.„„.  .nil  MURt  *«'' 


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ADOLESCENCE 

ITS 

PSYCHOLOGY 

AND    ITS    RELATIONS   TO 

PHYSIOLOGY,   ANTHROPOLOGY,    SOCIOLOGY 
SEX,   CRIME,   RELIGION 

AND 

EDUCATION 

BY 

G^  STANLEY   HALL,   Ph.D.,   LL.  D. 

PRESIDENT   OF   CLARK    UNIVERSITY   AND    PROFESSOR    OF 
PSYCHOLOGY   AND    PEDAGOGY 


Santa  Barbnrn  Tenchors  library. 


NEW   YORK 

D.  appleton  and  company 

1904 


1  ?>  1 


Copyright,    1904,   by 
D.    APPLETON    AND    COMPANY 


Puhlislied  May,  lOOi        A  ?"'.{■" 


TABLE    OF    CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  IX 

PAGE 

Changes  in  the  Senses  and  the  Voice i 


CHAPTER   X 

Evolution  and  the  Feelings  and  Instincts  Characteristic  of 

Normal  Adolescence .40 

CHAPTER  XI 
Adolescent  Love 95 

CHAPTER  XII 

Adolescent  Feelings  toward  Nature  and  a  New  Education  in 

Science  „        . 144 

CHAPTER  XIII 

Savage    Pubic    Initiations,  Classical  Ideals  and  Customs,  and 

Church  Confirmation         ........     232 

CHAPTER  XIV 
c     The  Adolescent  Psychology  of  Conversion         ,        .        .        .    281 

CHAPTER  XV 
Social  Instincts  and  Institutions 363 

CHAPTER  XVI 
Intellectual  Development  and  Education 449 

V 


VI  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

CHAPTER  XVII 
Adolescent  Girls  and  their  Education 561 

CHAPTER  XVIII 

Ethnic  Psychology  and  Pedagogy,  or  Adolescent  Races  and 

THEIR   TrEATAIENT 648 

Index  of  Subjects 749 

Index  of  Names 765 


CHAPTER    IX 


CHANGES    IN    THE    SENSES    AND    THE    VOICE 

I.  Touch  :  Changes  in  discriminative  sensibility — Pain — Pressure — Minimal  con- 
tact— The  tickle  sense  and  its  archaic  origin — Basal  nature  of  touch — Intoler- 
ance of  roughness  and  depilation — Dermal  sense — Skin  toilets.  II.  Taste : 
Hunger  the  other  basis  of  genetic  psychology — Freakiness  of  appetite  and  its 
changes  for  both  food  and  drink  at  puberty — Nutritive  and  practical  needs — 
Phylogenetic  suggestions.  III.  Smell:  Historical  hints — Relation  to  sex — 
Experimental  tests — New  subjective  relations  and  associations — Blushing  and 
its  origin.  IV.  Hearing  :  Changes  in  range — Discrimination  and  new  interest 
in  sounds  in  nature  or  music.  V.  The  Voice  :  Sound  in  the  insect  and  higher 
animal  world — Relations  to  love  and  war — Mutation  in  animals  and  men — 
Differences  between  change  of  voice  in  girls  and  boys — Individual  variations. 
VI.  Sight:  Changes  in  the  field  of  vision — New  color  sense — Experiments — 
Optical  judgments — New  visual  interests — Color  vocabularies.  VII.  General 
craving  for  sense  stimuli — The  age  of  sense — Dangers — Internal  sensations. 

Having,  in  the  chapters  that  precede,  considered  physical 
growth  and  the  mental  and  moral  perversions  incident  to 
adolescence,  and  given  an  anthology  of  descriptions  of  various 
phases  of  this  transitional  stage  of  life  as  conceived  or  experi- 
enced by  men  and  women  of  historic  or  literary  eminence,  we 
have,  in  the  chapters  that  follow,  to  consider  its  normal  genetic 
psychology,  beginning  with  sensation  and  proceeding  to  feel- 
ings, will,  and  intellect.  The  material  for  what  follows  is 
newer,  more  difficult,  and  more  incomplete,  but  although  many 
data  are  already  at  hand,  there  has  never  been  any  attempt, 
within  my  knowledge,  to  bring  them  together  or  to  draw  the 
scientific  and  practical  inferences  they  suggest.  Many  of  the 
special  studies  to  be  considered  are  based  upon  too  insufficient 
numbers  to  be  more  than  tentative,  but  in  coordinating  their 
results  they  very  commonly  shed  surprising  light  upon  each 
other,  and  their  themes  are  often  vividly  illustrated  and  con- 
40  I 


2  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

elusions  aided  by  analogies  with  growth  or  by  the  more  salient 
facts  of  mental  disease  or  moral  perversion,  so  that  on  the 
whole  the  larger  and  more  important  features  of  this  half  of 
the  picture  appear  with  considerable  distinctness.  I  am  well 
aware  that  so  great  is  the  interest  and  importance  of  the  field, 
and  such  the  momentum  of  challenging  questions  that  at 
present  incite  to  further  research  in  all  parts  of  this  rich  domain 
now  so  promisingly  opened,  that  great  additions  to  our  knowl- 
edge in  the  near  future  are  inevitable. 

At  adolescence,  each  of  the  senses  undergoes  certain  char- 
acteristic changes  of  structure,  function,  or  both.  Interests 
change  and  with  them  the  organs  of  apperception,  so  that 
aspects  and  elements  different  from  those  hitherto  absorbing 
the  complex  but  already  familiar  objects  of  sense  become  foci 
of  attention.  While  it  is  of  course  impossible  to  distinguish 
clearly  between  what  is  due  to  cerebral  or  psychic  modification 
and  that  resulting  from  changes  in  the  sense  organs  and  their 
immediate  centers,  it  is  probable  that  the  former  greatly  pre- 
ponderate, although  they  can  not  explain  all  the  facts.  One  of 
the  most  important  and  comprehensive  modifications  is,  that 
whereas  most  sense  stimuli  before  this  age  tend  strongly  to 
provoke  reflex  reactions,  after  it  these  tend  to  be  delayed  or 
better  organized,  as  if  there  were  a  marked  increase  of  associa- 
tive or  central  functions.  Before,  the  projection  system  pre- 
dominated, and  stimuli,  suggestion,  and  afferent  processes  gen- 
erally passed  more  readily  over  to  the  efferent  or  motor  tracts ; 
but  now  we  have  increased  cerebral  irradiations,  and  there  is  a 
marked  advance  in  the  development  of  the  long-circuiting  func- 
tions of  thought,  deliberation,  and  reflection.  This,  too,  reacts 
upon  sense  and  makes  observation  better.  The  deliverances  of 
each  sense  also  now  begin  to  have  a  more  independent  value  of 
their  own.  Sensations  are  more  objectified  and  their  pleasure 
and  their  pain  effects  are  more  keenly  felt.  There  is  a  new 
sense  esthetic  or  enjoyment  of  the  sensation  itself  for  its  own 
sake.  The  conaesthesias,  or  associations  of  senses  on  the  basis 
of  their  organic  feelings  and  tone  effects,  are  now  increased. 

I.  Touch. — According  to  Weber,  discriminative  dermal 
sensibility,  measured  by  the  distance  of  compass-points,  de- 
creases with  growth.     His  table  is  as  follows: 


CHANGES   IN  THE   SENSES   AND   THE  VOICE 

oy  I 
Mm.  Mr 

1.  Point  of  the  tongue l.i  i.l 

2.  Volar  side  of  the  finger-tip 2.3  1.7 

3.  Red  part  of  lips;  volar  side  of  the  second  finger  joint.  4.5  3.9 

4.  Back  part  of  the  third  finger  joint ;  point  of  the  nose. .  6.8  4.5 

5.  Edge  and  middle  of  back  of  tongue;  not  red  part  of 

the  lips  ;   metacarpus  of  the  thumb 9.0  6.8 

6.  Plantar  side  of  the  tip  of  the  great  toe 11. 3  6.8 

7.  Palm  of  hand;   cheek;  outer  lid 11.3  9.0 

8.  Middle  of  the  hard  palate 13.6  11.3 

9.  Back  part  of  the  forehead 22.6  18.0 

10.  Back  part  of  the  hand 31.6  22.6 

11.  Glutaeus 40.6  33.8 

12.  Acromion 40.6 

13.  Upper  and  lower  part  of  the  under  arm 40.6  36.1 

14.  Upper  and  lower  part  of  the  under  thigh 40.6  36.  i 

15.  On  the  breastbone 45.1  33.8 

16.  Spine  and  neck 54.2  36.1 

17.  Spine  in  the  middle  of  the  back 67.7  40.6 

18.  The  middle  of  the  upper  arm  and  thigh 67.7  31.6 

Weber  also  shows  that  with  the  longitudinal  growth  of  the 
limbs  and  trunk  the  sensory  circles  of  childhood  grow  more 
oblong,  their  longitudinal  increasing  more  than  their  trans- 
verse axes. 

Marro  tested  the  increase  of  discriminative  sensibility  in 
eight  girls  and  ten  boys.  At  the  first  test,  the  girls  were  from 
seven  to  twelve  years  old  and  the  boys  from  seven  to  four- 
teen. The  following  were  his  results  in  millimeters.  The 
second  test  was  made  ten  years  later  on  the  same  subjects,  and 
indicated  diminution  with  advancing  age,  as  follows :  ^ 

Right  Left  Back  of  Front  of  wrist, 

finger-tip.        finger-tip.  hand.  Right.  Left. 

p.  ,     (  ISt  test 1.35  1.43  IIO  9.2  I2.I 

^'""l  2d  test 1.77  1.75  6.4  8.5  10.4 

test 1.72  1.73  13.2  10.7  16.25 

test 1.85  1.82  11.44  10.12  15.66 


^°y^{2d 


From  this  Marro  opines  that  the  discriminative  sensibility 
of  the  index-finger  of  the  right  hand  diminishes  from  child- 
hood to  maturity,  although  this  might  be  due  to  the  induration 
caused  by  work.  He  found  girls  more  obtuse  in  this  respect 
than  boys,  and  thought  the  forehead  grew  insensitive  to  com- 

>  La  Puberty.     Bull,  de  la  Soc.  de  M^d.  Ment.  de  Belgique,  1894,  p.  413. 


4  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

pass-points  in  man,  and  less  so  in  woman,  with  advancing  age. 
Otherwise,  both  he  and  Lombroso  thought  touch  more  acute 
in  young  girls  than  later.  This  accords  with  Czermak,  who 
found  the  topographic  skin  sense  of  children  more  acute  than 
in  adults.  Since  then  this  has  generally  been  assumed,  and 
ascribed  to  the  fact  that  while  the  dermal  surface  increased, 
the  number  of  tactile  end  organs  remained  constant.  Thus  it 
is  plain  that  the  most  characteristic  changes  in  dermal  sensi- 
bility are  not  in  fine  distance  discriminations.  This  declines 
somewhat  with  growth,  which  increases  the  interval  between 
the  tactile  organs. 

Carman  *  found  that  sensibility  to  pain  decreased  as  age 
increased,  except  at  twelve,  with  both  sexes;  that  the  left 
temple  grew  more  sensitive  than  the  right ;  and  that  girls 
were  more  sensitive  than  boys.  Gilbert,  too,  found  a  gradual 
decrease  of  pain  sensibility  to  pressure  from  sixteen  to  nine- 
teen, boys  being,  less  sensitive  than  girls  throughout.  Girls 
seemed  to  have  reached  the  minimum  of  sensibility  at  thirteen, 
while  for  boys  the  most  rapid  decline  began  at  that  time 
and  the  difference  increased  from  about  0.4  kg.  to  more 
than  I  kg.  All  these  tests,  however,  have  a  large  mean 
variation.  Other  algometric  tests,  although  perhaps  less  care- 
ful than  these,  have  led  to  somewhat  different  results.  All 
tests,  too,  leave  it  undetermined  whether  it  is  less  sensibility 
or  increased  power  to  bear  pain  that  causes  the  threshold  to  be 
set  higher.  In  view  of  the  increased  hardships,  battles,  etc.,  of 
this  age,  teleological  modes  of  thought  might  have  anticipated 
this  general  result.  It  suggests  that  tenderness  now  may  be 
excessive,  and  that  impact  with  the  world  of  things  must  be 
more  vigorous  to  produce  the  same  result.  Susceptibility  to 
esthetic  pain  in  the  higher  senses  and  in  the  skin  itself  seems 
to  increase,  and  in  the  wondrous  system  of  balances  and  har- 
monies in  our  nature  this  may  be  compensatory.  I  have  some- 
where read  statistics  showing  that  of  all  wounds  leaving  per- 
manent scars  found  on  the  bodies  of  adult  men,  the  time  oi 
which  could  be  remembered,  most  were  received  during  pubes- 
cent years. 

'  Pain  and  strength  measurements  of  1,507  school  children  in  Saginaw,  Mich 
Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  April,  1899,  vol.  x,  pp.  392-398. 


CHANGES  IN  THE   SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  5 

The  skin  and  the  nervous  system  are  both  developed  from 
the  external  embryological  layer,  and  all  the  higher  senses  arose 
as  gradually  differentiated  and  specialized  forms  of  touch, 
which  is  the  mother  sense  of  them  all.  The  psychic  side  of 
dermatology  is  thus  the  archaeological  field  of  the  psychologist, 
whose  precept,  when  ultimate  and  especially  genetic  questions 
of  sense-perception  are  discussed,  must  always  be  "back  to 
touch,"  somewhat  as  the  philosophical  slogan  often  is  "  back 
to  Kant,"  "  to  Plato,"  "  to  nature,"  etc.  The  various  dermal 
sensations,  the  modality  of  some  of  which  is  not  yet  deter- 
mined, constitute  a  complex  basis  for  the  discussion  of  the 
problem  of  reality,  because  their  functions  alone  can  give  us  the 
primary  qualities  of  matter.  The  reason  that  theories  of 
knowledge  can  not  now  give  us  the  external  world  in  all  its 
full  reality  is  because  the  latter  rested  upon  touch,  and  the 
development  of  the  higher  senses  has  thus  removed  us  many 
degrees  from  reality.  Haptics  is  thus  a  paleopsychic  field  par 
excellence,  and  the  exploration  of  this  most  extended  of  all 
senses  involves  a  study  of  the  entire  dermal  area,  which, 
roughly  speaking,  is  the  boundary  between  the  somatic  ego  and 
the  non  ego.  No  department  of  psychology  is  so  attractive  and 
so  promising  to  those  whose  prime  interest  is  in  origins.  One 
of  my  pupils  has  made  an  ingenious  and  very  suggestive 
attempt  to  interpret  a  good  part  of  the  Scotch  philosophy  of 
common  sense,  especially  as  represented  by  Reid,  Stuart,  and 
Brown,  as  a  more  or  less  unconscious  effort  to  base  reality 
upon  the  deliverances  of  this  sense.^ 

The  pubescent  age  is  marked  by  a  new  kind  of  dermal  con- 
sciousness. There  are  often  pimples  and  eruptions,  and  when 
these  or  scabs  are  formed  there  is  an  especially  strong  desire 
to  remove  them,  and  the  habit  of  picking  the  skin  sometimes 
for  hours  may  become  almost  irresistible.  Many  returns  specify 
a  marked  pubescent  intolerance  of  the  least  roughness,  a  rage 
for  picking  the  face  so  that  scabs  can  not  perform  their  healing 
function  and  the  skin  becomes  so  marred  with  sores  that 
sometimes  permanent  discolorations  and  even  scars  are  left. 
Occasionally  the  skin  is  purposely  pricked  or  abraded  with  a 

^  Fraser :  The  Psychological  Foundations  of  Natural  Realism.     Am,  Jour,  of 
Psy.,  vol.  iv,  pp.  429-450. 


6  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

pin  to  create  roughness  in  order  to  enjoy  the  exquisite  pleasure 
of  removing  it.  Our  records  show  some  cases  of  youths  who 
have  been  fond  of  dropping  tallow  from  a  lighted  candle  on  to 
their  hands  to  have  the  satisfaction  of  picking  it  off  later. 
Hang-nails,  callosities,  blisters,  and  scabs,  sometimes  of  large 
wounds,  are  never  so  intolerable  and  are  impetuously  removed 
despite  much  pain.  Some,  too,  pull  out  hair  from  the  head, 
eyebrows,  lashes,  hands,  and  elsewhere,  despite  the  pain.  In 
some  cases  games  of  rubbing  the  skin  are  noted.  Whether 
there  is  a  slight  pruritus  or  a  hunger  for  some  specific  dermal 
sensation,  like  light-hunger  for  the  eye  in  the  blind,  or  whether 
the  skin  is  slightly  anesthetic  and  its  rights  are  thus  invaded 
to  secure  the  normal  quota  of  stimulus,  or  there  is  a  desire  to 
satisfy  the  exquisite  sensation  of  smoothness  which,  in  hand- 
shaking and  caressing  of  lovers,  is  so  important  a  factor,  we 
do  not  know.  Perhaps  some  or  all  of  these  may  have  been 
elements  and  played  their  role  in  natural  selection  or  even  in 
the  original  depilation  of  the  human  body,  the  stroking  of 
which  is  still  a  source  of  pleasure.  This  theme  is  a  very  im- 
portant and  fascinating  one  from  the  standpoint  of  evolution 
and  is  akin  to  the  theory  of  minimal  touch  excitations,  which 
may  provoke  reactions  of  almost  convulsive  intensity.  The 
increase  of  this  form  of  the  tickle  sense  is  another  unique  fea- 
ture of  this  stage  of  life.  Especially  in  states  of  fatigue  and 
reduced  control,  the  reactions  are  highly  dynamogenic  and 
the  psychophysic  law  is  in  a  sense  inverted,  for  there  is  a  point 
below  which  the  slighter  the  touch  the  more  intense  is  its  result- 
ing sensation. 

Minimal  touch  excitations  suggest,  and  may  thus  perhaps 
represent,  the  very  oldest  stratum  of  psychic  life  in  the  soul, 
and,  if  so,  have  still  in  their  strange  sensitiveness  and  energy 
reminiscences  of  the  primeval  vigor  and  spontaneity  of  its 
dawn.  Thus  keenly  perhaps  did  organisms  once  feel  the  world 
about  them,  and  thus  intensely  did  they  react  to  it  in  that  Eocene 
age  of  the  soul  before  the  soma  had  been  mechanized  and  before 
its  vitality  had  lapsed  to  a  degree  of  vigor  which  now  separates 
it  so  far  from  that  of  the  reproductive  elements  that  it  may 
be  said  to  be  a  fallen  thing  and  to  have  brought  death  into 
the  world.  However  this  may  be,  it  is  certain  that  haptic  im- 
pressions are  profoundly  modified  with  the  dawn  of  sexual  life 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  7 

in  a  way  that  suggests  some  mobilization  of  sensation  con- 
nected with  the  new  sexual  functions  and  their  organs.^ 

Thus  we  may  infer  that  along  with  the  increased  self-feel- 
ing goes  an  augmented  consciousness  of  everything  that  invades 
the  contour  of  the  body.  As  allochiria  is  diminished  and  the 
prepotency  of  the  right  side  for  muscular  activity  is  known  to 
increase  at  this  age,  it  is  not  unlikely  that  the  left  side  now  ac- 
quires its  slight  advantage  over  the  right  in  passive  sensibility. 

We  have  also  evidence  from  returns  and  from  anthropology . 
that  the  secretion  of  sebum  is  augmented  and  that  the  skin 
becomes  more  glossy,  an  effect  which  it  is  often  striven  to  in- 
crease or  diminish  by  various  crude  cosmetics,  and  also  that 
the  secretion  of  sweat  is  more  copious.  Both  these  are  factors 
in  the  new  sense  of  cleanliness  or  uncleanliness  which  now 
arises. 

In  the  middle  teens  there  is  often  an  increased  general  sen- 
sitiveness to  heat  and  cold.  Boys,  and  especially  girls,  are  more 
sensitive  to  chills  and  prone  to  protect  themselves,  e.  g.,  at  night, 
by  too  warm  clothing  instead  of  exposing  themselves  to  wind 
and  weather,  as  hardy  natures  can  with  such  advantage 
so  easily  be  encouraged  to  do.  This  sensitiveness  to  external 
change  may  develop  a  delicate  diathesis  and  even  enervation. 
The  optimum  of  temperature  most  favorable  for  all  vital  proc- 
esses, and  which  is  instinctively  sought  by  every  creature  that 
can  migrate  or  even  move,  seems  to  have  a  range  which  is  nar- 
rowed or  widened  with  many  corresponding  new  adjustments 
almost  directly  according  to  vigor  or  the  health.  Conversely, 
the  body  is  often  exposed  to  wind  and  sun  with  great  predilec- 
tion. 

Much  as  we  need  more  careful  age  determinations  here, 
the  practical  importance  of  correct  dermal  habits  at  this  age 
can  not  be  overestimated.  A  rugged  life  with  abundant  stimu- 
lation of  the  sense  of  contact,  temperature,  and  even  pain,  has 
great  prophylactic  value  in  preventing  the  focalization  of  der- 
mal consciousness  to  the  sexual  parts  and  functions.  Now, 
too,  begins  a  sensitiveness,  which  is  often  extreme  and  per- 
sistent through  life,  especially  in  females,  to  the  hand-shaking 

*  See  my  fuller  discussion  of  this  subject:   The  Psychology  of  Tickling,  Laugh- 
ing, and  the  Comic.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  October,  1897,  vol.  ix,  p.  10  et  seq. 


8  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

habit,  which  often  mediates  sudden  likes  and  disHkes  thr.t  are 
as  deep-seated  and  ineluctable  as  those  of  smell.  Many  in  our 
returns  find  it  hard  at  this  age  to  shake  hands  at  all,  and  this 
aversion  may  culminate  in  settled  misophobia,  delirium  of 
touch,  or  fear  of  contact  and  contamination.  A  gifted  lady 
much  before  the  public  writes  me :  "  At  receptions,  where  I 
must  shake  hands  with  a  long  line  of  people,  I  sometimes  take 
one  that  gives  me  a  shudder  of  repulsion.  It  is  not  necessarily 
a  moist,  cold,  clammy,  or  fish-tail  hand,  disagreeable  as  these 
are,  and  it  is  not  wholly  the  muscular  action.  I  do  not  believe 
in  magnetic  qualities,  but  the  feel  of  some  hands  touches 
off  an  idiosyncrasy  I  felt  first  in  the  early  teens.  Some  are 
pleasant,  and  this  is  quite  independent  of  other  qualities  that 
affect  my  likes  and  dislikes.  I  used  to  say  that  however  much 
I  liked  a  man  I  could  never  marry  him  if  I  did  not  like  the 
touch  of  his  hand;  and  I  feel  so  yet." 

One  of  the  many  problems  in  this  field  is  that  of  dermal 
hairs.  The  current  theories  of  man's  anthropoid  descent  ap- 
pealed to  in  explaining  the  loss  of  the  lanugo  of  the  fetus, 
although  suggested  by,  do  not  so  readily  explain,  the  increased 
growth  of  hair  or  the  impulse  to  remove  it  at  puberty.  Ploss 
thinks  the  latter  almost  universal,  and  we  have  perhaps  here  an 
interesting  illustration  of  the  great  law,  to  be  treated  elsewhere, 
that  organic  functions  tend  to  be  repeated  higher  up  the  phyletic 
scale  in  the  psychic  field.  Developmental  processes,  e.  g.,  re- 
moved the  lanugo,  but  now  man  tends  to  shave,  pull  out  hairs, 
and  otherwise  to  depilate  his  body.  This,  it  has  been  suggested, 
is  the  nearly  spent  momentum  that  bared  the  skin  of  the  hair 
of  our  pithecoid  ancestors.  As  in  all  other  impulses  of  this 
class,  the  half-subliminal  hair  consciousness  is  philophobiac  or 
works  both  in  the  way  of  new  love  and  new  aversion  under  the 
influence  of  the  nascent  sexual  life.  On  the  one  hand,  we 
have  increased  love  of  coiffure,  and  on  the  other,  we  have  the 
persistent  impulse  to  shave  or  cut  hair.  The  newly  awakened 
skin  consciousness  at  the  same  time  prompts  to  undress  and 
expose  portions  of  the  body  in  a  way  hitherto  unknown,  and 
also  to  tattoo,  wear  ornaments,  and  dress  for  a  new  motive. 
The  erogenic  zones  on  the  breast,  back,  abdomen,  etc.,  give  a 
new  love  of  caressing,  stroking,  patting,  embracing,  clasping 
hands,  and  kissing,  getting  into  close  contact  over  larger  sur- 


CHANGES  IN  THE   SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  9 

faces,  with  a  new  sensitiveness  to  contact  along  with  new  con- 
sciousness of  arms,  ankles,  neck,  etc.  If  Lotze's  philosophy  of 
clothes,  as  the  physical  extensions  of  the  ego  into  all  that  in- 
creases height  and  point  of  contact  through  ribbons,  canes,  high 
headgear,  etc.,  is  true,  it  all  begins  at  adolescence.  Indeed,  his 
measured  paragraphs  on  the  subject  are  real  contributions  to 
the  new  palpation  consciousness  of  this  age  also  expressed  in 
blushing,  and,  in  a  very  different  way,  in  the  ancient  Roman, 
Turkish,  and  Oriental  passion  for  baths,  unguents,  and  skin 
toilet  generally,  which  may  develop  into  luxury  and  effemini- 
zation.  We  know  that  pigmentation  is  greatly  increased  at 
this  age ;  and  there  is  much  indication  that  not  only  the  tickle 
sensibility  to  minimal  contacts,  but  also  the  range  of  discrim- 
ination for  pressures,  is  augmented. 

II.  Taste. — The  true  beginning  for  a  psychology  essen- 
tially genetic  is  hunger,  the  first  sentient  expression  of  the  will 
to  live,  which  with  love,  its  other  fundamental  quality,  rules  the 
world  of  life.  The  more  we  know  of  the  body,  the  more  clearly 
we  see  that  not  only  growth  but  every  function  has  a  trophic 
background ;  that  through  all  the  complex  chemical  bookkeeping 
of  income  and  expenditure,  every  organ  is  in  a  sense  a  diges- 
tive organ;  that  the  body  is  a  machine  for  the  conservation, 
distribution,  and  transmission  of  energy;  and  that  man  is,  phys- 
ically considered,  what  he  eats  and  what  he  does  with  it,  or, 
better,  what  he  completely  digests.  Food  is  the  first  object  of 
desire,  and  all  fins,  legs,  wings,  and  tails  were  developed  either 
to  get  food  or  to  escape  finding  a  grave  in  some  other  crea- 
ture's stomach.  It  is  as  if  the  lower  forms  of  life  said  to  them- 
selves, "  My  world  is  my  food,"  because  there  is  less  interest  in 
anything  else.  They  hibernate,  hestivate,  or  migrate  accord- 
ing to  the  food  supply.  Low  forms  of  life  that  cease  to  be 
sessile  do  so  to  get  food,  which  is  the  chief  end  of  the  world- 
wide struggle  for  survival,  where  the  law.  Eat  or  be  eaten,  is 
imperative.  Some  two-thirds  or  more  of  all  the  kinetic  energy 
of  the  human  body  goes  to  digestion.  Food  is  one  of  the  first 
forms  of  property,  and  almost  everything  is  food  for  some 
creature.  In  the  slow  processes  of  cephalization  by  which  the 
brain  and  centers  develop  near  the  mouth  end  of  the  alimentary 
canal,  the  first  laugh,  if  Spencer  is  right,  was  in  prospect  of 


10  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

food,  and  says,  when  interpreted  phyletically,  "  This  is  good 
enough  to  eat."  The  great  epoch  marked  by  the  descent  of 
fire  and  cooking  not  only  economized  digestion  and  freed  its 
energy  for  higher  uses,  but  evolved  hearth,  home,  and  meal- 
times. From  the  standpoint  of  the  higher  metabolism,  every 
cell  and  tissue  has  its  own  specific  hunger,  and  what  we  call 
appetite  is  a  symphony  of  many  parts  or  a  net  algebraic  result 
aggregated  from  the  specified  hunger  of  all  the  tissues  and 
cells.  There  is  a  struggle  for  survival  between  the  different 
organs  of  the  same  soma  for  the  food  supply  which  the  blood 
contains,  and  sensation,  and  perhaps  thought,  are  in  one  sense 
functions  of  nutrition.  If  the  parts  and  molecules  latest  to  de- 
velop and  most  distinctively  human,  being  more  complex  than 
others,  and  being  those  which  from  their  extreme  instability 
are  most  labile,  are  broken  down  in  the  function  of  thought  and 
feeling,  we  can  well  understand  tliat  the  nervous  system,^which 
is  the  master  tissue  of  the  body,  may  be  the  seat  of  the  highest 
complexity,  where  matter  is  most  nearly  transubstantiated  into 
soul.  Pleasure  and  pain  are  closely  linked  with  satiety  and 
hunger.  Happiness  or  euphoria,  which  nearly  every  form  of 
greeting  in  the  world  first  inquires  for  when  friends  meet,  on 
the  one  hand,  and  disease,  the  chief  fear  of  man,  which  brings 
functions  to  consciousness  that  should  remain  submerged,  mor- 
bidifies  visceral  sensations  into  hypochondria  and  darkens  into 
melancholia  with  forced  feeding,  on  the  other,  are  the  extremes 
between  w^hich  every  normal  and  happy  life  unfolds.  Sleep 
builds  up  brain  cells,  and  in  anemia  we  live  on  a  lower  nutri- 
tive level.  If  the  products  of  decomposition  or  the  clinkers  in 
the  furnace  of  life  are  not  removed,  one  organ's  food  may  be 
another's  poison,  and  there  is  auto-intoxication  and  fungoid 
growth,  and  as  the  biproducts  accumulate  and  the  chip  pile  of 
dead  matter  increases  there  is  progressive  liability  to  infection 
by  micro-organisms.  In  a  sense  every  disease  is  due  to  cell 
hunger,  and  old  age  and  death  are  progressive  starvation. 
Most  of  the  diseases  of  middle  and  later  life  are  probably  due 
to  avoidable  errors  of  diet.  As  we  go  up  this  scale  of  complete 
and  high-level  nutrition,  there  is  growth, — physical,  mental,  or 
both, — the  pleasure  field  widens,  and  the  maximum  of  utilized 
food  is  attained.  To  feed  well  causes  lower  organisms  to  pass 
rapidly  and  surely  over  the  stages  of  growth,  while  insufficient 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  H 

nourishment  causes  arrest,  whether  in  larva  or  child.  A  well- 
balanced  dietary  is  especially  necessary  at  adolescence,  when 
the  range  of  appetite  normally  enlarges  and  creatures  pre- 
viously monophagous  become  polyphagous,  and  it  is  hard  to 
adopt  new  kinds  of  food  after  the  close  of  this  period.  Bad 
eating  habits,  either  in  quality  or  quantity,  are  at  the  bottom 
of  most  breakdowns  in  student  life,  and  one  of  the  chief  causes 
of  intemperance.  Thus  every  part  of  the  body  is  constantly 
undergoing  chemico-vital  changes,  and  in  the  extracts  of  the 
six  pounds  of  food  and  drink,  which  an  adult  working  man 
consumes  daily,  and  which  are  poured  through  the  thoracic 
duct  into  the  blood,  every  organ  which  is  irrigated  should  find 
and  be  able  to  extract  the  nutriment  it  needs. 

At  the  very  dawn  of  puberty  there  is  a  marked  change 
in  the  amount  of  food  required  which  does  not  vary  directly 
with  the  rate  of  growth  or  even  exercise ;  but  there  are  many 
facts  which  suggest  some  unknown  cause  or  process,  as  if  the 
catabolic  changes  were  modified  some  months  before  the  body 
begins  permanent  augmentation.  There  is  generally  a  new 
relation  to  food.  Appetite  is  often  freaky,  irregular,  capricious, 
seeking  a  new  equilibrium  and  larger  variety,  and  the  relation 
among  the  staple  foods  finally  settled  on  almost  always  changes. 
Sometimes  food  that  is  too  highly  seasoned  or  too  hot,  or  that 
in  which  desserts  predominate  and  overload  a  sluggish  stomach, 
and  perhaps  those  which  have  aphrodisiac  action,  as  Marro 
thinks  the  case  with  legumes  of  the  garlic  class,  or  tea,  coffee, 
wine,  beer,  alkaline  or  acid  drinks,  may  be  almost  passionately 
desired.  Indeed,  the  instability  of  appetite  in  both  sexes  often 
suggests  that  of  pregfnancy.  The  sense  of  taste  becomes  in 
some  degree  independent  and  desires  stimulants,  condiments, 
and  sometimes  intoxicants.  The  rhythm  of  meal-times  often 
tends  to  break  up  as  if  by  a  new  wave  of  influences  from  the 
irregularities  of  the  savage  life  of  our  forebears.  In  nervous 
temperaments,  especially,  food  is  bolted  and  breakfast  slighted, 
and  love  of  occasional  excessive  gorging  on  edibles  not  hitherto 
staple,  alternates  with  indifference  to  or  criticism  of  the  family 
table. 

When  we  pass  to  detail,  the  data  are  not  entirely  har- 
monious. It  is  now  generally  held  that  while  the  amount  of 
both  solid  matter  and  water  taken  into  the  body  increases 


12 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 


greatly,  indeed,  nearly  doubles  from  the  age  of  nine  to  maturity, 
both  steadily  decline  per  kg.  of  body  weight — solids  from  14.4 
to  9.1  and  water  from  60  to  44.8.^  Other  later  data  seem  to 
indicate  that  while  the  albuminoids  and  carbohydrates  are  not 
greatly  changed  in  relative  amount,  there  is  some  decrease  in 
the  relative  proportion  of  fat  and  an  increase  in  the  sugar  in- 
gredients of  food.  Camerer  constructed  with  great  labor  the 
following  table  showing  the  changes  in  the  quality  and  quantity 
of  food  from  the  ages  of  eleven  to  eighteen  : 


Age 

Average  weight,  kg 

Total  food,  kg 

Albumin 

Fat 

Carbohydrates 

Water 


Girls. 

Boys. 

II-14 

15-18 

11-14 

15-16 

31.90 

1.723 
.068 

•34 

1. 612 

.060 

.41 

1.909 

.086 

52.8 

2.314 
.102 

.044 

.270 

1.322 

.035 
.0219 

1.273 

.034 

.262 

1,510 

•  73 

.287 
1. 810 

17-18 

59-4 
2.378 
.1 

.83 

.302 

1.850 


Taste  is  a  chemical  sense  which  seems  often  to  improve 
through  life  and  sometimes  to  develop  to  an  exquisite  degree  of 
sensibility  in  old  age.  It  is  the  doorkeeper  at  the  entrance  to 
the  alimentary  canal,  and  the  human  face,  including  nose  and 
eyes,  which  are  primarily  food-finders,  and  the  jaws,  which  are 
triturators,  have  developed  as  accessories.  All  the  higher  meta- 
bolism depends  upon  keeping  the  appetite  true  to  the  needs  of 
the  body,  like  a  somatic  conscience  always  pointing  steadfastly 
toward  the  undiscovered  poles,  the  one  of  nutritive  need  and 
the  other  of  human  destiny.  Taste  is  perhaps  even  harder  to 
explore  by  experimental  methods  than  smell,  and  no  good 
laboratory  age  tests  are  available.  Whether  the  special  organs 
of  taste  on  the  tongue  or  the  gustatory  surface  is  modified  at 
adolescence  in  either  extent,  discriminative  sensibility,  thresh- 
old value,  or  reaction  time,  we  have  no  demonstrable  knowl- 
edge. From  Horn's  experiments  with  eighty-eight  tolerably 
pure  substances  down  to  the  latest  explorations  of  this  sense, 
we  do  not  find  one  thorough  and  valid  test  for  even  the  chief 
stages  of  life. 

We  have,  however,  a  large  body  of  questionnaire  returns 


'  Vierordt :   Daten  und  Tabellen,  p.  214. 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE   VOICE  13 

which  suggest  with  more  or  less  probability  that  the  following 
modifications  are  likely  to  occur :  first,  there  is  a  change  of 
appetite,  often  very  marked  at  this  age,  or  a  psychic  transvalu- 
ation  of  tastes.  Milk,  often  taken  copiously  and  with  zest  be- 
fore, now  becomes  unpleasant,  and  the  proportion  of  solid  food 
desired  increases.  We  know  that  the  jaw-bone  grows  strong, 
the  chin  prominent,  and  the  muscles  of  mastication  increase, 
causing  a  general  modification  of  the  aspect  of  the  face.  Con- 
nected with  this,  perhaps,  is  the  propensity  to  chew  and  to  eat 
substances  that  require  stronger  action  of  the  jaw.  The  very 
prevalent  gum-chewing  habit,  which  culminates  now,  is  another 
expression  of  this  age.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  there  is  often 
a  new  tendency  to  bolt  food  unchewed,  due  perhaps  to  more 
impetuosity  of  appetite  or  the  increased  nerve  tension,  and  tem- 
porary loss  of  the  poise  that  good  table  manners  suggest  in 
this  respect.  Nearly  all  who  have  answered  the  question,  report 
that  at  this  age  many  foods  seem  to  taste  differently.  Many 
now  incline  to  more,  and  others  to  less,  vegetable  food  than  be- 
fore. Animal  food  is  almost  always  more,  but  sometimes  less, 
in  demand  than  before,  and  there  is  nearly  always  a  change 
in  this  respect.  While  the  taste  for  sweets  is  sometimes  dimin- 
ished, it  is  often  increased,  but  the  propensity  for  mild  acids 
is  greatly  augmented,  and  still  more  so  that  for  sodas  or  alka- 
lies. The  propensity  for  bitter  tastes  undergoes  also  a  distinct 
increase.  All  this  indicates  that  the  range  of  likes  is  normally 
widened. 

Mr.  Bell  found  a  desire  to  taste  everything  that  could 
be  carried  to  the  mouth  regardless  of  its  edible  qualities — 
grass,  plants,  soap,  worms,  bugs,  ink, — one  hundred  and  eighty 
different  objects  being  enumerated ;  but  this  desire  was  al- 
ready declining  at  the  age  of  four  or  five.  Later,  he  thought, 
came  a  propensity  to  make  and  taste  unusual  mixtures  of  food 
and  drink,  or  to  taste  foods  in  their  stages  of  preparation — one 
hundred  and  twenty  articles  being  enumerated — culminating 
between  seven  and  ten.  Adolescent  curiosity  vents  itself  on 
new  articles  in  a  bill  of  fare,  new  flavors,  etc.  During  or  often 
before  this  transition  stage  there  is  a  period  of  unsettlement, 
fluctuation,  and  freakiness.  New  flavors  or  savors  are  craved ; 
there  are  appetites  unknown  before,  and  old  foods,  formerly 
favorites,  now  become  indifferent.    There  is  a  lickerish  dainti- 


14  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

ness,  and  it  would  seem  that  this  upsetting  often  coincides  with 
a  new  love  of  spices,  condiments,  or  very  strong  stimuli  which 
sometimes  incline  to  the  various  toxic  habits.  It  is  as  if  taste 
now  had  a  somewhat  more  independent  value  in  itself,  became 
more  inward  and  more  associated  with  the  Gemcingefuhle  on 
the  one  hand,  and  more  objectified  on  the  other. 

Another  of  the  most  marked  tendencies  of  this  age  is  that 
to  regulate  appetite  by  psychic  motives.  New  tastes  for  objects 
at  first  unpleasant  are  often  persistently  cultivated,  perhaps  for 
social  or  very  often  for  reasons  thought  to  be  scientific.  Various 
foods  or  drinks  are  affected,  because  they  are  more  associated 
with  adult  habits ;  the  stern  dietary  of  the  training  table  is  per- 
haps imitated,  and  instinctive  likes  and  dislikes  are  braved  and 
bullied  according  to  some  preconceived  scheme.  Semper  and 
others  have  brought  forward  evidence  that  in  animals  this  is  a 
plastic  period  when  many  become  more  polyphagous,  e.  g.,  that 
bears  may  learn  to  eat  oats,  and  horses  to  even  eat  hens,  and 
they  have  shown  how  difficult  it  is  to  adopt  new  food  after 
sexual  maturity. 

All  this  shows  the  extreme  hygienic  necessity  at  this  stage 
that  eating  habits  should  receive  special  attention,  and  that 
all  picae  and  special  likes  and  aversions  which  interfere  with  a 
well-balanced  and  comprehensive  dietary  should  be  avoided, 
if  youth  is  to  utilize  the  full  impulsion  of  this  period  which  the 
human  as  well  as  the  insect  larva  needs  to  bring  it  out  to  the 
imago  stage  of  full  maturity.  All  suggests  that  excessive  tea- 
ism,  coffeeism,  etc.,  predilection  for  tidbits,  condiments,  and 
desserts,  to  the  prejudice  of  appetite  for  plain,  wholesome  nu- 
tritives, and  all  the  special  dislikes  for  standard  foods  now  so 
common,  if  not  themselves  signs  of  arrest,  at  least  jeopard  the 
highest  maturation  of  powers. 

Impatient  as  adults  often  are  at  the  eccentricities  of  juve- 
nile appetites  and  the  proneness  to  time-irregularities  in  both 
sexes,  these  probably  have  their  justification  within  limits.  This 
is  the  age  when  at  early  tropical  majority  youth  in  primitive 
society  cut  loose  from  parental  aid  in  procuring  food  supply 
and  set  up  for  themselves  in  new  environments,  before  they 
were  fully  skilled  in  the  arts  both  of  providing  and  preparing 
food,  and  so  at  a  time  when  the  irregularities  always  found  in 
savage  life  were  increased.     Probably  seasonal  variations  due 


CHANGES   IN  THE   SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  I5 

to  changes  from  scantiness  and  abundance  will  be  made  out 
when  the  facts  are  all  in,  and  these  will  no  doubt  be  found  in 
kind  as  well  as  in  amount  of  food.  No  creature  ever  began  to 
have  such  a  wide  variety  and  range  of  dietary  as  man,  for, 
while  his  teeth  and  digestive  organs  are  about  as  well  adapted 
to  fungivorous  as  to  carnivorous  habits,  commerce  now  enables 
him  to  command  the  products  of  every  clime  and  to  insure  con- 
stancy and  abundance  in  advance  with  no  direct  efifort,  and  this 
is  a  transforming  and  comparatively  recent  condition.  Many 
tribes,  like  many  animals,  are  still  fat  and  sleek  in  the  fall  and 
lean  in  the  spring,  and  alternate  at  every  season  between  feast- 
ing, potlucking,  and  famine  or  incipient  starvation.  In  some 
animals,  and  among  some  northern  tribes  which  still  show  a 
marked  breeding  season,  this  is  attended  by  greatly  reduced 
appetites  and  by  maceration.  Prolonged  periods  of  exception- 
ally sustained  activity  are  often  concomitant  with  reduced  eat- 
ing, commonly  and  perhaps  primarily  the  cause,  but  sometimes, 
and  it  may  be  secondarily,  the  effect  of  unwonted  effort.  Thus 
the  phyletic  presumption  is  that  traces  of  these  racial  experi- 
ences should  be  more  or  less  faintly  rehearsed  at  this  period. 
If  so,  this  is  the  way  of  nature  and  should  be  frankly  recog- 
nized. Happy  the  youth  who  comes  up  to  full  maturity  un- 
stunted  by  perversions,  excess  or  defect,  and  with  true,  trust- 
worthy appetite  and  regular  eating  habits.  Probably  no  period 
and  no  condition  of  life  suffers  reduced  vitality  and  efficiency 
from  errors  in  diet  so  much  as  brain-working  and  sedentary 
youth,  despite  the  fact  that  none  can  better  sustain  such  errors, 
so  far  as  life  and  tolerable  health  are  concerned. 

III.  Smell. — The  sense  of  smell  in  adult  man  is  about  as 
undeveloped  as  was  the  color  sense  in  the  remote  and  some- 
what conjectural  age,  which  Magnus  describes  for  the  chro- 
matic sense  when  colors  had  no  independent  names,  but  were 
designated  by  those  of  objects  representively  colored.  It  is  still 
hard  to  distinguish  gustatory,  olfactory,  and  often  the  tactile 
elements  "  in  all  the  smells  of  earth's  great  kitchen."  H.  Clo- 
quet's  ^  mystic  and  almost  poetic  interpretation  of  olfaction  as 
presiding  over  man's  relation  to  everything  vaporized  or  vola- 
tile; his  view  that  odors  make  the  birds  sing,  or  rather,  as  he 

^  Osphresiologie,     Paris,  1821,  p.  758. 


1 6  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

thought,  laugh,  and  are  the  chief  Hnk  between  the  flora  and  the 
fauna ;  that  those  who  eat  and  drink  least  best  understand  and 
appreciate  this  highly  spiritual  sense;  that  odors  were  long 
man's  chief  duty  to  the  gods,  who  were  known  by  their  ambro- 
sial aura;  that  the  world  of  smells  is  that  of  Democritus  and 
brings  man  into  rapport  with  cosmic  emanations ;  that  Moham- 
med was  right  when  he  called  odors  one  of  the  two  chief  joys  of 
life,  which  had  their  own  mystic  language;  that  in  India,  titles 
and  degrees  of  distinction  are  designated  by  odors ;  that  fumi- 
gation keeps  ofif  evil  spirits;  that  man  prays  to  Heaven  with 
incense ;  that  perfumes  compel  the  good-will  of  those  about  us ; 
that  they  are  carminative  and  generally  medicinal;  that  the 
clairolfactant  or  hyperosmic  soul  perceives  more  than  the  clair- 
audient  or  clairvoyant,  and  the  implication  that  if  we  ever  fully 
know  the  higher  osmograms  of  aphrodisiacs  and  the  aura  semi- 
iiolis,  love  itself  may  be  raised  to  a  higher  level — of  all  this  we 
can  perhaps  only  say,  Periculum  est  credere  ant  non  credere. 

Olfactory  sensations  are  phylogenetically  among  the  first 
to  associate  themselves  with  sex,  and  are  perhaps  the  first  to 
be  differentiated  from  general  sensibility.  This  stage  is  still 
seen  in  reptiles  and  amphibians  whose  cortex  is  chiefly  olfac- 
tory. In  the  infant,  smell  is  one  of  the  earliest  senses,  and 
Soury  says  thought  begins  in  it.^  Although  in  man,  its  original 
role  of  conserving  the  individual  in  helping  him  to  find  food 
and  to  avoid  enemies  is  slight,  it  still  has  very  close  association 
with  the  reproductive  function.  Althaus  long  ago  urged  that 
the  primary  function  of  the  olfactory  sense  was  to  facilitate 
reproduction,  and  cited  many  cases  of  animals  detecting  the 
female  in  rut  at  great  distance.  Schiff  performed  the  crucial 
experiment  of  extirpating  the  olfactory  centers  in  young  dogs, 
and  found  that  when  they  had  grown  to  maturity  they  did  not 
distinguish  sex.  The  odor  of  the  body,  and  especially  of  parts 
of  it,  which  Jaeger  thinks  to  be  the  essence  of  the  soul,  is  often 
a  very  powerful  aphrodisiac.  Mantegazza  tells  of  a  lady  who 
took  such  great  pleasure  in  smelling  a  flower  that  it  seemed  to 
her  like  a  sin.  Fere,  quoted  by  Roux,  tells  of  a  young  man  who 
sneezed  whenever  he  had  an  erotic  thought,  and  many  facts 
show  a  very  close  sympathy  in  both  health  and  disease  between 

1  See  also  Roux:   Psychologie  de  I'lnstinct  Sexuel,  p.  72. 


CHANGES  IN  THE   SENSES  AND   THE  VOICE  17 

the  pituitary  surface  of  the  nose  and  sex.  Marro  found  that 
the  sense  of  smell  was  most  exquisitely  developed  in  girls  at 
the  commencement  of  puberty.  An  old  saw  has  it  that  when 
young  people  have  the  nosebleed  they  are  in  love.  Hemor- 
rhages from  the  nose  are  quite  common  in  puberty  and  adoles- 
cence.^ The  closeness  of  this  relation  appears  from  the  fact 
that  congestion  of  the  turbinated  bodies  is  common  during 
menstruation,  when  it  may  embarrass  nasal  respiration,  cause 
headaches,  and  even  act  vicariously  for  the  normal  discharges. 
Sneezing  sometimes  accompanies  sexual  excitement,  and  nasal 
catarrh  and  the  fetor  of  ozena  are  more  pronounced.  Often 
after  the  menopause,  atrophic  rhinitis  is  found.  The  pain  of 
dysmenorrhea  is  often  relieved  by  applying  cocaine  to  the  so- 
called  genital  spots  or  the  erectile  tissue  over  the  turbinal  and 
septum.  This  relation  is  often  seen  in  the  fact  that  castration 
of  young  animals  interferes  with  the  development  of  this  tissue. 
So  far,  no  thorough  and  adequate  laboratory  tests  of  the 
development  of  smell  during  the  different  stages  of  life  have 
been  made,  unless  we  except  those  of  Marro,  who  attempted 
to  measure  the  acuteness  of  smell  with  Zwardemaker's  olfac- 
tometer, by  the  maximum  distance  at  which  odors  could  be  per- 
ceived when  a  uniform  surface  and  intensity  of  olfactory  sub- 
stance were  exposed,  with  the  following  results  in  millimeters : 


Sugar  of 

■  Licorice. 

Caoutchouc.                       Vanii 

LLA. 

Musk. 

Right. 

Left. 

Right.          Left.                Right. 
Girls. 
Under  fourteen — 39  cases. 

Left. 

Right. 

Left. 

16.29 

1505 

29.29         26.81               II. 31 
From  fourteen  to  eighteen— 15  < 

10.92 

:ases. 

4.29 

4-15 

9- 50 

"■73 

18.53         1993                770 
Over  eighteen — 13  cases. 

7.46 

6.13 

5-48 

17.60 

14.80 

22.44       i7-i6           13  41 

Boys. 
Under  fourteen  —15  cases. 

^^■33 

4.07 

3-30 

12.60 

11.60 

24.96         20.83              14.79 

15.0 

7.0 

5.85 

From  fourteen  to  eighteen — 10  cases. 

15-55 

15- 40 

28.22          27.0                  13.05 
Over  eighteen— 5  cases. 

1318 

5.83 

4.80 

8.40 

8.20 

19.20          17.80                 8.25 

8.25 

7-50 

7.0 

'The 

Relation  of 

the  Nose   to   the  Reproductive  Organs. 

By  C. 

N.   Cox, 

Brooklyn  Med.  Jour.,  July,  1902. 
41 


1 8  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Besides  these  somewhat  inconclusive  tests,  Marro  repeated  them 
on  boys  and  girls  in  public  institutions,  taking  note  in  each  case 
whether  each  was  pubescent.  Although  he  used  so  few  substances  that 
for  this  reason  alone  his  conclusions  seem  less  broadly  based  than  we 
could  wish,  we  have  perhaps  no  better  inference  than  his,  which  is,  in 
fine,  that  women  have  more  olfactory  sensibility  than  men,  and  that 
there  is  an  augmentation  in  girls  at  puberty.  This  seems  especially 
pronounced  for  musk,  a  strong  sex  perfume.  From  fourteen  to  eight- 
een many  girls,  it  would  appear,  are  slightly  osmosmic  for  vanilla, 
caoutchouc,  and  licorice,  their  olfactory  perceptions  being  more  acute 
both  before  and  after  these  years.  Boys  from  fourteen  to  eighteen 
were  more  sensitive  for  each  substance  except  musk  than  either  before 
or  after. 

We  have,  however,  a  less  controlled  source  of  inference  in 
questionnaire  returns,  which  indicate  with  considerable  cer- 
tainty the  following  results :  First,  the  perfumes  of  flowers 
attract  more  attention,  give  more  pleasure,  and  are  more 
finely  discriminated  near  the  dawn  of  adolescence  than  before. 
Sometimes  this  is  described  as  the  opening  of  a  new  olfactory 
world.  Fragrance  becomes  henceforth,  and  especially  to  young 
women,  a  source  of  exquisite  delight,  and  sometimes  sym- 
phonies of  their  perfumes  are  described  as  if  the  tone  color  of 
this  sense  now  became  capable  of  producing  a  higher  degree 
of  esthetic  enjoyment  than  any  other.  The  interest  in  flowers 
is,  of  course,  manifold,  but  there  is  reason  to  think  that  at  no 
stage  of  life  does  it  depend  more  upon  pure  olfaction. 
Secondly,  most  returns  specify  an  increased  interest  in  per- 
fumes and  aromata  generally.  The  immense  role  these  have 
had  in  worship  and  in  the  development  of  religious  feelings  is 
well  seen  in  Sigismund,^  who  gives  a  scholarly  history  of  their 
commercial,  religious,  and  cosmetic  uses.  The  adolescent  soul 
rises  more  easily  with  fumigation  and  incense  than  is  possible 
later  in  life.  Returns  show  that  now  girls  love  the  perfumes 
for  hair,  breath,  garments,  writing  paper,  soaps,  smelling  bot- 
tles and  sachet,  and  that  there  is  the  widest  range  of  individual 
differences  both  in  acuteness  and  obtuseness  of  olfactory  sensi- 
bility and  in  personal  preferences  and  aversions.  The  psychol- 
ogy of  this  sense,  too,  shows  that  its  associations  are  strong, 
but  very  deep  and  often  subconscious.     It  is  at  this  period  of 

^  Die  Aromata.     I^eipzig,  1884. 


CHANGES  IN   THE   SENSES  AND  THE   VOICE  19 

life  that  these  potentiaHties  by  which  incense  may  suggest  all 
the  religious  emotions,  the  odor  of  the  flower  recall  images  of 
sunny  meadows,  varnish  a  funeral,  the  undescribable  ship  smell 
a  voyage  by  sea  and  even  nausea,  new-mown  hay  a  mass  of 
dim  haestevic  sensations,  are  most  numerous  and  active  and 
have  greatest  power  to  modify  sentiments  and  enhance  sug- 
gestibility. Thirdly,  body  odors,^  while  they  do  not  reach  their 
maximal  intensity,  now  rise  suddenly  to  far  greater  dominance. 
The  more  rapid  metabolism  increases  them,  as  sweat  now  be- 
comes more  copious,  as  well  as  of  different  composition  and 
smell,  with  sex  differentiations  in  quality,  and  somatic  exhala- 
tions are  more  keenly  sensed.  Bad  breath,  now  for  the  first 
time,  has  great  power  to  blight  friendships ;  the  aroma  of  dis- 
ease or  anything  suggesting  the  intestinal  tract,  and  sweatiness 
or  anything  that  savors  of  uncleanliness  of  person  or  toilet,  now 
becomes  an  important  social  factor.  Real  and  sometimes  fanci- 
ful offensive  personal  exhalations  now  may  become  insupport- 
able, and  many  are  especially  sensitized  even  to  defective 
ventilation.  Indeed,  we  must  admit  that  fantastic  as  was 
Jaeger's  identification  of  the  soul  with  a  smell,  personal  odors, 
sometimes  both  consciously  and  unconsciously  at  this  age,  af- 
fect likes  and  dislikes.  Finally,  we  must  reserve  a  place  conjec- 
turally  for  sex  odors,  which  we  know  become  effective  with  ani- 
mals at  this  period  of  life,  and  this  very  probably  may  have  an 
importance  for  youth  hitherto  unsuspected  and  at  present  en- 
tirely undemonstrable.  If  we  add  to  all  these  the  flavors  and 
savors  which  link  taste  and  smell,  and  take  account  of  intoxi- 
cants, tobacco,  etc.,  we  are  again  on  the  old  solid  ground  of 
statistics,  because  both  these  habits,  as  shown  in  Chapter  V, 
are  especially  prone  to  arise  at  this  period  of  inception. 

Young  children  seem  on  the  whole  rather  insensitive  to 
smell,  which  is  currently  assumed  to  be  a  decadent  sense  in 
man.  But  there  is  now  a  period  of  recrudescence,  not  so  much 
for  any  discriminative  or  noetic  value,  as  for  a  rather  pure 
sense  feeling  with  a  marked  emotional  tone,  as  if  these  sensa- 
tions themselves  were  now  appreciated  for  their  own  sake;  as 
if  the  scale  of  pleasure  and  pain,  up  and  down  which  they  are 
distributed,  was  magnified ;  and  as  if  the  impressions  which 

^  Monin  :   Les  Odeurs  du  Corps  Humaine.     Paris.  1886. 


20  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

these  nerves  mediate  now  came  to  a  higher  psychic  valuation. 
Just  possibly,  too,  the  development  of  the  organ  at  this  stage 
causes  a  characteristic  modification  in  the  direction  of  the  air 
current  in  the  nostrils,  which  E.  Paulsen  has  shown  to  be  so 
important.  In  some  of  our  cases,  the  exquisiteness  of  this  sense 
in  adolescence  becomes  remarkable.  Julia  Brace  was  at  this  age 
when  she  best  discriminated  the  washed  clothes  of  each  inmate 
of  the  Hartford  Asylum  for  the  Blind.  The  recognition  of  per- 
sons and  even  objects  by  the  emanations  that  appeal  to  the  nose, 
which  seems  so  incredible  in  the  literature  of  hysterical  distem- 
pers, is  possible  at  this  period  if  ever ;  and  the  sometimes  almost 
convulsive  intensity  of  malodorous  sensations  also  belongs  here. 
On  the  whole  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  when  laboratory  tests 
have  explored  the  gamut  of  nature's  odors  for  each  period  of 
life,  it  will  be  found  that  closely  bound  up  with  the  development 
of  sex  in  man  goes  a  great  exaltation  and  enlargement  of  this 
spiritualization  of  taste,  which  is  related  to  it  in  somewhat  the 
same  anticipatory  way  that  sight  is  related  to  touch. 

Blushing  is  another  dermal  function  which  undergoes  dis- 
tinct augmentation  at  adolescence,  suggesting  a  new  or  closer 
rapport  between  the  skin  and  the  mind.  Its  close  connection 
with  the  sense  of  shame  has  suggested  to  some  that  it  is  an 
organic  relict  of  an  ancestral  sex  fear,  especially  in  young 
women,  in  whom  it  is  most  developed.  It  may  once  have  ex- 
tended over  a  larger  portion  of  the  body,  and  be  "an  atavistic 
trace  of  a  more  widely  diffused  sex  erethism."  ^  There  is  little 
uniformity  in  blushing.  It  may  begin  in  a  small  or  in  a  large 
spot,  or  may  mottle  a  considerable  surface  and  then  spread  up 
and  down  or  around.  Sometimes  it  acquires  morbid  intensity 
and  is  accompanied  by  tremors,  pressure,  giddiness,  mental  con- 
fusion, etc.  Subjectively  it  goes  with  consciousness  of  self,  or 
of  the  surface  of  the  body.  It  is  a  great  heightener  of  beauty, 
and  natural  selection  may  have  much  influence  upon  its  devel- 
opment. Campbell  ascribes  it  to  shyness,  and  Melinard  to  the 
desire  for  concealment.  The  skin  now  becomes  an  organ  of 
the  mind  in  a  new  sense  and  reflects  its  inner  movements  in 
ways  and  degrees  often  very  embarrassing.  Not  unconnected 
with  this  is  the  new  sense  of  consciousness  of  complexion. 

*  G.  E.  Partridge:  Blushing,  Ped.  Sem.,  vol.  iv,  p.  387  et  seq. 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  2i 

There  is  no  beautifier  that  compares  with  arterial  blood,  and  the 
increased  vascularity  and  erethism  of  the  human  skin  at  this 
age,  although  not  without  analogues  in  the  animal  world,  has 
been  a  theme  of  much  literature  and  poetry,  while  the  absence 
of  it  inclines  to  cosmetic  arts.  There  are  indications  that  pallor 
of  the  skin,  and  especially  the  face,  occurs  more  often  at  adoles- 
cence, partly  as  a  normal  reaction  to  blushing,  and  partly  be- 
cause of  the  increased  responsiveness  of  the  skin  to  states  of 
mind  opposite  to  those  which  cause  blushing.  So,  too,  chronic 
flushes  and  coldness  and  clamminess  of  parts  of  the  dermal  sur- 
face are  more  frequent  and  extreme. 

IV.  Hearing. — The  ear  is  closely  connected  with  the  senti- 
ments, and  there  is  a  general  truth  in  the  trite  saying  that  music 
is  the  language  of  the  feelings  as  speech  is  that  of  the  intellect. 
There  is  reason  to  believe  that  young  children  hear  higher 
tones  than  adults,  and  also  that  there  is  a  pubescent  stage  in 
which  the  vocabulary  does  not  grow  as  rapidly  as  before  and 
after,  but  when  unwonted  intensity  of  expression  is  vented 
upon  a  few  words  and  phrases  which  even  the  ear  loves.  One 
of  the  characteristics  of  slang,  of  which  this  is  the  culminating 
period,  is  that  a  few  words  do  duty  for  a  whole  genus  of  psychic 
processes,  so  that  verbalization,  like  appetite,  is  now  peculiarly 
prone  to  ruttiness.  This  gullying  intensity  is  perhaps  cognate 
with  that  to  yell  and  vent  the  new  tendency  to  phonation  in 
articulate  and  sometimes  animal  noises,  not  perhaps  so  much 
to  gratify  any  ear  hunger  as  to  relieve  efferent  tension.  Pro- 
clivity to  ear-mindedness  becomes  more  pronounced>  and  there 
is  a  new  responsiveness  of. soul  to  accents,  inflections,  timbre, 
and  cadences,  or  to  speech  music,  which  sometimes  comes  to 
have  an  independent  value,  and  even  where  it  does  not  rise  to 
consciousness,  has  a  sudden  reenforcement. 

Many  of  the  emotions  can  almost  be  said  to  be  born  now, 
and  perhaps  all  are  intensified,  so  that  the  emotional  life  is  far 
wider,  more  diversified,  and  deeper.  Tone  color  is  felt;  pre- 
cision in  articulation  and  pronunciation,  though  not  often  at- 
tained and  very  often  actually  diminished,  is  now  felt  in  a  new 
way.  Friendships  are  affected  by  the  quality  of  the  voice,  and 
the  tales  of  sentimental  maidens  who  fall  in  Ipve  with  the  voices 
of  people  they  have  never  seen,  are  true  now,  if  ever.    As  the 


22  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

voice  increases  in  range,  perhaps  it  is  not  impossible  that  the 
scale  of  audibility  falls  slightly  after  this  age  and  that  some 
higher  notes  are  lost  to  audition  and  lower  ones  gained,  or  at 
any  rate  are  appreciated,  after  the  traffic  of  language,  spoken 
and  heard,  has  sunk  to  a  lower  key. 

Dr.  J.  O.  Reik,^  however,  is  inclined  to  think  that  the  power 
of  hearing  the  highest  musical  notes  varies  with  age,  perhaps 
being  greatest  in  the  early  teens,  the  limit  of  perception  declin- 
ing with  age.  This  was  first  suggested  by  Dr.  Clarence  Blake.^ 
There  is  some  reason  to  think,  too,  that  there  is  for  a  short  time 
hyperacuity  of  hearing  and  also  of  seeing  at  about  this  age. 
Dr.  Reik  also  thinks  that  the  auricle  gradually  increases  both 
in  length  and  width  to  at  least  the  age  of  twenty  and  perhaps 
later,  although  its  most  rapid  growth  is  in  the  early  years  and 
the  annual  increase  is  slight  after  fourteen.  Where  there  is  a 
difference  between  the  two  ears,  the  right  is  usually  the  larger. 

Again  the  sounds  in  nature  reverberate  more  deeply  in 
the  soul.  The  running  brook,  the  waving  trees  and  grass,  the 
ripple  of  the  sea,  the  song  of  birds,  the  noises  of  the  tempest, 
now  come  nearer  to  the  soul  and  seem  to  take  on  a  more  human 
quality.  These,  too,  often  become  independent  objects  of  at- 
tention and  speak  a  language  to  the  heart ;  now  stillness  itself 
may  just  become  a  sensation.  Once  more  the  range  or  hori- 
zon of  auditory  consciousness  is  rather  suddenly  enlarged.  A 
series  of  tones,  noises,  and  especially  words,  is  grasped  into  a 
unity,  not  by  association  and  not  perhaps  because  the  after- 
image of  the  first  member  of  a  series  lingers  longer  to  sense, 
but  rather  because  the  range  of  the  mind  is  more  extended,  and 
the  synthetic  power  which  welds  many  elements  into  unity  is 
strengthened.  Simple  rhythm  and  rime  are  appreciated  long 
before,  but  now  declamatory  or  stylistic  prose  becomes  musical 
and  is  cadenced  into  wholes,  as  if  a  new  sentence  sense  was 
developed.  The  swing  and  lilt  of  longer  lines  and  more  com- 
plex forms  of  verse  in  poetry  are  appreciated.  So  is  harmony, 
while  the  power  to  apprehend  all  the  factors  of  intricate  musi- 
cal accompaniments  and  compositions  of  many  parts  now  first 


'  Report   on   the   Examination   of  the   Ears  of  440  School  Children.      Johns 
Hopkins  Hospital  Bull.,  December,  1900,  p.  ^18. 
2  Trans.  Am.  Otol.  Soc,  1872, 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE   VOICE  23 

appeals  to  the  soul.  Music,  which  may  have  been  cultivated 
much  before,  now  comes  to  mean  unutterable  things  and  ac- 
quires a  new  interest.  Very  often  discords  too  become  painful 
to  an  unwonted  degree,  and  if  war,  love,  and  religion  be  the 
three  factors  that  have  cadenced  the  soul  to  the  rhythm  out  of 
which  music  was  born,  this  is  what  we  should  expect  at  this 
age,  when  the  instincts  which  underlie  all  three  are  so  greatly 
reenforced.  Most  of  these  new  manifestations  are  transient  in 
those  who  do  not  develop  great  musical  power,  but  even  in 
these  they  are  often  well  unfolded  for  a  time. 

Of  556  young  people,  Lancaster  found  that  464  had  an  in- 
creased love  of  music, often  amounting  to  a  passion,  which, how- 
ever, soon  passed.  The  curve  of  this  love  culminates  at  fifteen 
and  declines  rapidly  after  sixteen.  In  many  cases  "  everything 
is  given  up  to  music  for  a  year  or  two,  and  then  it  is  dropped." 
Some  imagine  themselves  great  musicians  and  see  audiences 
spellbound  and  applauding  with  waving  handkerchiefs.  Some 
purchase  instruments  and  take  lessons  with  enthusiasm  for  a 
while,  but  the  spell  soon  passes.  Young  children  who  have 
been  made  painfully  nervous  by  music,  are  now  filled  with 
rapture  by  it,  and  are  sometimes  easily  and  deeply  moved  to 
tears.  There  is  a  new  love  of  rhythm  and  of  melody,  a  high 
sense  of  the  possibilities  of  music  as  a  means  of  expression, 
delight  in  opera,  etc. 

Music  is  more  closely  connected  with  pure  sensation  than 
any  other  art.  Hearing  plays  a  far  more  important  part  in 
musical  esthetics  than  even  the  theory  of  perspective  does  in 
painting.  It  does  not  necessarily  and  directly  excite  images  like 
poetry,  or  give  pleasure  in  form  like  painting  and  statuary, 
although  it  is  far  more  than  "  a  psychic  process  collected  from 
immediate  sensation."^  In  its  origin  it  is  closely  connected  with 
the  dance,  which  has  been  called  mute  poetry.  Sometimes 
music,  but  far  more  often  words,  come  first,  instrumental  or 
"  absolute  music  "  arising  late.  It  is  hard  to  combine  its 
esthetic,  psychical,  and  physiological  aspects  in  one  inclusive 
theory,  but  perhaps  Billroth  is  right  that  the  amount  of  harsh- 
ness a  hearer  endures  or  loves  is  a  matter  of  taste  and  habit. 


^  See  Billroth  :   Wer  ist  Musikalisch  ?  oder  psycho-physiologische  Aphorismen 
tiber  die  Musik.     Vienna,  1901. 


24  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

SO  that  the  boundary  between  harmony  and  discord  has  often 
changed.  So  tone  scales  most,  and  harmonious  interweaving 
next,  do  not  rest  upon  fixed  laws  of  nature,  but  upon  esthetic 
principles  which  are  subject  to  change  and  will  continue  to  de- 
velop still  more  in  the  future.  Of  its  many  factors  the  rhythm- 
sense  is  far  most  common.  Only  two  per  cent  of  the  Austrian 
recruits  can  not  learn  to  march  rhythmically  and  so  have  to 
be  transferred  to  the  cavalry.  Among  children  in  this  country 
this  proportion  is  far  greater.^  The  clog  and  jig  dancing  in- 
stinct is  strongest  and  most  often  manifested  at  the  dawn  of 
puberty,  as  is  the  love  of  dancing  generally.  In  45  cases  of 
enthusiasm  in  playing  the  banjo  or  drum,  "  the  interest  was 
awakened  in  every  instance  in  the  period  of  early  adolescence, 
between  the  ages  of  thirteen  and  seventeen."  This  is  usually 
the  case,  according  to  Sears,  with  interest  in  playing  other 
musical  instruments.  He  also  found  that  of  356  cases  report- 
ing increased  interest  in  music,  the  average  age  in  girls  was 
twelve  and  in  boys  thirteen,  and  also  that  "  a  special  interest 
in  dancing  is  likely  to  arise  when  the  child  is  thirteen  or  four- 
teen," a  little  later  in  boys  than  in  girls.  Sometimes  there  is 
a  sudden  and  revolutionary  change  from  strong  dislike  to 
passionate  and  consuming  love,  and  many  devote  themselves 
to  a  musical  career  for  a  time  during  adolescence.  This  calen- 
ture of  enthusiasm  may  last  for  years  even  in  those  slightly 
gifted.  No  genius  is  more  precocious  than  that  for  music, 
and  with  talent,  progress  during  the  early  teens  is  often  pro- 
digious. For  the  average  youth  there  is  probably  no  such 
agent  of  educating  the  heart  to  love  of  God,  home,  nature, 
country,  and  of  cadencing  the  whole  emotional  nature,  and 
hence  there  is  no  aspect  of  our  educational  life  more  sad  than 
the  neglect  or  perversion  of  musical  training  from  this,  its 
supreme  end. 

V.  The  Voice. — Here  best  we  may  consider  the  voice, 
which,  as  the  facts  of  deaf-mutism  show,  is  developed  under 
the  tutelage  of  the  ear.  The  first  sounds  in  the  insect  world 
seem  to  be  sexual,  for  they  are  made  only  by  the  male  and  only 

'  Studies  in  Rhythm,  by  Charles  H.   Sears.     Ped.  Sem.,   March,  1901,  espe- 
cially  p.  \^  et  seq. 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  25 

at  sexual  maturity.  Stridulation,  which  may  have  developed 
from  the  rattling  of  the  parts  of  a  horny  sheath  caused  by 
locomotion,  is  made  in  many  ways,  but  always  by  rubbing 
serrated  or  pectinated  edges,  whether  of  wings,  thighs,  or  body, 
which  perhaps  fiddle  on  each  other  alternately.  Some  cicadae 
can  be  heard  a  mile,  and  were  kept  in  cages  for  their  song  by 
the  Greeks  and  Chinese.  Other  insects  approximate  a  true 
voice  by  sexual  calls  made  by  forcing  air  through  their  spira- 
cles with  abdomens  distended  as  resonators,  so  that  more  than, 
half  the  body  is  a  musical  instrument.  The  note  of  these  in- 
struments, like  that  of  bees  in  humming,  is  modified  by  excite- 
ment, and  often  seems  to  express  feeling.  Some  think  the 
noise  of  the  death-tick  a  sexual  call.  Some  fish  make  noises 
audible  for  many  fathoms,  and  male  frogs  chirp  and  croak  in 
the  spring.  Most  clucks,  chirps,  crowing,  and  whistling,  as 
well  as  songs,  are  commonly  love  calls.  A  former  test  of  a 
good  bird  singer,  Darwin  tells  us,  was  to  see  if  it  will  continue 
to  sing  while  the  cage  is  swung  around  the  owner's  head,  and 
birds  matched  in  rivalry  will  sometimes  sing  for  hours  till  one 
drops  exhausted  or  dead.  A  canary  sang  continuously  for  four- 
teen hours.  The  best  singers  are  commonly  not  brilliant  in 
hue,  but  charm  with  their  voice.  If  song  is  not  confined  to 
the  breeding  season,  the  very  voice  often  changes  then.  Drum- 
ming, rattling  quills,  the  whirring  of  the  birds  made  by  feathers 
especially  shaped  to  cut  the  air,  as  they  plunge  or  turn  in  it, 
like  most  noises  in  the  insect  world  which  is  so  similar  to  that 
of  birds,  primarily  serve  the  reproductive  function.  The  larynx 
of  some  animals  enlarges  during  rut,  and  others  are  mute  save 
in  the  breeding  season.  The  voice  is  often  to  strike  terror  be- 
fore battle  or  in  challenge.  Some  monkeys  make  the  woods 
vocal  in  the  spring.  Darwin  holds  that  music,  instead  of  origi- 
nating in  speech  cadences,  as  Spencer  thinks,  sprung  from  and 
is  reminiscent  of  the  psychoses  of  old  courtships  of  a  long- 
past  age.  However  this  may  be,  sound  in  both  the  animal  and 
human  world  is  a  potent  agent  of  love.  The  song  of  crickets, 
birds,  and  the  pleasure  of  the  other  sex  in  hearing  it,  suggests 
to  Weismann  that  not  only  the  voice  but  other  kinds  of  musical 
organs  have  a  sexual  origin  as  mediations  of  selection. 
Whether  we  hold  with  Darwin  that  song  was  developed  by 
sexual  selection  and  language  was  evolved  from  it,  or  with 


26  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Spencer,  Schweibe,  and  others,  that  speech  was  primary,  or 
even  with  Weismann  that  the  musical  sense  has  no  necessary 
relation  to  sexual  life,  but  was  a  complementary  product  of 
the  organ  of  audition,  we  know  that  timbre  alone  has  great 
power  in  arousing  or  arresting  sexual  feeling  and  that  music 
and  love  are  closely  associated.  Tissot  ^  thinks  birds  have  a 
change  of  voice  yearly,  and  that  its  relative  loss  in  many 
species  out  of  the  breeding  season  is  a  disease.  This  has  been 
noted  in  canaries  and  other  captive  birds,  and  especially  when 
molting.  Other  animals  show  similar  phenomena  in  the 
season  of  molting  and  shedding  the  coat. 

It  is  impossible  to  glance  at  the  later  theories  concerning  the  origin 
of  speech  and  the  recent  studies  of  vocalization  among  animals  without 
being  convinced  that,  of  all  the  many  factors  involved  in  this  very 
complex  theme,  sex  has  played  a  far  more  important  role  than  has 
even  yet  been  recognized.  Its  profound  modification  by  castration, 
and  by  abnormalities  of  the  vita  sexualis,  the  change  of  voice  that 
accompanies  puberty  and  its  modification  at  senescence,  the  volumi- 
nousness  of  song  and  sex-calls  among  animals  in  the  breeding  season, 
all  suggest  that  while  it  is  as  yet  by  no  means  proven  that  voice  orig- 
inated as  a  sex  charm,  this  factor  has  nevertheless  had  immense  influ- 
ence in  its  development.  During  menstruation  it  is  often  less  brilliant, 
thin,  and  more  prone  to  be  flat  in  singers,  and  is  often  sharp  in  states 
of  dysmenorrhoea.  The  pubertal  change  is  almost  as  much  less  marked 
in  the  female  as  the  mammary  change  is  in  the  male.  Before  this 
period  the  larynx  of  the  sexes  differs  but  little,  and  from  three  to  eleven 
the  change  in  both  sexes  is  slight.  Puberty,  however,  brings  a  sudden 
enlargement  of  the  glottis,  which  in  the  male  nearly  doubles  its  propor- 
tions, and  in  girls  enlarges  in  the  ratio  of  from  five  to  seven.  Its  trans- 
verse diameter  remains  more  nearly  the  same  for  both  sexes.  It  has 
been  thought  that  the  shriller,  higher  pitch  of  the  female  voice,  ob- 
servant in  many  animals  as  well  as  in  man,  has  had  something  to  do 
in  determining  the  sharper  quality  of  feminine  terminations  in  the  lan- 
guages, where  gender  is  thus  distinguished.  The  voice  is  more  devel- 
oped in  civilized  than  in  savage  races,  and  is  probably  slowly  becoming 
lower  in  pitch  in  Europe. 

Intricate  as  is  the  anatomy  of  the  larynx  at  puberty,  these  changes 
are  easy  to  understand.  Its  skeleton  grows  forward,  giving  greater 
prominence  to  the  Adam's  apple,  where  the  vocal  cords  have  their 
anterior  insertion  in  the  thyroid  cartilage.  In  the  female  larynx  the 
same  change  occurs,  but  is  much  less  marked  and  generally  more  grad- 
ual, the  larynx  remaining  a  little  higher  up  in  the  neck.    The  growth 

'  Essai  sur  la  Mue  de  la  Voix.  Encyclopedic  des  Sciences  M^d.,  1840,  viii, 
p.  676. 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE   VOICE  27 

to  double  the  length  or  more  involves  the  fall  of  an  octave  in  the 
pitch  of  the  voice  and  a  more  or  less  prolonged  period  before  fulness 
and  quality  are  well  established  on  the  new  basis.  The  first  symptom 
of  the  impending  change  is  slight  hyperemia  of  the  larynx,  which 
causes  the  voice  to  become  slightly  raucous  and  hoarse.  This  may 
vanish  in  a  few  days,  when  it  is  noticed  that  the  voice  is  a  little  lower 
but  more  uncertain.  Often  the  vocal  cords  and  cartilages  to  which  they 
are  attached  do  not  grow  in  exact  proportion  the  one  to  the  other. 
The  tension  is  unsteady  and  the  voice  occasionally  breaks  to  a  childish 
treble,  often  with  notes  higher  than  were  normal  before  the  change 
began.  Slowly  phonation  takes  on  a  distinctly  adult  character.  Those 
probably  go  too  far  who  assert  that  as  the  voice  goes  down  in  pitch  it 
keeps  exact  pace  step  by  step  with  genital  development,  and  that  the 
deeper  it  is  the  more  complete  the  unfoldment  of  virility.  Bierent  even 
goes  so  far  as  to  think  it  a  general  rule,  although  not  without  numerous 
exceptions,  that  a  very  robust  man  with  very  abundant  hair  and  well- 
developed  sexual  functions  usually  has  a  bass  voice,  and  that  dark- 
haired  people  usually  are  bassos  or  contraltos,  and  blondes  are  more 
likely  to  have  high  voices.  Tenors,  at  any  rate,  need  to  be  far  more 
careful  to  avoid  errors  and  excess  in  order  to  keep  their  voice  at  the 
top  of  its  condition  than  those  who  sing  bass.  According  to  Delauney, 
the  voice  of  those  made  eunuchs  before  puberty  is  always  between  tenor 
and  soprano,  because  the  larynx  does  not  develop  and  the  voice  re- 
mains childish.  Despite  the  fact  that  ovariotomy  is  now  so  frequent, 
its  effects  on  the  voice  are  not  clear.  It  seems  probable,  however,  that 
it  causes  a  slightly  more  masculine  timbre  without  involving  much 
change  of  pitch.  Masini  has  shown  that  the  voices  of  prostitutes  tend 
to  be  still  more  mannish. 

The  influence  of  anomalies  in  the  development  of  the  sex  organs 
upon  character  and  all  the  secondary  sexual  qualities  is  very  marked 
and  almost  inevitable.  Castration  before  puberty,  very  common  in 
some  parts  of  Italy,  even  by  barbers,  whose  signs  still  advertise  com- 
petitively the  cheapness  of  the  operation,  which  is  performed  not  only 
to  make  singers  for  the  famous  Sistine  choirs  and  elsewhere,  but  to 
supply  the  market  in  Oriental  seraglios,  etc.,  arrests  the  larynx  at  about 
two-thirds  its  normal  diameter  and  prevents  change  of  voice,  and  may 
even  cause  its  pitch  to  grow  actually  higher.  Vocal  spasms,  persistent 
hiccup,  the  harsh  voice  of  women  of  the  street,  are  also  in  close  sym- 
pathetic relation  with  the  state  of  the  organs  of  reproduction.  From  a 
table  of  Marro,'  based  however  on  only  about  one  hundred  cases,  it 
would  appear  that  the  voice  of  Italian  girls  begins  to  descend  at  twelve 
or  thirteen,  and  may  reach  its  lowest  point  as  late  as  sixteen  or  seven- 
teen. Vierordt's  table  upon  this  point  is  based  on  still  fewer  cases,  and 
is  far  more  indeterminate. 

The  best  attempt  yet  made  to  determine  the  changes  in  chil- 
dren's voices  as  modified  by  age  through  the  period  of  muta- 

'  La  Puberty,  p.  11. 


28  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

tion  is  that  of  Paulsen,^  who  carefully  tested  250  individuals 
in  each  school  class  in  Kiel,  or  in  all  2,685  boys  between  six 
and  fifteen,  and  2,259  S^^^^  from  six  to  fourteen.  He  used 
only  children  with  intact  respiratory  and  vocal  apparatus,  and 
with  the  aid  of  a  singing-master  utilized  for  upper  and  lower 
limits  only  those  notes  that  could  be  produced  without  special 
effort.  Children  in  the  two  lowest  classes  sang  simple  songs 
variously  pitched  for  the  purpose,  and  older  children  sang  the 
scales  in  the  vowel  a.  He  found  that  50  per  cent  began  to 
quaver  at  the  age  of  thirteen ;  70  per  cent  at  fourteen ;  80  per 
cent  at  fifteen.  During  change  he  found  the  throat  often  swol- 
len, but  not  the  cords,  which  McKenzie  said  were  affected. 
Control  is  lost  but  afterward  regained.  Girls  from  six  to  nine 
increase  in  height  only,  then  drop  to  g,  where  they  remain  till 
thirteen,  when  their  lower  limit  falls  to  e,  deepening  in  all  only 
two  and  a  half  notes.  The  boys'  voices  on  the  average  were 
more  limited  both  up  and  down.  Their  increase  upward  at 
first  keeps  pace  with  that  of  the  girls,  but  the  greatest  height 
is  reached  a  year  later,  at  twelve;  then  it  sinks  through  four 
and  a  half  notes,  till  at  thirteen  its  greatest  depth  attained  is  at 
d.  Near  the  end  of  the  childish  period  the  voice  has  a  range  of 
nearly  three  octaves.  Girls  reach  their  greatest  range  at  thir- 
teen, and  boys  at  fourteen. 

Individual  differences  are  very  great :  at  ten,  e.  g.,  of  girls 
5.6  per  cent  can  sing  only  an  octave  or  less ;  85.6  per  cent  from 
one  to  two  octaves ;  and  8.8  over  two  octaves ;  while  of  boys 
at  ten,  12.5  can  not  exceed  an  octave;  83.7  sing  between  one 
and  two  octaves;  and  only  3.9  per  cent  sing  over  two  octaves. 
Eliminating  individual  differences,  the  following  table  gives 
the  range  available  for  singing  for  each  age  and  for  both  sexes. 
The  first  table  represents  the  actual  range  minimal  and  max- 
imal, and  the  second  the  limits  within  which  average  children 
can  safely  sing ;  the  staff  being  appended  for  convenience. 

>  Ueber  die  Singstimme  der  Kinder.     Pfliiger's  Archiv,  1895,  vol.  xi,  p.  407. 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE 


29 


Age. 

Bovs. 

6. 

ci  . 

di— a 

.  d 

7- 

b'  . 

di— a 

'  .   .   •   g' 

8. 

a  .  .  di 

-d»  .   g» 

9- 

a  .   .   d» 

-d'  .   g* 

10. 

a  .  .  di 

-d»  .   a» 

II. 

a  .  c'- 

— d"  .  .  a» 

12. 

a  .  c'  — 

e^  .   .  .  h» 

a 

13. 

g 

.  .  c*- 

e^   .  .  .  h» 

14- 

g 

.  .  .  c»- 

e*  .  .  ais* 

ges 

15- 

ges 

Girls. 

ci  .  d»— gi  .   . 

d» 

c'  .  d>         a}  . 

.  d» 

h  .  di a}  . 

.  .  f 

a.  .  di hi 

-4'  . 

-d» 

-d» 

-d^ 

-d» 


II. 


Agb 
6. 

7 
8 

9 

10 
II 
12 
13 
14 
15 


Boys. 
d»-gi 

d» a} 

di bi 

d> c2 

di d» 

h  (c') d^ 

h dis« 

h — dis2 

h dis« 

h dis' 


Girls. 


d^— a 

d» 

di  — 
di — 


di- 


Ic- 


di 


-hi  (c») 
d^ 


-dis* 


3r 

b 


t  ■•'  a 
— fi—g-oiHi — 
I- — J- 


T~h- 


rn-d- 


gorh  _. 


II       Ji . 
"  g  or  h 


''    6 


"-#' 


30  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Other  studies  show  sHghtly  different  limits.  Behnke  and 
Lenox  Brown  ^  found  that  from  seven  to  ten  the  difference 
in  the  sexes  began  to  be  marked,  and  from  ten  to  thirteen  gave 
boys  a  practical  range  of  from  a  to  d,  and  girls  from  c  to  f. 
Another  investigator  concludes  that  in  the  fifth  year  children 
command  from  four  to  six  notes,  at  eight  years  from  seven  to 
nine,  and  at  twelve  from  eleven  to  fourteen  notes.  Vierordt 
thinks  girls  produce  their  highest  notes  at  the  age  of  ten. 
Muller  measured  the  length  of  the  vocal  cords  and  found  that 
just  before  puberty  it  was  .7  in.  in  boys  and  .625  in.  in  girls. 
Later  the  relation  of  the  length  of  these  cords  was  as  7  :  5  at 
rest,  and  as  3  :  2  in  tension.  The  mean  length  at  rest  in  males 
he  found  to  be  .728,  and  in  females  .495,  and  at  greatest  ten- 
sion .912  and  .616  respectively.^  Since  the  important  work  of 
G.  Manuel  Garcia,^  we  understand  the  mechanism  of  falsetto, 
or  head  and  chest  tones.  We  need,  but  still  lack,  a  study  of 
the  adolescent  voice  as  thorough  and  painstaking  as  that  which 
Garbini  *  has  made  of  the  child's  voice  to  the  age  of  six. 

Mutation  is  often  very  gradual.  Perhaps  a  slight  hoarse- 
ness is  noticed  for  a  few  days  or  weeks,  and  the  voice  is  then 
found  to  be  permanently  lowered.  Sometimes  the  voice  is 
literally  broken,  perhaps  into  three  or  even  more  parts,  with 
gaps  between  them,  and  slowly  the  intervals  fill  in.  Some 
boys  sing  treble  till  nineteen.  McKenzie  found  that  of  3(X) 
choir  boys  only  17  per  cent  really  showed  a  "  tip  over  "  of  voice. 
Some  voices  are  raucous,  and  there  is  more  or  less  irritation, 
loss  of  control,  and  cases  are  on  record  where  six  or  seven 
years  elapsed  before  phonation  was  established  on  the  new 
basis.  Some,  on  the  other  hand,  girls  far  more  often  than 
boys,  continue  to  sing  through  these  changes  with  no  apparent 
injury.  The  voice  grows  powerful  and  rich  in  both  sexes,  and 
its  timbre  as  well  as  its  pitch  changes. 

Pubescent  boys  are  especially  prone  to  yell  and  indulge  in  vocal 
gymnastics  of  a  drastic  kind.  They  often  become  experts  in  imitating 
animals,  the  other  sex,  instruments,  locomotives,  and  sounds  in  nature. 

^  The  Child's  Voice.     London,  1885. 

'  The  Physiology  of  the  Human  Voice.     Phil.  Trans.,  1896,  p.  551. 
'  Observations  on  the  Human  Voice.     Proc.  Royal  Soc.  of  London,  vol.  vii, 
pp.  399-412. 

*  Evoluzione  della  voce  nella  infanzia.     Verona,  1892. 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE   VOICE  3^ 

The  intense  emotions,  such  as  jealousy  and  rage,  are  vocally  simulated, 
and  there  are  innumerable  affectations  and  a  new  vocal  consciousness. 
Tones  in  conversation  with  the  other  sex,  as  appears  from  our  returns, 
may  be  almost  oleaginous  or  excessively  deep  and  hard,  according  to 
temperament  and  occasion.  Articulation  otten  suffers  for  a  season. 
Inflection  is  sometimes  reduced  and  then  excessive.  Girls  simper, 
affect  boyish  phonation,  and  then  may  become  mincing  and  overnice. 
Speech,  music,  cadence,  rhythm,  and  perhaps  rate  of  utterance,  are  re- 
constructed. Many  bad  habits,  some  suggesting  arrest,  are  settled  into. 
Voices  may  become  nasal,  throaty,  coarse,  aspirate,  guttural.  Vowel- 
ization  lacks  resonance,  or  pronunciation  is  slovenly,  etc.  In  common 
conversation,  young  people  often  seem  playing  on  the  voice  as  if  to 
explore  its  possibilities  in  all  directions.  In  all  these  respects  the  voice 
at  the  season  of  change  is  very  responsive  to  bodily  states,  reflecting 
the  general  tone,  mood,  sentiment,  feeling,  and  state  of  health  as  at  no 
other  age  of  life.  On  cloudy  days  and  in  hot  weather  and  when  hungry, 
children  easily  flat,  and  tense,  nervous  states  give  the  voice  a  strident, 
perhaps  sharp  or  neurasthenic  tang,  so  that  regimen,  dress,  food,  sleep, 
etc.,  are  never  more  important  in  this  respect.  Never  is  mankind  so 
influenced  by  quality  of  voice  as  in  adolescence.  This  is  not  only  the 
unconscious  medium  of  likes  and  dislikes,  but  is  often  specified  as  the 
very  first  charm  in  the  other  sex.  So  instinctive  is  imitation  that  the 
young  ought  always  to  hear  better  and  never  worse  voices  than  their 
own. 

Singing  is  the  most  universal  language,  because  it  is  the  language 
of  feeling.  Piety,  patriotism,  all  the  racial  and  domestic  sentiments 
and  love  of  nature  can  be  thus  trained.  Teachers  of  singing  have 
drifted  very  far  from  the  intent  of  nature  in  this  respect.  Love,  home, 
war,  religion,  country,  and  rhythm  generally,  it  is  their  first  duty  to 
preform  in  the  heart.  The  merely  technical  process  of  reading  notes 
is  a  small  matter  compared  with  the  education  of  the  sentiments. 
Their  function  is  to  direct  a  gymnastics  of  the  emotions,  to  see  that 
no  false  feelings  are  admitted,  to  open  the  soul  to  sympathy  and  social 
solidarity.  "  Where  singing  is  not,"  said  Luther,  "  the  devil  enters;" 
and  "  I  will  not  look  at  a  teacher  who  can  not  sing."  Melody,  har- 
mony, the  dynamism  of  soft  and  loud,  quality  and  cadence,  are  the 
purest  epitome  and  vehicle  of  the  higher  moral  qualities.  Without 
them  the  range  or  depth  of  the  life  of  the  heart  suffers.  Song  should 
expurgate  every  evil  passion  and  banish  care  and  fatigue.  Even  the 
Chinese  call  their  crude  music  the  science  of  sciences,  and  think  har- 
mony connected  with  the  function  of  government  and  the  state;  as 
Plato  said,  a  reform  in  music  would  mean  a  political  revolution,  and 
Melanchthon  called  it  the  theology  of  the  heart.  Young  and  old  meet 
in  this  art,  for  much  of  the  life  of  feeling  is  as  independent  of  age  as 
of  culture.  The  voice  is  the  practical  basis  of  all  music.  The  larynx 
is,  like  the  face,  a  barometer  and  register  of  feeling.  Aristotle  said 
music  molded  character  as  gymnastics  do  the  body. 

Behnke  and  Brown  collected  opinions  from  two  hundred  teachers 


32  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

of  singing  on  eight  questions  concerning  children's  voices.^  Most 
agree  that  boy  choristers  do  not  excel  as  singers  later.  Only 
fifteen  think  boys  can  sing  through  mutation,  holding  that  the 
voice  goes  to  pieces  then  if  not  exercised.  Many  think  train- 
ing before  puberty  has  little,  and  some  say  no  effect  on  the 
voice  afterward.  Children  can  not  understand  good  music  or 
feel  it  before.  It  is  impossible  to  predict  from  the  child's  voice  what 
it  will  become  when  adult.  Seiler  goes  to  the  extreme  of  saying  that 
it  is  useless  to  train  the  voice  before  puberty,  but  musical  intelligence 
can  be  helped,  and  the  power  of  hearing  music  through  the  voice, 
which  is  the  best  mode  of  appreciating  it,  can  be  trained.  Little  chil- 
dren only  are  aided  in  vocalization  by  dancing  while  they  sing.  It  aids 
respiration,  strengthens  the  lungs,  helps  digestion,  and  the  consensus 
is  that  from  eleven  to  puberty,  when  the  child's  voice  is  at  its  best, 
cultivation  is  valuable  musically;  many  advocate  beginning  at  the 
age  of  two  or  three  with  very  gentle,  soft,  and  simple  melodies,  and 
that  there  should  be  a  generous  period  of  singing  by  imitation.  It  is, 
in  fact,  as  absurd  to  begin  singing  by  notes  before  a  repertory  of  songs 
is  acquired  as  it  would  be  to  teach  language  from  a  primer  before  the 
power  of  speech  was  acquired. 

Finally,  we  have  no  sympathy  with  the  view  that  great  solicitude 
should  be  exercised  to  prevent  any  but  pure  tones  at  adolescence,  for 
nature  seems  to  decree  that  the  young  should  utter  every  kind  and 
degree  of  emotion  vocally;  this  takes  us  far  outside  the  narrow 
limits  laid  down  by  precisians  and  drill-masters,  and  we  believe  that 
the  self-consciousness  so  common  in  schools  concerning  song  is  a  peda- 
gogic artifact,  due  to  either  too  little  or  too  fastidious  practise,  and 
that  voices  ought  to  be  harsh,  raw,  and  awkward  for  a  season.  The 
chief  evil  of  self-consciousness  is  artificiality  in  tone  production  that 
tends  to  throat  strain  and  chronic  soreness.  Declamation  and  recita- 
tion may  perhaps  be  made  to  afford  an  adequate  basis  for  vocal  train- 
ing, especially  if  the  selection  be  interesting  and  adapted  to  the  senti- 
ments of  the  young.  Singing  and  speaking  are  at  the  best  when  the 
subject-matter  occupies  the  center  of  attention  and  rules  are  relegated 
to  the  background,  while  music,  like  cadences,  must  fit  the  words.  The 
prime  question  in  all  singing,  declamation,  etc.,  is,  What  feelings  and 
ideas  do  they  express?  All  other  things  are  accessory,  and  all  tech- 
nique is  bad,  however  good  per  se,  if  it  diverts  teacher  or  pupil  from 
the  chief  end  of  giving  utterance  to  strong,  normal,  and  uplifting  sen- 
timents.    The  moral  purpose  thus  overtops  and  conditions  all  others. 

VI.  Vision. — The  eye  is  the  seat  of  the  sense  of  form,  color, 
light,  and  shade,  and  is  in  most  persons  the  sense  nearest  the 

»  See  F.  E.  Howard  :  The  Child  Voice  in  Singing.  N.  Y.,  1898.  Also  Kafe- 
mann  :  Die  Erkrankungen  der  Sprechstimme.  Danzig,  1899.  Vierordt :  Physiol, 
des  Kindes-Alters.  Treitel  iiber  die  Stimme  kleiner  Kindern.  Centralblatt  f. 
Physiol.,  1891,  No.  15. 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  33 

mind.  Young  children  excel  adults  in  detecting  dim  forms  in 
the  dark,  and  probably  in  fine  spatial  discriminations.  Although 
we  have  no  satisfactory  experimental  tests,  it  is  probable  that 
children  distinguish  grades  of  light  and  shade  rather  minutely 
before  the  perception  of  colors  is  much  developed.  There  is 
also  reason  to  think  that  the  periphery  of  the  retina,  which 
receives  images  from  objects  in  indirect  vision;  although  not  so 
extended  as  in  the  adult,  has  more  power  to  roll  the  eye  re- 
flexly  until  it  is  brought  into  direct  vision,  and  that  the  foveal 
power  is  now  increased.  As  the  brow,  eyebrows,  cheek-bones, 
and  nose,  which  normally  increase  in  the  teens,  narrow  the  field 
of  vision,  it  would  seem  that  the  difference  of  power  between 
the  fovea  and  the  retinal  periphery  is  increased. 

In  Chicago,  among  2,030  boys  and  2,735  gi^^s,  Smedley 
found  32  per  cent  of  the  former  and  37  per  cent  of  the  latter 
with  visual  defects.  These  increased  rapidly  during  the  first 
three  years  of  school  life,  decreasing  after  the  age  of  nine,  first 
slowly,  then  more  rapidly,  till  the  age  of  thirteen  was  passed. 
From  ten  onward,  those  with  visual  defect  stand  lower  than 
those  whose  sight  is  normal,  and  the  same  was  found  to  be  true 
for  nearly  all  ages  in  cases  of  defective  hearing. 

Judgments  of  form  are  now  more  correct,  and  the  power 
to  grasp  large  and  complex  forms  as  a  whole  is  augmented. 
Gilbert  marked  off  62  cm.,  and  asked  children  to  translate  the 
visual  impression  into  muscle  sense  by  moving  the  arm  through 
a  distance  thought  to  be  the  same ;  he  found  that  it  was  over- 
judged  at  no  age,  so  that  "  we  underestimate  distance  trans- 
lated from  the  sense  of  sight  to  the  muscle  sense.  Boys  are  less 
accurate  than  girls  from  six  to  ten ;  then  the  reverse  is  the 
case."  The  age  of  greatest  correctness  was  fifteen.  He  also 
tested  children  from  six  to  eighteen,  by  asking  them  to  estimate 
the  number  of  inches  between  two  marks  twenty  inches  apart. 
At  the  age  of  six,  these  comparative  estimates  were  only  about 
one-fifth  the  real  distance,  and  up  to  fifteen  the  distance  was  al- 
ways judged  too  short;  fifteen  to  sixteen  was  the  most  accu- 
rate age,  and  older  people  overestimate  perhaps  because  their 
method  changes  to  marking  off  imaginary  distances  with  the 
eye  on  the  principle  that  a  full  space  seems  larger  than  an 
empty  space.  Judgments  improve  very  rapidly  in  both  sexes  to 
about  eleven,  after  which  they  progress  much  more  gradually. 
42 


34  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Griffing  ^  shows  "  that  the  extensive  threshold  or  ability 
to  receive  and  retain  a  number  of  simultaneous  retinal  impres- 
sions is  a  function  of  individual  growth,  reaching  its  maximum 
only  when  the  observer  is  fully  developed."  The  maximum 
numbers  of  letters  seen  at  once  shows  a  marked  increase  at 
puberty  and  on  through  high  school  and  college.  The  tendency 
to  guess  decreases  with  maturity.  The  great  gain  from  high 
school  to  college  is  especially  noteworthy. 

Again,  the  perception  of  form  is  now  gradually  emanci- 
pated from  other  associated  sensations,  coming  into  closer 
rapport  with  the  brain  and  with  psychic  processes,  and  all  visual 
estimates  improve. 

In  testing  children  with  objects,  the  size  and  weight  of 
which  varied  independently  and  sometimes  inversely,  Dress- 
lar  ^  found  that  there  was  no  apparent  gain  from  the  age  of 
seven  to  fourteen  in  the  capacity  to  separate  visual  impressions 
from  pressure,  but  that  the  size  confused  the  estimate  of 
weight  almost  equally  for  all  these  ages. 

Gilbert  also  tested  the  influence  of  suggestion  by  seen  size 
as  affecting  the  estimated  weight  of  lifted  objects,  and  found 
that  from  nine  the  increase  in  accuracy  for  both  sexes  coin- 
cided tolerably  with  the  age  of  fourteen,  and  that  at  fifteen 
and  sixteen  there  was  a  diminution  followed  by  a  rapid  increase 
to  seventeen. 

Another  interesting  psychic  change,  which  takes  place  in 
childhood  and  youth,  has  been  suggested  by  Wolf e,^  who  found 
that  our  notions  of  the  size  of  different  objects  differ  widely. 
Young  children  underestimate  the  size  of  coins  and  bills; 
mature  people  overestimate  the  size  of  the  former.  The  great 
individual  differences  in  these  estimates  of  children  grow  quite 
uniform  with  the  dawn  of  the  teens.  It  would  seem  that  to 
young  children  a  memory  image  seems  smaller  than  its  object, 
while  in  many  adults  it  may  exceed.  This  suggests  that  draw- 
ing might  concern  itself  more  with  size. 

We  also  find  changes  due  to  modifications  of  interest.    Fine 

*  On  the  Development   of  Visual    Perception  and  Attention.     Am.   Jour,   of 
Psy.,  January,  1896,  vol.  vii,  p.  227. 

*  Psychology  of  Touch.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  June,  1894,  vol.  vi,  pp.  50-54. 

*  Some  Judgments  on  the  Size  of  Familiar  Objects.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  Janu- 
ary, 1898,  vol.  ix,  pp.  137-166. 


CH.'WGES   IN   THE   SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  35 

differences  of  face,  figure,  the  fit  of  clothes,  grace  in  motion, 
or  in  outHne  drawings  now  have  a  new  meaning.  We  begin  to 
take  in  our  esthetic,  social,  and  natural  environrraent  with  a 
larger  ken.  We  see  better  what  feeds  nascent  interests  and 
ignore  that  which  appeals  to  dying  ones,  and  yet  there  is  greater 
capacity  to  see  all  things,  self  included,  from  the  standpoint  of 
the  neutral  spectator.  Words  are  read  in  outline  without  per- 
ception of  the  letters  that  compose  them.  Some  returns  indi- 
cate new  interests  in  tracing  mazes  and  figure  ornaments,,  and 
in  grouping  repeated  visual  impressions,  as  frickets,  bricks  in 
the  sidewalk,  etc.  Form  begins  to  come  to  its  independent 
rights,  and  we  see  the  beauty  of  symmetry  and  proportion, 
group  items  to  larger  unities,  count  and  aggregate  impressions, 
take  pleasure  in  things  afar,  landscapes,  and  the  heavens  which 
no  other  sense  can  attain,  and  there  is  pleasure  in  arranging, 
dividing,,  and  intricating  details.  Thus  perhaps  the  constella- 
tions were  first  imaged. 

The  color  sense,  which  appeals  more  to  sentiment,  now  ac- 
quires a  deeper  meaning,  and  if  children  see  light  and  shade 
best,  adolescents  far  excel  them  in  response  to  the  chromatic 
world  about  them;  the  hues  of  blossoms  and  of  clouds,  the 
blue  of  the  sky,  the  green  of  the  fields,  etc.,  now  give  new 
satisfaction.  Colors  have  a  suggestive  and  symbolic  power, 
and  associations  are  widely  irradiated  and  established.  Crimson 
suggests  blood  ;  yellow,  gold ;  etc.  There  is  new  esthetic  pleas- 
ure and  pain  in  the  harmony  and  contrast  of  colors.  Their 
power  to  excite  and  depress,  which  Goethe  first  investigated  in 
a  colored  room,  and  which  makes  the  poetry  of  colors,  is  now 
deeply  felt. 

Luckey  ^  found  that  the  power  to  see  colors  in  indirect 
vision  increased  with  age,  but  that  the  lack  of  this  power  in 
children  was  compensated  by  a  greater  proportional  range  for- 
black  and  white  than  for  color  as  compared  with  adults. 

Wolfe  *  found  that  so  far  as  could  be  inferred  from  the 


*  Comparative  Observations  on  the  Indirect  Color  Range  of  CTiirdren,  AduFts,, 
and  Adults  trained  in  Color.  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  JaQoary,  sScfS,  Tol.  vi,  pp. 
489-504. 

*  The  Color  Vocabulary  of  Children. 


36  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

extent  and  accuracy  of  color  vocabularies,  the  delicacy  and 
discriminative  power  of  children  increased  rapidly  at  first,  but 
that  girls  make  but  little  progress  after  the  eleventh  year,  al- 
though boys  continue  to  advance  until  at  seventeen  there  is 
great  improvement  in  discrimination  of  violet,  orange,  and 
pink,  in  this  order.  The  power  to  see  and  name  violet  cor- 
rectly appears  from  his  tables  to  be  chiefly  during  adolescence, 
girls  having  the  advantage  throughout. 

Gilbert  showed  ten  colors  nearly  alike  to  each  child;  he 
measured  acuteness  of  chromatic  sensibility  by  the  average 
number  of  colors  considered  to  be  the  same,  and  found  a  rapid 
increase  of  sensitiveness  to  ten  or  twelve,  which  then  more 
slowly  increased  to  a  maximum  at  sixteen  for  girls. 

The  sense  of  sight  craves  stronger  stimuli.  Loud  colors, 
high  lights,  and  striking  contrasts  are  preferred,  and  taste  for 
mild  hues,  subdued  tones,  and  delicate  tints  comes  later.  Some 
think  the  range  of  the  color  scale  is  extended  and  that  the  red 
end  of  the  spectrum  and  far  more  the  blue  and  violet  end  is 
developed.  There  is  much  reason  to  believe  that  finer  color 
discrimination  in  intensity  and  wave  length  and  degrees  of 
light  and  shade  arises.  The  color  world  is  at  any  rate  almost 
regenerated  and  recreated  and  all  its  esthetic  effects  greatly 
enhanced.  Dress,  flowers,  clouds  and  sky,  chromatic  patterns 
and  all  variegated  paintings  in  Nature's  art  gallery  are  not 
only  perceived  more  clearly,  but  are  inwardly  felt  and  affect 
moods.  Favorite  colors  acquire  character  and  individuality  and 
by  new  analogies  come  to  be  associated  with  moral  and  intel- 
lectual qualities,  while  their  symbolism  irradiates  far  into  the 
world  of  tone,  ethics,  and  religion,  as  well  as  esthetics,  and  they 
have  new  power  over  the  heart.  Color  preferences  may  be  so 
marked  as  to  shade  everything  controllable  about  the  person  and 
the  environment,  and  sometimes  aversions  are  no  less  pro- 
nounced. These  often  change,  perhaps  repeatedly,  and  may 
be  reversed,  so  that  colors  most  loved  will  become  unpleasant, 
and  vice  versa.  Perhaps  everything  must  be  colored,  and  the 
soul  becomes  impressionable  to  what  was  before  unnoticed,  and 
new  central  associations  and  interpretations  arise.  Combina- 
tions painful  to  cultivated  taste  may  be  for  a  time  a  delight. 
This  secondary  quality,  which  brain  or  soul  is  energized  to 
create,  is  laid  on  to  the  entire  visible  world  like  a  lavish  coat 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  37 

of  variegated  fresh  paint,  and  at  the  same  time  is  given  an  ab- 
stract value  of  its  own  quite  independent  of  form. 

Indeed,  form  often  suffers  in  appreciation  for  a  time  at  the 
expense  of  the  new  color  life  of  vision.  Outlines  and  propor- 
tions are  less  keenly  felt,  but  this  should  be  and  normally  is 
only  for  a  season,  and  the  sense  of  the  beauty  that  lies  in  these 
has  later  its  innings.  Then  the  charm  of  contour,  beginning 
in  the  limited  field  of  a  few  objects,  grows  acute  and  discrimina- 
tive and  slowly  widens  from  the  human  to  the  animal,  plant, 
and  inorganic  world.  Features,  every  article  of  dress,  points 
in  pets,  the  utensils  of  play  and  work,  sights  and  individual 
objects  in  nature,  drawing  apart  from  painting,  not  only  come 
again  to  their  rights,  but  have  their  own  value  both  discrimina- 
tive and  esthetic  if  the  development  of  the  sensory  is  not  prema- 
turely checked,  in  a  way  pregnant  with  suggestion  for  courses 
of  artistic  training  that  seek  to  follow  rather  than  force  nature. 
It  is  as  if  the  retinal  cones,  if  they  mediate  color,  or  their  cere- 
bral endings  and  connections,  precede  the  rods  and  their  an- 
nexes in  the  adolescent  push  upward  to  the  adult  plane,  only 
to  be  followed  by  the  latter  when  their  nascent  period  comes. 

VII.  General  Craving. — In  these  changes  of  sensory  re- 
sponse to  the  objective  world,  it  is  often  difficult,  as  we  have 
indicated,  to  say  how  much  is  due  to  new  interests  or  to  high- 
er lability  or  potentialization  of  brain  cells,  and  how  much,  if 
any,  is  left  to  be  explained  by  changes  in  the  peripheral  organs 
of  sense  themselves.  Among  the  14,000  different  sensations 
which  Kiilpe  thinks  can  be  discriminated,  many  may  be  grad- 
ually lost  and  others  developed  by  attention  and  fixed  habit. 
There  is,  no  doubt,  an  important  change  in  the  relative  prom- 
inence of  the  different  senses  in  our  psychic  life  at  this  stage 
with  its  new  emotions,  interests,  and  apathies.  Adolescent 
years  mark  the  golden  age  of  sense,  which  is  so  prone  to  be- 
come sensual  if  uncontrolled.  Then  the  soul  exposes  most 
surface,  as  it  were,  to  the  external  world.  The  eye  gate  and 
ear  gate  especially  are  open  their  widest,  and  not  only  that, 
but  the  feeling  tone  and  the  general  sense  feeling,  so  largely  in- 
dependent of  perception,  are  also  at  their  best,  so  that  the  pos- 
sibilities of  knowing  our  world  and  acquiring  experience  on 
the  one  hand,  and  of  lapsing  to  a  life  of  indulgence,  are  now 


38  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

most  developed.  It  has  been  suggested  that  this  latter  may  be 
somewhat  inversely  as  discriminative  power,  but  this  view  is 
partial  and  needs  the  most  careful  limitation.  When  we  re- 
member that  there  is  almost  no  such  thing  as  memory  for  feel- 
ings themselves,  but  only  for  the  conceptions  which  accom- 
pany or  are  reenforced  by  them,  we  can  see  how  the  reminis- 
cences of  adults  on  this  point  must  be  received  with  caution. 

In  fine,  we  must  conceive  the  traffic  inward  along  all  the 
sensory  tracts  augmented  in  a  curve  of  increment  yet  to  be 
more  exactly  charted,  and  all  the  sensory  areas  of  the  brain  to 
be  both  more  highly  sensitized  and  flooded  with  masses  of 
impressions  that  for  a  time  are  confused  and  very  imperfectly 
understood  or  worked  off  into  their  normal  channels  of  reac- 
tion, and  properly  coordinated.  The  growth  of  the  sex  organs 
and  functions  sends  inward  a  confused  mass  of  impressions 
that  can  not  be  interpreted  or  at  first  even  localized.  Especially 
is  this  true  of  girls,  because  their  organs  are  both  more  inward 
and  relatively  larger  in  size  and  function.  These,  too,  give  a 
feeling  of  intensified  existence,  sentiments  of  strange,  nameless 
yearning,  aimless  unrest,  moments  of  rapture  and  fulness  of 
life  and  joy  abounding,  alternating  perhaps  with  misgiving  and 
periods  of  slight  depression  which  can  not  be  explained,  as  if 
the  soul  were  in  the  hands  of  some  deep,  mysterious,  but  fateful 
principle  that  had  power  to  play  at  its  own  alien  and  capricious 
will  upon  all  its  frets  and  strings.  An  indescribable  rapture 
supervenes  when  we  wake  or  sleep,  and  then  its  charm  fades 
and  leaves  the  world  a  little  somber  with  the  sense  of  some 
vanished  good.  Some  supreme  goal  that  seemed  near  retreats 
to  a  distance  that  seems  unattainable.  Both  these  states  and 
their  fluctuations,  poetry,  art,  romance,  and  religion  have 
described  in  their  polymorphic  shapes  in  countless  ways  and 
with  all  the  imagery  available  in  earth's  scenery  chambers. 

Thus  one  of  the  most  characteristic  descriptions  of  this 
period  is  that  it  is  preeminently  the  age  of  sense,  and  hence 
prone  to  sensuousness  not  only  in  taste  and  sex,  where  the 
danger  is  greatest,  but  in  the  domain  of  each  of  the  sense 
species.  Every  centripetal  nerve  glows  and  tingles  with  new 
life,  and  every  in-going  fiber  is  freighted  and  even  gorged  with 
the  traffic  of  impressions.  Never  is  the  body  so  imperiously 
dominant  and  so  insistently  in  evidence,  and  never  is  the  ex- 


CHANGES  IN  THE  SENSES  AND  THE  VOICE  39 

ternal  world  so  ineluctable  and  impressively  real,  as  in  this  im- 
pressionistic age.  Never  is  objective  and  subjective  experience 
so  vivid  and  so  manifold.  Youth  is  in  its  world,  in  the  closest 
rapport  with  it  possible  to  man.  It  not  only  lights  but  often 
burns  his  soul.  He  would  touch  it  at  every  point,  explore  its 
every  possibility,  receive  everything  it  has  to  give,  and  revel 
in  it  to  intoxication.  All  this  is  his  right  and  his  necessity,  only 
it  must  neither  lead  to  perversion  or  become  so  overwhelmingly 
absorbing  as  to  cause  arrest  or  degeneration.  Thus  the  soul  is 
furnished;  for,  whatever  our  philosophy,  it  is  never  so  nearly 
true  as  at  this  age,  that  there  is  nothing  in  the  intellect  that 
does  not  get  there  through  the  senses,  for  now  the  chief  activity 
of  the  mind  is  working  over  the  sense  capital  thus  acquired. 


CHAPTER  X 

EVOLUTION  AND   THE   FEELINGS   AND   INSTINCTS   CHARACTERISTIC 
OF    NORMAL   ADOLESCENCE 

Ayersion  to  genetic  views  of  the  soul  owing  to  undue  interest  in  its  future — 
Neglect  of  its  somatic  and  historic  relations  by  modern  ultra  idealism  and 
epistemology — Evils  of  pure  speculation  and  extreme  dualism — Neglect  of 
lessons  from  animals,  children,  and  savages — Barrenness  of  systems  and 
speculations  for  knowledge  of  the  feelings — Postulates  of  a  true  genetic 
psychology  and  its  biological  basis — A  new  evolutionary  concept  of  soul — 
Adolescent  changes  in  instincts  and  feelings,  alternations  between  inertness 
and  excitement,  pleasure  and  pain,  self-confidence  and  humility,  selfishness  and 
altruism,  society  and  solitude,  sensitiveness  and  dulness,  knowing  and  doing, 
conservatism  and  iconoclasm,  sense  and  intellect — Necessity  of  developing  ail 
tendencies  freely  before  the  age  of  consistency  and  unity — The  interval  be- 
tween pithecoid  and  primitive  man — Phyletic  and  individual  correlates — Ado- 
lescence to  advance  up  the  age  scale. 

Before  considering  the  normal  psychic  changes  that  oc- 
cur during  the  period  of  sexual  maturity,  it  is  necessary  at  the 
outset  to  state  in  a  brief  and  summary  way — because  the  topic 
is  to  be  dwelt  on  more  fully  in  another  book — the  general  con- 
ceptions of  the  soul  that  underlie  and  condition  the  treatment  of 
adolescence  and  childhood,  especially  because  the  standpoint  is 
different  from  that  of  our  psychological  and  philosophical  con- 
temporaries, and,  we  believe,  embodies  a  new  idea  of  profound 
scientific  and  practical  importance  which  has  a  great  and  as- 
sured future. 

It  may  be  roughly  characterized  as  in  some  sense  a  new  and 
higher  monism  and  an  evolutionism  more  evolved,  with  a 
method  which  has  already  yielded  some  promising  results 
hitherto  unattained  and  a  program  of  far  more  work  yet  to 
be  done,  which  is  little  in  harmony  with  the  complacent 
sense  of  finality  and  completeness  so  often  manifest.  From  this 
standpoint  it  becomes  plain  how  gross  have  been  the  errors  in 
both  conceiving  and  practically  training  the  soul,  which  are 
due  to  the  mexpugnable  and  all-dominant  interest  in  its  future 

40 


FEELINGS  AND  PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  4 1 

State  and  the  insistent  and,  to  our  thinking,  not  only  unscien- 
tific but  almost  abnormal  aversion  to  consider  its  past.  This 
genetophobia  pervades,  consciously  or  often  unconsciously, 
much  of  the  best  ancient  and  contemporary  philosophical  and 
theological  thought,  and  is  one  of  the  greatest  and  most  invet- 
erate obstacles  to  a  truly  scientific  psychology.  The  problem 
of  the  nature  of  the  soul  has  also  rarely,  save  in  forms  of 
materialism  now  generally  discarded,  been  separated  from  that 
of  a  future  life,  has  led  to  a  horror  of  materialism  that  is  almost 
misophobia,  and  has  betrayed  many  able  professors  to  take  an 
attitude  toward  genetic  psychology  like  that  of  Agassiz  toward 
evolution.  Like  every  other  prevalent  aberration  of  the  human 
mind,  this  has  deep  historic  roots,  several  of  which  must  be 
roughly  indicated  to  understand  it.  It  began  in  the  Western 
mind  with  "  the  fall  of  man  in  Socrates  and  Plato."  In  turn- 
ing to  the  study  of  man,  they  neglected  nature  and  disparaged 
the  naive  and  unconscious  in  the  human  soul.  It  was  assumed 
that  there  was  no  good  even  in  unreasoned  virtue,  which  could 
not  be  really  such  until  it  became  noetic  and  sophisticated.  He 
who  knew  the  right  and  did  not  do  it,  instead  of  thereby 
increasing  his  guilt,  was  already  more  than  half-way  to  per- 
fection. 

I.  The  doctrine  of  anamnesis  or  reminiscence  first  admitted 
a  most  significant  past  to  the  psyche,  but  it  was  in  a  transcendent 
world  which  had  endowed  it  with  only  just  those  ideas  which 
Plato  held  to  and  of  which  he  made  Socrates  the  midwife  in 
this  life.  Education  culminated  in  their  recovery  to  conscious- 
ness. Metempsychosis  had  also  yet  earlier  held  to  a  past  for 
the  soul,  and  Nemesis  and  Karma  were  doctrines  of  retribution 
and  reward  for  the  next  previous  state.  Since  ancient  Greece, 
however,  categories  or  innate  ideas,  as  Trendelenberg  and  Laas 
well  show,  have  been  the  goal  or  the  basis  or  both  of  most 
philosophic  systems,  but  from  Aristotle's  ten  to  Kant's  twelve, 
they  have  been  underived  and  Melchizedician,  as  holy  to  the 
disciples  of  each  school  as  the  Mosaic  tables,  till  Spencer  sug- 
gested that  even  all  of  those  that  were  valid,  although  a  priori 
and  innate  in  the  individual,  were  acquired  by  the  race.  This 
proposition  will  always  be  abhorrent  to  every  pure  intuition- 
alist  mind  that  has  a  passion  for  absolute  presuppositionless 
beginnings. 


42  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Christianity,  too,  has  shown  little  interest  in  the  past  of 
the  soul,  save  for  that  of  its  founder  and  in  order  to  account 
for  sin.  Its  emphasis  on  personal  immortality  gave  the  soul 
immense  and  unprecedented  dignity,  but  focused  attention  and 
endeavor  upon  its  future.  Even  the  traducianism  of  Tertul- 
lian,  who  taught  that  the  soul  was  in  some  sense  hereditary  and 
had  a  somatic  continuity  with  previous  generations  back  to 
Adam,  found  little  vogue,  helpful  as  it  was  in  explaining  the 
mystery  of  transmitted  sin  and  guilt,  and  was  twice  condemned 
as  a  heresy,  although  Luther  seems  to  have  held  it.  Some  form 
of  creationism,  or  the  view  that  at  a  certain  age  of  the  embryo 
a  newly  and  miraculously  made  soul  joined  the  body  ab  extra, 
has  been  the  prevailing  one.  The  soul  of  the  natural  man  is 
tainted,  corrupt,  and  children  depraved  perhaps  totally  at  birth, 
and  the  supreme  work  of  life  is  to  save  it  from  eternal  woe. 
Asceticism  demeaned  this  life  for  the  sake  of  the  next,  and  as 
the  soul  and  its  destiny  became  glorious,  the  body  was  macer- 
ated and  its  regimen  neglected.  The  world  was  made  out  of 
brute  matter,  chaos,  or  from  nothing,  but  no  one  ever  even 
asked  of  what  the  soul  was  made.  In  condemning  every  form 
of  the  doctrine  of  preexistence  of  the  soul,  the  Church  lost  some 
of  the  best  arguments  for  its  post-mortem  existence,  but  these 
were  never  appreciated  save  for  the  person  of  Christ.  Thus, 
while  the  body  might  come  in  part  from  the  parent,  every  soul 
was  a  newly  made  thing  with  no  history.  It  was,  in  its  own 
nature,  outside  the  current  of  heredity,  but  was  corrupted  by 
contact  with  the  sinful  body  through  which  it  was  dragged 
down  unless  rescued  by  a  special  redemptive  work.  The  focus 
of  all  interest  in  the  soul  was  thus,  how  to  insure  its  salvation 
hereafter. 

The  ethical  value  of  the  idea  of  a  future  life  of  rewards 
and  punishments  has,  of  course,  been  incalculable.  If  it  has 
brought  in  cosmo-heteronymous  motives  of  morality  unknown 
to  the  Stoics  and  disallowed  by  Kant;  if  it  has  sometimes  en- 
gendered a  transcendental  selfishness  that  may  become  gross, 
and  in  neurotic  ages,  races,  or  persons,  favored  fears  and  anx- 
ieties that  were  hysterical ;  if  formal,  external,  and  even  me- 
chanical ways  and  means  of  salvation  have  often  been  relied 
on — all  these  things  concern  us  here  only  as  products  and  illus- 
trations of  the  evils  of  a  too  exclusive  interest  in  the  soul's 


FEELINGS   AND   PSYCHIC   EVOLUTION  43 

future,  which  is,  in  fact,  still  unknowable  save  to  faith,  and  of 
excessive  neglect  of  its  past,  which  is  really  now  increasingly 
accessible  and  which  is  proverbially  the  best  means  of  judging 
of  its  future. 

One  striking  example  of  the  havoc  which  this  lust  to  pierce 
the  secrets  of  the  future  makes  with  science  is  seen  in  the  Eng- 
lish Psychic  Research  Society.  It  has  collected  masses  of 
precious  and  hitherto  neglected  border-land  phenomena  between 
waking  and  sleep,  sanity  and  insanity,  on  trancoidal  states, 
automatisms  of  body  and  mind,  illusions,  hypnotism,  etc.  But 
almost  the  sole  interest  of  this  large  and  cultured  society  in 
these  data  is  what  contribution  they  make  to  what  its  able  leader 
calls  "  the  most  insistent  question  of  the  human  heart,  If  a  man 
die,  shall  he  live  again  ?  "  Is  there  a  land  of  disembodied  spir- 
its, and  can  communication  be  established  and  demonstrated 
between  them  and  us?  Possession,  apparitions,  phantoms  of 
the  dead,  messages  from  the  ghost  world,  or  transcendental  as 
well  as  mundane  telepathy,  and  in  general  an  inductive  demon- 
stration of  a  survival  of  the  soul  after  death,  are  thus  the  themes 
or  conclusions,  directly  or  indirectly,  inspiring  all  this  work.^ 
Now  the  folly  and  pathos  of  all  this  is  that  every  fact  and  group 
of  facts  relied  on  point  for  their  explanation  directly  and  only 
to  the  past  of  the  individual  or  the  race  and  not  to  the  future, 
to  the  ab-  and  sub-  and  not  to  the  super-normal,  or  perhaps  to 
the  body  even  more  than  to  the  spirit.  Greatly  indebted  as  our 
guild  is  for  facts,  suggestive  aperais,  and  new  interests  to 
these  students,  their  service  is,  as  I  have  elsewhere  tried  to 
point  out  in  some  detail,^  not  unlike  that  of  alchemists  who 
sought  the  elixir  of  life  for  chemistry,  of  astrologists  in  quest 
of  the  influence  of  the  stars  on  human  life  for  astronomy,  and 
just  as  the  desire  to  locate  heaven  and  faith  in  planetary  in- 
fluences and  modes  of  attaining  physical  immortality  had  to 
be  cast  out  of  these  fields  before  science  could  really  do  its 
great  work  in  them,  so  similar  purgation  must  be  made  here. 

How  profoundly  contemporary  psychologists  and  philoso- 
phers of  the  highest  academic  rank,  even  those  who  shrink  from 

^  See  Human  Personality  and  its  Survival  of  Bodily  Death,  by  F.  W.  H.  Myers. 
2  vols.     London,  1903. 

'  See  my  fuller  exposition  of  these  points  in  the  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  vol.  vii, 
p.  135  et  seq. 


44  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

all  such  extreme  conclusions,  are  influenced  by  this  bias,  con- 
sciously or  unconsciously,  in  the  deeper  motivations  of  their 
work,  its  direction,  methods,  and  conclusions,  we  see  on  every 
hand.  One  professor  of  great  learning  and  acumen  has  been 
apparently  almost  unpivoted  by  the  prolonged  and  acute  study 
of  the  revelations  of  a  noted  trance  medium,  which  he  is  con- 
vinced are  from  relatives  in  the  spirit  world.  Another  profound 
and  acute  leader  of  American  metaphysical  thought  attains  as 
his  consummate  conclusion  the  conviction  of  an  eternal  world 
of  many  monadic  minds  or  selves,  in  a  republic  or  city  of  God, 
the  free  members  of  which  control  the  natural  world  and  are 
the  sources  of  all  its  law.  The  supreme  fact  in  his  world  is 
"  the  eternal  reality  of  the  individual."  Creation  itself  is  not 
an  event,  but  a  symbol,  and  these  personal  spirits  never  fully 
and  completely  enter  the  real  world,  for  they  are  out  of  time 
and  of  the  chain  of  causality.  Another  of  no  less  power  and 
eminence  makes  the  goal  of  philosophy  the  demonstration  of 
an  individuality  deeper,  more  permanent,  and  real  than  that  of 
persons  as  they  appear  to  us,  because  knowledge  and  love  are 
stronger  than  life,  and  so,  if  our  nature  is  not  a  lie,  the  actuality 
of  our  dead  friends  transcends  sense.  Such  instances  might 
be  multiplied.  The  great  majority  of  people,  expert  as  well  as 
lay,  think  and  speak  of  soul  in  the  future  tense,  and  to  very 
few  does  the  word  suggest  any  connotation  with  the  past. 
Ask  the  very  man  on  the  street  what  he  thinks  of  the  soul,  and 
he  assumes  that  you  speak  of  another  life  or  of  preparation 
for  it. 

II.  This  proleptic  and  sometimes  almost  cataleptic  interest 
in  the  soul's  future  has  also  been  a  deep  psychological  motive 
in  most  of  the  vast  body  of  discussions,  past  and  present,  on 
the  relations  of  the  mind  and  body,  and  the  aversion  to  even 
any  very  close  association  between  the  two  is  inveterate.  Dr. 
McCosh  held  that  the  student  of  psychology  must,  at  the  out- 
set, strip  the  idea  of  soul  of  every  material  metaphor.  It  is 
independent  of  time  and  space,  has  no  place,  age,  form,  etc. 
Paulsen  says  in  his  introduction,  "  thoughts  are  not  in  the 
brain ;  one  can  just  as  well  say  that  they  are  in  the  stomach  or 
in  the  moon,  etc."  For  James,  the  brain  obstructs  thought 
like  a  bad  conductor.  "  Our  brains  are  thin,  half-transparent 
places  in  the  veil,"  through  which  the  great  life  of  soul  "  breaks 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  45 

into  this  world  in  all  sorts  of  restricted  forms."  Elsewhere  he 
makes  purgation  of  the  body  by  urging  with  unusual  fervor 
that  sex  has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  the  psychology  of 
religion,  which  is  in  fact  a  hollow  and,  to  quite  an  extent,  an 
unreal  thing  without  it.  Soul  and  body  are  opposed  and  con- 
trasted at  every  point.  This  tendency  is  a  well-preserved  tra- 
dition of  idealism.  Descartes,  its  modern  advocate,  thought 
mind  and  matter  had  nothing  in  common,  and  his  successors 
thought  them  only  externally  attached.  Even  volition,  in  order 
to  affect  the  body,  and  sensation,  to  give  knowledge  of  things, 
must  go  through  God  as  a  mediating  tertium  quid.  So  began 
the  tragic  war  between  the  ego  and  its  object,  and  the  terms 
of  truce  drawn  up  by  Kant  and  his  successors,  under  whose 
influence  the  problem  of  the  perception  and  the  possibility  of 
knowing  the  external  world  has  been  worked  out,  have  for 
many  generations  been  the  focus  of  all  interest  in  the  world 
of  soul,  and  the  process  of  dissolving  the  objective  world  has 
become  an  academic  cult  that  plays  on  the  dreameries  of 
adolescence  and  robs  it  of  zest,  vigor,  and  faith.  It  is  a  mental 
tonic,  but  sterilizes  the  heart  and  paralyzes  the  will.  Incom- 
mensurability is  their  postulate,  not  unity,  and  just  now  even 
psychologists  are  addicted  to  making  subtle  but  utterly  scholas- 
tic distinctions  between  theories  of  parallelism  and  interaction, 
with  arguments  I  would  far  rather  be  refuted  by  than  use. 
These  thinkers  constitutionally  resist  every  important,  trans- 
forming, and  formative  norm  or  principle  that  is  offered  to 
psychology  from  any  department  of  physical  science,  for  which 
they  affect  to  legislate  methods  and  lay  down  limitations  on 
high  a  priori  grounds.  What  can  brute  matter  tell  us  of  its 
lofty  partner,  mind  ?  It  must  rather  be  held  up  and  brought  to 
its  haunches  like  Plato's  dark  steed,  and  dualism  is  pushed  to 
its  uttermost  in  every  domain. 

Ultra  idealism  I  hold  to  be  pathological,  and  hypertrophied 
self-consciousness  to  be  at  least  in  part  and  perhaps  essentially 
a  remedial  process,  but  it  is  now  so  drastic  that  many  succumb 
under  it.  It  may  in  part  be  grossly  and  physiologically  described 
as  premature  excessive  development  of  associative  activities 
over  those  of  the  projection  system  which  mediates  sensation 
and  motion.  Modern  man  at  best  has  lost  much  keenness  of 
sense  and  his  motor  life  tends  to  caducity.     His  muscles  are 


46  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

flabby  from  disuse,  and  efferent  stimuli  are  long-circuited  to 
cerebral  activities  instead  of  being  reflected  at  once  to  motion. 
As  sight  becomes  dominant,  touch,  the  mother  sense,  which 
alone  gives  the  most  inexpugnable  sense  of  reality,  retires  in 
favor  of  a  paper  currency  of  visual  experience,  and  thus,  as  is 
inevitable,  those  who  subject  themselves  long  to  this  discipline 
feel  a  little  removed  from  the  basal  properties  of  matter.^  The 
eye-minded  man  is  perhaps  more  predisposed  to  idealism  than 
the  practical,  motor-minded  type.  The  blind  have  the  most 
unfaltering  sense  of  the  reality  of  the  external  world  because 
they  are  nearer  the  original  tangible  form  in  which  reality  was 
first  given.  An  age  of  wealth,  too,  withdraws  from  the  stern 
struggle  for  existence  which  most  impresses  objectivity.  For 
thinkers  by  profession,  especially  if  they  are  not  men  of  science, 
who  are  withdrawn  from  the  palpitating  interests  of  literature 
or  social  life  and  politics,  sheltered  and  isolated  still  more  by 
a  fixed  and  assured  salary  in  old,  endowed,  respectable,  but 
uninspected  institutions,  segregated  in  the  study,  so  that 
knowledge  of  life  and  nature  comes  not  even  from  the  labora- 
tory, but  from  the  pallid,  second-hand  source  of  books,  await- 
ing in  this  environment  the  time  of  life  when  youthful  exuber- 
ance of  not  only  sense  and  motion  but  even  of  passion  begins 
to  abate,  fed  upon  the  literature  of  Hindu,  Greek,  and  German 
idealism  rather  than  upon  science — for  such  the  whole  physical 
universe  and  the  world  of  throbbing  life  and  action  is  pretty 
sure  to  fade  and  the  inner  world  of  thought  to  become  all  in  all. 
Having  attained,  by  whatever  processes,  the  settled  convic- 
tion that  matter  is  non-being,  that  the  rich,  booming  cosmos  is 
rnaya  or  illusion,  mere  eject,  project,  possibility  of  sensation, 
thing-in-itself,  etc.,  and  that  even  its  receptacles,  time  and  space, 
are  only  subjective  forms,  there  comes  as  the  first  result  an 
elation  and  exaltation  that  nothing  else,  unless  it  be  paranoia 
or  certain  drugs,  can  give.  Mind  is  supreme,  has  come  to  its 
own  kingdom,  can  not  respect  itself  too  highly  as  the  cosmo- 
thetic  creator  and  bearer  of  the  universe.  And  now  comes,  in- 
terpolated between  Berkeley  and  Hume,  where  this  develop- 

*  See  a  suggestive  argument  on  this  point  by  A.  Fraser,  on  Visualization  as  the 
Chief  Source  of  the  Psychology  of  Hobbes,  Locke,  Berkeley,  and  Hume,  and  an- 
other on  the  Foundation  of  Natural  Realism  which  he  thinks  to  be  touch.  Am. 
Jour,  of  Psychol.,  vol.  iv,  pp.  230,  429.     See  also  ch.  xvi,  §  vii  (a). 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC   EVOLUTION  47 

ment  stage  should  be  both  in  the  genetic  and  pedagogic  order, 
for  they  are  its  inevitable  Nemesis,  the  great  romantic  period 
of  philosophizing.  The  soul,  or  rather  one  of  its  forms  of  ac- 
tivity, speculative  reason,  proceeds  to  recreate  from  within  or 
posit  the  world,  and  to  read  a  new  title  clear  to  what  sense  had 
lost.  It  is  all  will  and  idea,  or,  Froschammer  thinks,  imagina- 
tion; the  real  and  rational  are  identical.  Nature  is  derived, 
evolved,  construed.  The  pantheistic  soul  of  the  individual,  the 
oracle  of  the  world  soul,  the  sole  mouthpiece  of  God,  itself 
transcendent,  is  given  a  rank  and  dignity  unprecedented  in 
many  ways,  even  by  preexistence  theories,  and  the  personal 
soul  of  the  thinker  becomes  a  parvus  in  sno  genere  detis,  the 
organ  of  all  the  categories,  and  its  self-consciousness  is  deemed 
the  blossom  of  all  the  world  processes,  with  conscience  the 
vicegerent  of  the  Divine,  conviction  immediate,  the  certainty 
of  reason  almost  convulsive,  re-revealing  religion,  etc.  This, 
too,  is  the  stage  of  the  great  postulates,  Platonic  myths  of  a 
transcendental  self,  a  world  soul  that  creates  by  thinking,  a 
supernal  will  that  is  energy,  ideas  that  are  archetypal,  a  con- 
science that  is  autonomous  and  absolute,  etc. 

But  this  ravishing  interlude  is  soon  seen  to  rest  only  on  a 
''transcendental  subreption"  in  the  Avernian  progress  of  Carte- 
sian doubt.  Hume  long  before  had  taken  the  inevitable  next 
step ;  the  ego  itself  must  go  the  way  of  the  external  world.  We 
can  truly  know  only  states  of  mind,  and  every  inference,  not 
only  of  the  existence  of  matter,  of  souls  in  animals  and  other 
men,  but  of  any  subjective  reality,  is  unwarranted  by  rigid 
epistemological  thinking  that  must  be  content  to  replow  and 
crossplow  the  same  old  fields  of  adult  consciousness  without 
attempting  to  clear  new  land  and  bring  it  under  cultivation. 
The  only  possible  logical  conclusion  is  the  nihilism  of  Gorgias. 
Nothing  exists;  if  something  did  exist,  we  could  not  know  it, 
and  if  we  knew  anything,  we  could  not  tell  it.  We  must  doubt 
even  that  we  doubt,  and  may  do  this  doubting  the  new  doubt 
indefinitely.  The  solipsistic  involucre  ends  at  last  with  only  at 
most  the  mental  content  of  the  present  flitting  moment,  with 
every  inference  to  the  reality  not  only  of  nature  but  of  the 
doubter,  or  even  of  other  of  his  own  states  of  mind  not  on  the 
instant  present,  denied,  and  so  instead  of  a  glorious  soul  there 
remains  only  an  inner  void.     There  is  no  other  goal  for  the 


48  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

rigorous  thinker,  who  has  the  courage  of  his  convictions,  than 
to  push  on  to  this  utter  bankruptcy  and  abortion.  Few  have 
the  hardihood  to  take  the  extreme  step,  but  many  have  had 
their  mental  eyeballs  seared  by  coming  within  sight  of  this 
hell  of  complete  skepticism  and  agnosticism.  All  such  are 
thereafter  changed  beings.  The  zest  of  life  has  faded  as  by 
precocious  senescence,  so  that  they  are  a  little  aloof,  Mahatmas, 
who  can  never  love,  hate,  enjoy  nature  and  life  without  reserve, 
and  they  can  no  longer  live  quite  like  those  who  have  never  ex- 
perienced the  great  disenchantment.  With  a  sense  of  superior 
insight  has  come  aridity  of  heart,  and  the  intellect  has  enfeebled 
the  will.  Few  things  are  worth  doing  with  enthusiasm  and 
abandon,  unless  it  be  to  devise  ways  of  escape,  and  to  this  some, 
especially  academic  teachers,  address  themselves.^  I  believe 
this  law  to  be  valid  and  often  illustrated,  viz.,  that,  other  things 
being  equal,  the  more  rigorously  and  extremely  the  logic  of 
doubt  has  been  applied  in  one's  personal  experience,  the  more 
desperate  the  salto  mortale  he  is  prone  to  make  to  escape.  Those 
who  have  gone  very  far,  may  have  recourse  to  some  very  satu- 
rated form  of  religious  orthodoxy,  or  spiritism  in  some  of  its 
less  crass  modern  forms,  while  those  who  have  for  any  reason 
paused  midway  on  the  downward  road  tend  to  have  recourse 
to  the  great  postulates  of  romantic  philosophy  described  in  the 
last  paragraph. 

Now  such  an  experience,  or  indeed  any  very  long,  serious 
and  sympathetic  work  with  extreme  idealism  and  epistemology, 
generally  disqualifies  for  whole-souled  work  in  any  science, 
and  most  of  all  in  psychology  considered  as  a  natural  science. 
Such  thinkers  often  attempt  objective,  inductive  work  in  the 
laboratory,  clinic,  etc.,  and  often  make  brilliant  suggestions, 
but  if  it  does  not  lack  true  scientific  quality  and  show  signs 
of  being  amateurish  and  merely  non-avocational,  this  work  is 
peculiarly  prone  to  be  upon  speculative  or  insoluble  questions 
or  to  be  marked  by  defective  rigor  of  method,  so  that  one  great 
need,  especially  now  and  in  this  country,  is  an  effective  demar- 
cation between  psychology  as  a  science  of  nature  and  as  a 


'  See  my  College  Philosophy,  Forum,  June,  1900,  where  I  have  tried  to  describe 
the  epistemological  processes  now  in  vogue  of  first  losing  the  soul  and  then  find- 
ing a  way  of  salvation. 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  49 

branch  of  philosophy.  Thus  much  of  what  is  now  called  psy- 
chology is  half  speculative  philosophy, and  if  not  hermaphrodite 
and  mongrel,  as  every  editor  in  this  field  knows,  much  that  is 
offered  it  has  at  least  the  mark  of  hybridity,  i.e., sterility,  so  that 
large  as  it  is  now,  it  can  have  no  future  save  in  history  as  a 
new  type  of  scholasticism.  Genetic  psychology  is  still  more 
alien  to  the  epistemologists,  because  they  have  their  own 
pseudogenesis  of  mind  in  the  realm  of  speculation  and  intro- 
spection.^ 

III.  A  third  obstacle  which  genetic  psychology  encounters 
has  an  instructive  analogue  in  that  which  Darwinism  had  to 
overcome  in  the  wide-spread  and  almost  inexpugnable  convic- 
tion that  the  study  of  living  forms  consisted  in  defining  and 
classifying  genera  and  species,  and  that  these  were  fixed  and 
intransmutable  one  into  the  other,  and  therefore,  if  the  devel- 
opment theory  were  established,  instead  of  being  near  its  goal, 
biology  would  be  shown  to  be  really  just  beginning  and  the  very 
bases  of  classification  thought  to  be  established  would  be  seen 
to  be  many  of  them  artificial.  So  psychogenesis  seems  utterly 
lawless  to  most  of  the  philosophers,  even  those  who  also  affect 
psycholpgy.  It  has  little  respect  for  the  narrow  limits  they 
assign  it  and  ignores  their  carefully  laid  down  boundaries.  It 
knows  and  claims  its  own  in  logic,  metaphysics,  ethics,  religion, 
and  pedagogy,  in  a  way  that  perturbs  the  cartographer  and  tab- 
ulator of  all  the  fields  of  human  knowledge.  The  philosophic 
type  of  mind  can  do  nothing  without  definitions  at  the  start; 
the  psychologist  is  content  to  describe  and  shrinks  from  defin- 
ing at  all,  at  least,  save  at  the  end.  The  philosopher  has  his  ste- 
reotyped and  conventionalized  pigeon-holes — idealism,  realism, 
materialism,  dogmatism,  skepticism,  positivism,  intuitionalism, 
empiricism,  and  the  rest,  and  if  he  is  above  the  partizanship 
that  uses  the  isms  not  his  own  as  epithets,  he  classifies  all  think- 
ers, ancient  and  contemporary,  under  one  or  another,  bring- 
ing these  distinctions  into  the  foreground  as  introductory  or 
propaedeutic  courses,  of  which  we  have  now  so  many  illustra- 
tions in  current  text-books  and  courses.     The  psychologist, 


'  See  an  exquisite  illustration  in  Judd's  Genetic  Psychology  for  Teachers,  New 
York,  1903,  which  decries  all  genetic  evolution  save  only  that  which  comes  from 
the  analysis  of  self-consciousness. 
43 


50  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

holding  that  all  thinking  men  are  all  of  these  in  differing  pro- 
portion and  are  any  one  of  them  at  most,  as  it  were,  only  by  a 
small  majority,  if  they  are  not  dwarfed  or  maimed,  would,  in 
teaching,  bring  his  pupils  into  a  relation  of  sympathetic  appre- 
ciation with  each  standpoint  without  bias  or  partiality ;  both  to 
this  end  and  also  for  pedagogic  reasons,  he  defines  and  differ- 
entiates these  standpoints  only  after  a  broad  basis  of  knowl- 
edge has  made  them  by  turns,  though  unconsciously,  but  as 
wholly  as  possible,  critics,  pessimists,  optimists,  ontologists, 
phenomenologists,  materialists,  idealists,  and  all  the  rest. 

Oken's  organosophy,  assuming  that  animals  are  but  fetal 
forms  of  man,  classified  radiates  as  intestinal,  annelids  as  res- 
piratory, fishes  as  osseous,  amphibia  as  muscular,  birds  as  nerv- 
ous animals,  etc.,  calling  each  a  crystallized  thought  or  word 
of  God.  Most  philosophical  classifications  of  systems,  human 
faculties  and  departments,  and  even  sciences,  are  equally  prone 
to  magnify  one  prominent  part  or  function  till  it  becomes  the 
chief  or  sole  mark — an  error  that  induction  has  long  described 
and  warned  against  as  due  to  underestimating  the  complexity 
of  nature,  life,  and  mind.  Theologians  hold  that  men  are 
either  Christians,  fetish  worshipers,  Buddhists,  Mohammed- 
ans, Confucianists,  etc.,  but  the  psychology  of  religion  shows 
that  the  individual  who  has  a  full  and  normal  development  is 
essentially  several,  if  not  many  or  even  all  of  these  in  turn,  or 
even  at  one  and  the  same  time.^  So  in  philosophy,  age,  mood, 
culture-stage,  perhaps  sex,  demand  a  differing  succession  of 
isms  already  beginning  to  be  slowly  made  out.  Childhood  is 
sensual,  materialistic,  very  dualistic;  youth,  ideal,  optimistic; 
manhood,  realistic,  positivistic ;  and  pessimism  and  especially 
epistemology  are  essentially  the  fit  philosophy  of  old  age  if  of 
any  period  of  life.  The  history  of  philosophy  teaches  that  the 
mono-ideistic  thinkers,  who  lived  a  lifetime  in  one  system  and 
who  are  the  types  in  whom  the  schematizers  delight,  either 
stiffened  in  the  mold  by  precociously  formulating  and  defining 
their  ideas  too  early  in  life,  ably  defending  in  maturity  the  posi- 
tion to  which  they  chose  to  commit  themselves  with  insufficient 
orientation  in  youth,  or  else  were  the  victims  of  an  environment 
or  an  age  itself  overwrought,  one-sided,  and  extreme.    Growth, 

'  See  Jean  Du  Buy.     Five  Great  Religions  as  Stages  of  Development.     (In 
press.)    Also  ch.  xiv. 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC   EVOLUTION  5^ 

on  the  other  hand,  is  essentially  non-logical  and  forever  incon- 
sistent with  itself.  The  logic  of  the  schools  is  ex  post  facto. 
It  follows  after  achievement  and  discovery,  and  at  best  tells  a 
little  of  how  mind  has  achieved  its  triumphs  in  the  past,  warns 
of  errors,  but  it  never  either  guided  or  inspired  new  steps. 
Plato  and  Kant  showed  genetic  progress  despite  the  rigor  of 
their  reasoning,  and  Schelling  is  still  more  instructive  to  the 
geneticist,  for  he  molted  successive  systems  of  thought,  as 
to  some  extent  did  Lotze  and  Fichte,  although  their  meta- 
morphoses were  limited  in  both  range  and  number.  That  some 
day  psychology  will  be  able  to  give  us,  in  place  of  the  crude 
phenomenologies  and  abstract  constructions  of  the  history  of 
philosophy  from  Hegel  to  our  day,  a  true  genetic,  natural  his- 
tory of  normal  stages  in  human  development,  using  systems  as 
human  documents,  somewhat  as  it  now  uses  returns  from  chil- 
dren, is  a  new,  if  yet  a  little  dreamy,  possibility,  which,  when  it 
is  realized  as  it  is  sure  to  be  sometime,  will  give  a  larger  range 
to  our  pilgrim's  progress  through  life.     If  this  ever  be,  there 

^    will  be  not  one  Zarathustra,  but  several,  and  perhaps  many  vari- 

^'  eties,  and  they  will  not  exemplify  the  present  types  of  philoso- 
phy as  laid  down  in  our  introductions,  but  the  psychology  of 
each  will  include  all,  only  with  characteristic  diversities  of 

-^  emphasis. 

IV.  All  three  of  these  tendencies  contribute  to  what  is 
-   nevertheless  in  some  sense  a  distinct  and  fourth  obstacle  to 

^    genetic  psychology,  viz.,  the  disposition  to  regard  animals  as 

^   well  as  defectives,  savages,  and  children  as  too  remote  from  the 

life  of  adult  culture  to  shed  much  light  upon  the  mature  mind. 

(a)   There  is  a  chasm,  variously  defined,  deepened  between 

^  us  and  primitive  people  by  prejudices  which  very  few  are  able 

<^  to  overcome,  and  recognize  lower  ethnic  strata  sympathetically 
\  at  their  true  worth. ^    *'  To  know  a  typical  savage  is  to  love  and 

n^*  respect  him,"  is  the  sentiment  often  expressed  as  the  result  of 
long  intimacy.  They  are  only  children  and  adolescents  of 
mature  years,  if  unspoiled  by  civilization,  with  far  more  vigor- 
ous bodies  and  often  purer  lives  than  ours,  and  perhaps  in- 
tended as  relays  to  take  up  the  burden  of  the  world's  progress 

'  See  my  article  on  The  Relations  between  Lower  and  Higher  Races.     Proc 
.  Mass.  Hist.  See,  January,  1903.     Also  chap,  xviii. 


5^  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

on  the  center  of  the  historic  stage  when  we  have  gone  the  way 
of  Egypt,  Greece,  and  Rome.  Without  knowing  them  and 
their  ways,  we  can  not  understand  children,  rehgion,  or  educa- 
tion, our  own  earHer  history  or  that  of  our  institutions.  Man 
was  no  doubt  far  longer  in  their  state  than  they  have  been  in 
ours.  We  have  had  too  little  sympathy  with  the  anthropol- 
ogy of  myth,  custom,  and  belief,  which,  great  as  its  achieve- 
ments are,  has  won  little  academic  recognition  in  curricula, 
examinations,  and  degrees,  and  with  which  the  philosoph- 
ical psychologists  fail  to  connect.  Students  of  the  soul 
should  be  students  of  man,  and  the  unanthropological  character 
of  American  psychology  is  not  only  un-American,  but  scien- 
tifically so  unnatural  that  it  must  be  transient.  Field  work  here 
has  a  disciplinary  and  broadening  effect,  now  one  of  the  most 
urgent  needs  of  our  too  cloistered  and  sequestered  work,  but 
to  the  speculative  type  of  mind  this  seems  remote,  too  purely 
objective  and  hard.  It  is  precisely  psychological  study  that 
is  most  needed  for  these  vanishing  races  if  we  would  truly 
know  ourselves,  and  only  a  profound  conviction  of  the  validity 
and  the  value  of  psychic  evolution  can  give  the  right  motiva- 
tion to  this  work. 

(b)  The  same  is  true  of  defectives,  criminals,  and  the  in- 
sane. There  is  the  same  lack  of  motivation  and  lukewarm 
interest.  Every  truly  inductive  'psychologist  values  above  price 
the  few  minute  clinical  and  other  personal  studies  of  individual 
cases  which  show  devolutional  phenomena,  and  feels  that  he 
is  helped  on  to  know  more  of  the  stages  by  which  man  became 
man  and  of  the  difficulties,  and  therefore  dangers,  of  the  ascent 
still  seen  in  adolescence.  I  know  of  but  one  or  two  American 
universities  in  which  a  course  in  morbid  psychology  and  clin- 
ical work  is  part  of  the  regular  work  of  the  department,  and 
although  it  is  correlated  with  neurological  work,  even  this  is 
confessedly  inadequate.  Our  sophistic  psychologists  rarely 
regard  this  work  with  contempt,  and  most  of  them  not  with 
entire  indifference,  but  so  intent  are  they  in  their  quest  of  the 
Holy  Grail  of  reality,  or  of  the  golden  fleece  of  categories  and 
moral  sanctions,  that  they  neglect  it  unless  it  serves  the  pur- 
pose of  literary  impressionism,  illustration,  or  disputation. 

(c)  Animal  psychology,  or  mind  in  the  animal  world,  is 
now  happily  less  often  an  object  of  animosity  or  disparage- 


FEELINGS   AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  53 

ment.  Descartes  found  that  the  impHcations  in  this  field  were 
irreconcilable  with  his  speculative  system,  and  so  non-suited 
even  the  higher  animals  as  non-intelligent  and  even  senseless 
automatisms,  who  did  not  really  feel  pain;  despite  the  re- 
cent revival  of  interest  in  a  scientific  as  distinct  from  a  specu- 
lative treatment  of  the  study  of  instinct,  not  only  is  his  ques- 
tion often  treated  seriously  in  texts  and  in  class-rooms,  but  it 
is  incessantly  reenforced  by  the  sophistic  argument  that,  as  we 
can  not  really  know  other  minds  or  matter,  we  can  much  less 
know  the  animal  world,  so  that  idealism  not  only  makes  no 
contribution  to  this  field,  but  disheartens  those  it  interests  from 
attempting  it.  In  this  way,  too,  it  countenances  extreme  views 
of  tropism  like  those  of  Loeb,  and  of  mechanism  like  Bethe, 
who  says  ants  and  bees  have  no  interests  for  the  psychologist. 
Great  as  was  the  value  of  the  triumph  of  the  views  of  Marshall 
Hall  over  those  of  Whytt,  and  of  Pfliiger  over  those  who  held 
to  a  spinal  soul,^  mechanism,  although  always  present,  can  just 
as  rpuch,  but  no  more,  completely  explain  animal  than  human 
conduct,  and  to  eliminate  sentiency  and  all  analogies  to  human 
life  is  only  a  grimace  or  affectation  of  science;  this,  as  Forel 
and  others  have  shown,  greatly  limits  both  its  scope  and  effi- 
ciency, and  is  as  extreme  in  one  direction  as  the  almost  totemic 
overestimation  of  animal  sagacity  by  Jacobi,  Fechner,  and 
others.  Anthropomorphism  here  has  a  very  important  func- 
tion, as  well  as  limitation,  both  of  which  theorizers  are  so  prone 
to  magnify. 

The  higher  animals  feel  pleasure  and  pain  and  have  many 
algedonic  experiences  in  common  with  us.  They  have  our  five 
senses,  memory,  and  attention,  and  most  of  our  forms  of  reflex 
action.  They  sleep,  wake,  feel  hunger  and  thirst,  form  food- 
societies,  and  much  of  their  activity,  like  man's,  is  to  satisfy 
their  wants.  They  have  sexual  sensations  and  desires,  many 
forms  of  courtship  and  showing  off,  sex-calls,  songs,  feel 
rivalry  and  jealousy,  and  fight.  They  make  homes  often  very 
elaborate;  shelter,  defend,  and  feed  their  young.  Fear  is  a 
prominent  factor  in  their  conduct,  as  is  anger  and  rage.  They 
have  esthetic  appreciation  and  preferences  for  color,  form,  and 

'  See  my  Sketch  of  the  History  of  Reflex  Action,  and  its  continuation  by  Dr. 
Hodge.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  vol.  iii,  pp.  71,  149. 


54  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

action.  They  play,  form  families,  associate  in  flocks,  swarms, 
coveys,  packs,  and  droves,  and  often  have  highly  developed 
social  organizations  and  classes,  with  communal  sympathies. 
Some  kill  the  weak,  make  slaves,  have  great  power  of  imitation, 
make  toilets,  are  educable,  etc.  They  are  liable  to  many  of  the 
same  diseases  as  we,  have  parasites,  often  suffer  various  forms 
of  insanity  and  degeneration,^  and  have  many  of  the  symptoms 
of  old  age.  Some  species  are  great  collectors,  and  others  cas- 
trate their  superfluous  males.  They  migrate,  organize,  forage, 
rob,  hunt,  take  captives,  feign  death,  and  distract  enemies  that 
are  on  their  tracks. 

Many  animals  do  many  things  that  man  can  not.  They 
have  better  homing  instincts,  estivate,  hibernate,  horripilate, 
breed  faster,  have  far  keener  and  probably  other  senses,  excel 
us  in  speed,  strength,  and  agility,  and  have  ways  of  knowing 
direction  and  the  weather ;  they  weave,  felt,  plaster,  make  many 
products,  and  conform  to  many  conditions  of  life  unfavorable 
for  man. 

Of  the  many  differences  between  the  animal  and  the  human 
mind,  the  use  and  creation  of  tools  and  of  clothes,  the  invention 
of  language,  association  by  similarity,  conscience  and  morality, 
religion,  progress,  etc.,  have  been  urged,  but  those  most  familiar 
with  the  brute  mind  and  the  recent  literature  upon  it,  while  they 
best  know  that  the  superiority  of  man  in  these  respects  is  very 
great,  will  be  least  disposed  to  deny  to  animals  at  least  faint 
rudiments  in  all  these  respects.  There  is  then  no  absolute,  but 
only  quantitative,  differentiation.  A  late  comparative  psychol- 
ogist boldly  figured  out  the  ratio  of  50-28  as  marking  the  rela- 
tive psychic  powers  of  lower  races  of  men  and  higher  animals 
respectively. 

(d)  The  same,  in  changed  terms,  is  true  of  childhood  and 
youth,  the  value  of  the  study  of  which  I  hope  this  book  shows. 

With  all  four  of  the  above  tendencies,  a  psychology  that 
refuses  to  evict  common  sense  both  in  the  popular  sense  and  in 
that  of  the  Scotch  philosophy  which  short-circuits  the  Kantian 
detour;  that  would  regard  the  chief  writers,  from  Descartes 

'  See  the  instructive  and  too  little  known  volume  of  Pierquin:    Trait6  de  la 
Folic  des  Animaux.     Paris,  1839. 


FEELINGS   AND   PSYCHIC   EVOLUTION  55 

to  Hegel,  as  a  philosophic  intermezzo,  which,  while  full  of  ex- 
hilaration and  rich  in  lessons,  replete  with  interest  and  instruc- 
tion, is  not  essential  for  its  purposes,  save  as  a  precious  human 
document  and  warning ;  that  seeks  a  pure  culture  of  naturalism 
and  induction ;  that  believes  that  neither  the  world  nor  the  soul 
is  lost, and  that  nature  and  mind  have  the  same  root;  that  holds 
that  mind  is  invisible  nature  even  though  nature  be  not  verified 
by  empirical  methods  as  visible  mind ;  that  puts  custom  above 
law  and  convention,  and  instinct,  feeling,  and  impulse  above 
both ;  that  is  not  a  cave  of  the  winds,  a  hybrid  of  metaphysics 
and  science ;  that  will  be  neither  bastardized  nor  marooned  by 
morosophs  who  would  limit  its  scope  and  afifect  disappointment 
in  its  work  either  in  the  laboratory  or  with  animals  or  children, 
because  it  does  not  solve  their  scholastic  problems — assuredly 
makes  some  havoc.  Psychic  is  even  more  upsetting  than  bio- 
logical evolution,  for  it  lies  nearer  to  all  human  and  practical 
interests.  But  it  renders  instant  aid  in  education,  science,  and 
religion.  It  turns  with  profound  interest  to  the  past  of  the 
soul,  is  not  concerned  chiefly  with  the  future,  and  studies 
its  embodied  rather  than  its  disembodied  life.  Its  cardinal 
principle  is  nemo  psychologus  nisi  biologns,  so  inseparable  are 
life  and  mind.  It  sees  remarkable  parallels  between  the  present 
state  of  the  disciplines  that  now  deal  with  mind  and  soul  and 
those  which  dealt  with  life  just  before  Darwin,  and  anticipates 
from  its  work  a  similar  period  of  debate,  followed  by  an  analo- 
gous new  life  in  all  these  branches  in  the  near  future.  As  phys- 
ical nature  could  hardly  be  really  taught  before  the  develop- 
ment hypothesis,  so  psychic  natures  now  so  misrepresented  can 
not  be  properly  taught,  or  will  at  least  then  be  far  more  effec- 
tively taught,  and  not  only  without  the  present  mental  wreck- 
age, but  with  vast  moral  and  intellectual  economies.  It  prefers 
a  long  program  of  hard  work  yet  to  be  done  to  a  sense  of  com- 
placency in  any  present  finalities.  It  appeals  to  the  really  young, 
and  would  appreciate  and  meet  adolescent  needs  rather  than 
deal  in  sad  insights  which  belong  only  to  senescence,  whether 
normal  or  precocious.  It  believes  youth  the  golden  age  of  life, 
the  child  the  consummate  flower  of  creation,  and  most  of  all 
things  worthy  of  love,  reverence,  and  study.  It  regards  educa- 
tion as  man's  chief  problem,  and  the  home,  school,  state,  and 
church  valuable  exactly  in  proportion  as  they  serve  it.    When  it 


56  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

finds  the  order  of  nature  in  teaching  lost,  often  inverted,  growth 
arrested,  the  all-sided  expansion  it  should  bring  restricted,  it 
realizes  that  even  pure  science,  including  those  departments 
that  deal  with  mind,  is  not  for  its  own  sake,  but  that  it  becomes 
pure  precisely  as  it  becomes  useful  in  bringing  a  race  to  ever 
more  complete  maturity.^ 

'  Some  have  urged  that  every  parent  knows  childhood  and  youth  by  instinct ; 
but  the  soul  is  surely  as  complex  as  the  body  or  its  diseases,  which  no  parent  as 
such  pretends  to  understand.  Others  insist  that  the  genetic  study  of  childhood  is 
a  popular  and  non-academic  movement;  and  so  it  is,  both  for  good  and  for  evil, 
the  first,  because  it  rebases  our  department  on  broader  foundations  and  makes  us 
feel  again  the  magnetic  thrill  of  touching  life  and  the  perennial  concerns  of  parent- 
hood ;  interests  the  public  in  research  in  a'  vital,  practical  way  that  has  already 
yielded  many  benefits  and  promises  far  more;  develops  a  momentum  of  new 
humanistic  interest  in  the  reminiscent  that  will  shape  and  vivify  the  academic  work 
of  the  future ;  and  the  last,  because  its  evils  are  those  incident  to  lusty  infancy,  and 
only  growth  can  give  it  ever  better  methods  and  increased  facilities.  It  was  as  in- 
dispensable, as  in  the  day  of  the  Reformation,  to  go  outside  the  narrow  limits  ol 
over-sublimated  systems  to  appeal  to  fresh,  original  sources  in  the  Vo/l'-soul  and 
face  the  dangers  of  followers  where  zeal  was  too  untempered  by  knowledge  in  the 
faith  already  rapidly  justifying  itself  that  these  would  be  soon  left  behind  as  rigor- 
ous methods  developed.  Others  have  objected  that  results  were  crude  masses  of 
facts  unsystematized,  uninterpreted,  unreasoned,  and  this  was  in  part  true  and  in- 
evitable at  an  early  stage  of  such  a  movement,  for  it  was  a  new  ore  and  the 
method  of  refinement  hard  to  learn,  but  the  foundations  of  a  great  structure  are 
already  laid  in  some  parts  and  in  others  well  begun,  into  which  this  material 
will  be  built,  not,  of  course,  without  waste  aud  some  refuse.  One  eminent 
psychologist  declared  to  a  large  audience,  with  great  applause,  that  his  children 
should  be  loved  and  never  studied,  for  it  was  an  injurious  interference  with 
nature.  But  is  love  less  or  greater  if  made  intelligent,  and  may,  nay,  ought, 
we  not  to  study  in  order  to  best  serve  and  develop  our  children,  and  is  not  half 
our  lesson  to  let  alone  and  trust  nature  more  and  to  keep  them  in  this  paradise  of 
tinconsciousness  ?  Others  say  the  adult  mind  is  the  psychologist's  only  Bible  and 
oracle,  for  in  it  the  human  plant  blossoms ;  but  very  much  is  lost  in  infancy  that 
never  comes  to  maturity,  and  these  factors  are  often  vital  for  life,  training,  and 
science.  Moreover,  this  argument  would  rule  out  embryology  and  find  everything 
needed  in  adult  anatomy.  As  was  said  of  evolution,  no  one  who  has  studied  psy- 
chogenesis  carefully  and  candidly  has  been  unconvinced  by  it,  if  they  have  not 
crossed  the  dead  line  of  age.  In  our  land  and  period  of  decreasing  offspring,  it 
has  made  children  more  desired  ;  it  has  given  a  new  fruitful  topic  to  thousands  of 
culture  clubs  of  men,  and  especially  of  women  ;  it  has  found  a  fulcrum  and  placed  its 
lever  under  our  educational  system  and  an  era  of  transformation  has  already  begun ; 
it  has  already  shed  new  light  on  the  origin  and  development  of  language,  myth, 
and  more  yet  of  religion ;  and  is  now  rapidly  establishing  itself  in  academic  life 
and  work.  The  new  danger  that  now  looms  in  the  pathway  is  that  too  much  will 
be  expected  of  it  too  soon.  Finally,  some  of  these  objections  involve  views  of 
childhood  as  false  to  fact  and  as  atrocious  scientifically  as  was  the  Calvinistic  doc- 
trine of  total  and  innate  infant  depravity,  morally  and  religiously.  ^ 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  57 

Back  of  all  the  determined  facts  of  proportionate  physical 
growth  in  the  average  boy  or  girl,  so  rich,  as  we  have  seen, 
already  in  the  quality  of  suggestiveness  (the  best  of  all  indi- 
cations of  a  great  future  development  of  a  subject)  lies  a  mass 
of  nascent  questions  like  the  dim  baby  faces  artists  depict  in 
the  background  of  the  nativity  as  a  cloud  of  witnesses  who  are 
to  people  the  earth  in  the  future.  How  wide  is  the  range  of 
individual  differences  in  the  temporal  order  in  which  parts  ap- 
pear and  what  are  the  facts  and  laws  of  heterochrony;  what 
influences  cause  the  slow  secular  transpositions  now  going  on 
in  the  race  and  individuals ;  why  are  females  virified  and  males 
feminized  in  their  gerontic  stages  as  the  secondary  qualities  of 
each  were  latent  in  the  other  but  were  suppressed  during  the 
reproductive  period;  what  are  the  psychic  units  and  subunits 
of  variation  each  under  the  control  of  its  own  hypothetical 
determinant ;  how  shall  we  conceive  the  central  principle  which, 
despite  the  struggle  of  part  against  part  for  its  food  supply 
from  the  blood,  preserves  such  harmony  that  the  development 
or  arrest  of  each  also  acts  as  a  stimulus  to  the  development 
or  arrest  of  others,  so  that,  while  the  elements  vary  so  inde- 
pendently, their  growth  is  still  so  well  correlated,  coordinated, 
and  subordinated  with  each  other  ?  Such  problems  can  not  be 
answered  till  we  can  compare,  far  more  fully  than  we  are  now 
able  to  do,  on  a  far  broader  basis  of  fact,  with  less  diverse 
methods  and  less  uncertain  and  contradictory  results,  growth 
of  all  the  larger  parts  like  those  indicated  in  Chapters  I  and  II, 
with  the  embryological  and  infantile  changes  in  each  rudimen- 
tary organ,  especially  of  all  the  animal  forms  in  man's  pedigree, 
and  also,  as  I  believe,  till  we  have  a  parallel  embryology  of  the 
psyche,  now  just  beginning  its  yet  more  significant  develop- 
ment. The  soul  is  as  much,  but  no  more,  an  organized  unity 
than  the  body ;  reflects  the  growth  not  of  the  brain  alone,  but 
of  every  part  and  organ  ;  has  powers  in  every  stage  of  nascency 
and  decadence  like  it ;  is  now  hindered  and  now  forwarded  by 
every  advance  and  regress  of  every  organ,  as  organs  themselves 
are,  sometimes  directly,  sometimes  indirectly,  always  accord- 
ing to  the  fulness  or  scantiness  of  the  tides  of  life.  Both 
mind  and  body  have  the  same  haunting  and  persistent  prob- 
lems concerning  the  relations  of  innateness  and  heredity  versus 
environment  and  individual  experience.    Puberty  is  not  with- 


58  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

out  analogues  to  birth  and  teething.  In  each  of  these  three 
crises  new  structures  come  to  the  front.  In  adolescence, 
individuation  is  suddenly  augmented  and  begins  to  sense 
its  limits  and  its  gradual  subordination  to  the  race  which 
the  Fates  prescribe.  Each  of  these  epochs  is  no  whit  less 
significant  for  the  evolution  of  the  soul  in  ways  we  must  now 
labor  to  discover  and  delineate.  It  is  no  less  profoundly 
sexed  than  the  body.  Its  nature  is  no  more  absolute  and  un- 
changeable. It,  too,  is  a  mobilized  and  moving  equilibrium. 
Much  once  central  is  now  lapsed,  submerged,  instinctive,  or 
even  reflex,  and  much  once  latent  and  budding  is  now  potent 
and  in  the  focus  of  consciousness  for  our  multiplex,  com- 
pounded and  recompounded  personality.  It  is  real  progress 
in  this  direction  that  psychology  has  found  a  new  center  in  the 
will,  served  by  a  motor  apparatus  that  is  seventy-two  per  cent 
of  the  body  weight;  that  we  have  just  begun  to  peep  beneath 
the  threshold  of  consciousness,  like  toilers  that  have  just  real- 
ized that  there  is  a  mine  of  untold  wealth  beneath  their  factory 
which  makes  it  and  all  its  output  of  comparatively  small  value, 
full,  as  some  still  deem  the  subconscious,  of  ghosts  and  shades 
of  the  departed. 

Especially  in  the  study  of  sentiments  and  feelings  to  which 
experimental  psychology  is  now  tending  and  regarding  as  its 
next  step,  are  the  results  of  this  Cartesian  neglect  of  lower  soul- 
types,  paralleled  by  Herbart's  degrading  concept  of  feeling  as 
the  friction  and  detritus  of  mutually  impinging  ideas  and  of 
excessive  introspection  now  apparent  in  the  paucity  or  aridity 
of  literature  almost  proverbial  among  students  of  childhood 
and  adolescence.  Are  all  forms  of  pain  identical,  or  are  there 
many  pains ;  is  pain  a  sensation  itself  or  a  form  of  sensation ; 
is  there  a  neutral  state  between  pleasure  and  pain ;  are  there 
pure  states  of  feeling  devoid  of  intellectual  elements;  is  the 
Lange-James  theory  right  or  wrong — these  are  surds  insolv- 
able  by  any  conceivable  crucial  test.  These  problems  isolate  us 
in  barren  formulae,  but  charm  disputative,  literary,  speculative 
minds,  make  parties,  attract  the  scholastic  temper,  but  repel 
the  investigator  who  is  chiefly  drawn  to  problems  that  in  the 
present  state  of  knowledge  admit  rather  than  preclude  solu- 
tions. We  seek  nothing  less  than  to  raise  new  problems,  find 
different  methods  of  approach,  and  bring  about  a  transvaluation 


FEELINGS  AND  PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  59 

generally,  and  we  hold  that  on  many  of  the  points  in  the  older 
regime  of  the  soul,  our  simple  data,  even  though  often  crude 
and  meager,  dispraised  by  the  studio  psychologists  as  merely 
descriptive,  inductive,  or  observational,  are  better  data  than  all 
the  books,  ancient  or  contemporary,  contain.  They  upset  many 
theories  and  definitions,  but  have  all  the  promise  and  potency 
of  cumulative  facts  and  fresh  problems,  and  suggest  morning, 
and  not  evening,  of  finished  work. 

There  are  other  more  general  difficulties,  now  apparent, 
which  beset  the  specific  study  of  our  emotional  nature.  First, 
in  our  day  and  civilization,  the  hot  life  of  feeling  is  remote  and 
decadent.  Culture  represses,  and  intellect  saps  the  root.  The 
very  word  passion  is  becoming  obsolete  in  psychological  litera- 
ture, which  on  this  subject  elementarizes,  repeats,  is  pedantic, 
or  affectedly  didactic.  The  life  of  feeling  has  its  prime  in 
youth,  and  we  are  prematurely  old  and  too  often  senile  in  heart. 
What  does  the  psychologist  of  the  study  know  of  hate  that 
makes  men  mad  or  bestial,  of  love  that  is  not  only  uncalculating 
but  is  stronger  than  life,  of  fear  that  shakes  the  pulses,  and 
courage  that  faces  death  in  its  crudest  forms  unflinchingly,  of 
the  wager  of  battle  where  men  fight  beasts  or  each  other  with 
teeth  and  knives  and  spitting  revolvers,  of  torture,  of  joy  that 
threatens  sanity?  Our  sensibilities  are  refined,  but  our  per- 
spective is  narrow,  our  experiences  serene  and  regular,  we  are 
protected,  our  very  philosophy  as  well  as  our  religion  sup- 
presses and  looks  with  some  contempt  even  upon  enthusiasm 
in  matters  of  the  cold  reason.  We  have  experienced  no  soul- 
quaking  reconstruction  of  our  souls  like  Paul,  Augustine,  or 
Luther,  we  are  anemic  and  more  prone  to  deny  than  to  believe, 
to  speculate  than  to  do,  and  we  turn  to  novels  and  the  theater 
for  catharsis  of  our  emotions.  Our  sentiments  are  oversub- 
tilized  and  sophisticated  and  reduced  to  puny  reactions  to  music 
and  appreciation  of  art  that  are  nine  parts  criticism  and  one 
part  appreciation.  What  we  have  felt  is  second-hand,  bookish, 
shop-worn,  and  the  heart  is  parched  and  bankrupt.  We  can 
hardly  keep  alive  even  the  hearty  and  frank  jealousies,  aver- 
sions, and  sympathies  of  our  own  divergent  psychologic  theo- 
ries, as  if  our  deeper  soul  felt  their  inanity,  and  so  the  stagna- 
tion that  healthful  controversies  and  polemics  prevent,  slowly 
supervenes. 


6o  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Happily  for  our  craft,  the  child  and  youth  appear  at  the 
truly  psychological  moment,  freighted,  as  they  are,  body  and 
soul,  with  reminiscences  of  what  we  were  so  fast  losing.  They 
are  abandoned  to  joy,  grief,  passion,  fear,  and  rage.  They  are 
bashful,  show  off,  weep,  laugh,  desire,  are  curious,  eager,  re-  « 

gret,  and  swell  with  passion,  not  knowing  that  these  last  two  \ 

are  especially  outlawed  by  our  guild.  There  is  color  in  their 
souls,  brilliant,  livid,  loud.  Their  hearts  are  yet  young,  fresh, 
and  in  the  golden  age.  Despite  our  lessening  fecundity,  our 
over-schooling,   "city-fication,"  and  spoiling,  the  affectations  i 

we  instil  and  the  repressions  we  practise,  they  are  still  the  light  ^ 

and  hope  of  the  world  especially  to  us,  who  would  know  more 
of  the  soul  of  man  and  would  penetrate  to  its  deeper  strata 
and  study  its  origins. 

Back  of  them,  too,  lies  the  great  animal  world,  where  often 
each  species  seems  essentially  but  a  feeling-instinct  embodied, 
as  the  carnivora's  cruelty,  the  rabbit's  timidity,  or  the  peacock's 
ostentation.  A  true  science  of  character  that  goes  beyond 
eye,  ear,  and  motor  mindedness,  or  activity  and  passivity,  can 
not  dispense  with  the  deeper,  older,  and  more  fixed  unary 
or  binary  or  at  most  ternary  compounds  that  were  matured 
and  compacted  before  man  arose.  In  the  new  tentatives  in 
ethology  also,  it  is  already  apparent  that  true  types  of  char- 
acter can  be  determined  only  by  studying  the  animal  world; 
that  man,  e.g.,  inherits  some  of  the  aggressiveness  of  the  car- 
nivora  and  the  timidity  and  deceit  of  creatures  long  preyed 
upon.  Indeed,  each  animal  group  may  represent  some  one 
quality  in  great  excess,  the  high  selective  value  of  which  made 
possible  the  development  and  survival  of  a  species,  genus,  or 
group.  It  should  not  be  forgotten  that  such  psychological 
classification  of  psychic  types  may  cross-section  morphological 
divisions  of  species  and  genera.  Each  character  type  is  thus 
a  fulfilled  possibility  of  development  in  some  specific  direction, 
and  in  man  is  based  on  unconscious,  instinctive,  prehuman,  or 
animal  traits,  the  elements  of  which  are  combined  into  aggre- 
gates of  greater  or  less  cohesion  according  to  age  or  persistence 
in  time,  etc.  This,  of  course,  must  be  supplemented,  first,  by  a 
quite  independent  study  of  the  forms  of  degeneration ;  and,  sec- 
ondly, of  the  marked  traits  and  dispositions  in  normal  persons ; 
and  when  the  conclusions  from  all  three  classes  of  data  concur, 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  6 1 

we  may  infer  that  we  have  a  trait  of  more  or  less  typical  value. 
Individual  psychology  differs  thus  from  comparative  psychol- 
ogy chiefly  in  the  fact  that  the  former  is  concerned  with  slighter 
and  more  delicate  variations,  man's  mode  of  adaptation  being 
finer  and  more  specific.  These  general  considerations,  to  be 
treated  more  fully  elsewhere,  are  here  adverted  to  only  to 
explain  the  general  psychonomic  law  which  assumes  that  we 
are  influenced  in  our  deeper,  more  temperamental  dispositions 
by  the  life-habits  and  codes  of  conduct  of  we  know  not  what 
unnumbered  hosts  of  ancestors,  which  like  a  cloud  of  witnesses 
are  present  throughout  our  lives,  and  that  our  souls  are  echo- 
chambers  in  which  their  whispers  reverberate. 

Assuming  thus  that  the  feeling-instincts  of  whatever  name 
are  the  psychophores  or  bearers  of  mental  heredity  in  us,  some 
of  which  persist  below  the  threshold  of  consciousness  through- 
out our  lives,  while  others  are  made  over  as  instincts  or  are 
transformed  to  habits  into  directions  of  the  will  more  or  less 
persistent,  we  thus  cross-section  old  methods  and  can  approach 
this  study  with  a  mental  horizon  vastly  widened  and  with  an 
historic  sense  less  atrophied.  We  have  to  deal  with  the  arche- 
ology of  mind,  with  zones  or  strata  which  precede  consciousness 
as  we  know  it,  compared  to  which  even  it,  and  especially  cult- 
ured intellect,  is  an  upstart  novelty,  with  everywhere  a  fuller 
and  clearer  expression  of  a  part  of  the  soul,  but  always  partial, 
one-sided,  and  more  accidental  and  precarious.  Both  the  degree 
and  the  direction  of  development  of  intellect  vary  more  with 
age,  sex,  environment,  etc.,  and  sharpen  individuality,  while 
the  instinct-feelings  in  each  person  are  broader,  deeper,  and 
more  nearly  comprehensive  of  the  traits  of  the  whole  human 
race.  It  is  in  the  latter  alone  that  man  is  a  microcosm,  com- 
prising anything  like  the  large  totality  of  human  experience, 
so  that  for  it,  and  not  for  conscious  mind,  it  can  be  said  that 
nothing  human  or  prehuman  is  alien.  These  radicals  of  man's 
psychic  life,  while  some  of  them  are  decadent,  rudimentary, 
and  superseded,  are  often  important  just  in  proportion  to  the 
depth  of  the  phylogenetic  strata  into  which  they  strike  their 
roots.  Hunger,  love,  pride,  and  many  other  instinctive  feel- 
ings, to  say  nothing  of  pleasure  and  pain,  can  be  traced  far 
down  through  the  scale  of  vertebrate  and  to  invertebrate  life. 

It  is  plain,  for  these  reasons,  that  they  must  be  studied 


62  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

objectively  and  by  careful  observational  methods,  and  that  the 
genetic  psychologist,  while  he  must  use  introspection  in  the 
old  way,  or  reen forced  and  perfected  by  experimental  methods 
wherever  they  serve  his  purpose,  will  find  it  necessary,  almost  in 
exact  proportion  as  his  work  becomes  fundamental,  to  gather 
his  data  empirically  from  the  comparative  study  of  lower  forms 
of  life  and  of  children  and  from  the  collation  of  the  varied  inner 
and  outer  experiences  of  many  minds  besides  his  own.  Thus 
the  psychologist  of  the  future,  if  his  science  is  to  have  a  future, 
must  turn  to  the  past,  by  which  alone  it  can  be  judged,  and  if 
he  would  be  prophetic  and  helpful  must  move  more  freely  with 
a  far  larger  command  of  data  up  and  down  the  phyletic  scale. 
Thus,  too,  our  ideals  of  what  the  most  perfect  knowledge  of 
any  fact  or  object  really  is,  are  coming  to  be  more  and  more 
genetic.  We  really  know  things  only  when  we  trace  their  de- 
velopment from  the  farthest  beginning  through  all  their  stages 
to  maximal  maturity  and  decay.  Thus  we  shall  never  truly 
know  ourselves  till  we  know  the  mind  of  animals,  and  most 
especially  those  in  our  line  of  descent.  We  must  recognize  that 
some  of  them  are  our  superiors  in  certain  respects ;  that  while 
we  explain  them  by  explication  of  those  traits  wherein  we  excel, 
they  no  whit  less  explain  us  by  those  of  their  traits  which  are 
superior  to  ours  and  of  which  our  souls  contain  only  relics; 
that  if  in  general  we  are  their  realized  entelechy,  they  are  the 
key  by  which  alone  we  can  unlock  many  of  the  mysteries  of  our 
own  origin  and  nature. 

Thus  again  the  same  revolution  in  the  studies  that  deal  with 
soul  impends  that  von  Baer  and  Darwin  represented  for  the 
body.  Before  their  day,  everything  was  classification,  nomen- 
clature, fixed  species,  just  as  with  the  pregenetic  psychologists 
everything  w-as  faculties  and  processes,  analyses  and  categories, 
as  if  the  adult  human  mind,  as  we  know  it,  were  a  fixed  and 
settled  thing.  From  the  new  standpoint,  the  human  soul  is  one 
of  many  types  of  mind  in  the  w^orld.  At  best  it  may  be  a  tran- 
sition from  a  lower  to  a  higher  race  to  be  evolved  later.  It  is 
perhaps  a  temporary  and  accidental  form  which  force  or  life  has 
taken  on  in  the  world.  If  it  is  like  a  species,  a  stage  of  evolu- 
tion, interrupted  at  a  definite  point,  we  can  not  truly  know  it 
until  we  have  traced  out  all  the  roots  and  branches  of  the  buried 
tree  of  its  pedigree.    We  must  study  its  changing  phases  histor- 


FEELINGS   AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  63 

ically.  We  can  not  know  mind  till  we  know  minds.  It  is  well 
not  entirely  to  forget  that  in  the  great  cosmic  order  revealed 
to  the  evolutionist,  the  mind,  which  modern  analysts  so  care- 
fully dissect,  may  be  merely  a  developmental  stage  of  that  of 
a  higher  type  as  much  above  us  as  we  are  above  the  dwellers  in 
Lemuria;  that  sometime  even  it  may  be  studied  as  a  link  be- 
tween the  higher  and  the  lower,  and  that  it  may  itself  some 
day  become  a  missing  one. 

More  summarily,  then,  the  idea  of  soul  we  hold  to  is  in  its 
lower  stages  indistinguishable  from  that  of  life,  and  so  far 
in  a  sense  we  revert  to  Aristotle  in  holding  that  any  truly  sci- 
entific psychology  must  be  first  of  all  biological.  Mind  is  al- 
most, possibly  quite,  coextensive  with  life,  at  least  animal 
life.  Its  most  fundamental  and  primary  expression  may  be 
characterized  in  Schopenhauer's  phrase,  the  will  to  live.  It  can 
hardly  be  distinguished  in  rudimentary  organisms  from  the 
nisus  a  tergo  in  its  multiform  manifestations  which  underlies 
growth,  reproduction,  and  the  struggle  for  survival  generally. 
Soul  is  characterized  by  responses  to  the  present  environment 
that  are  exquisite,  incessant,  and  all-sided,  but  is  also  pervaded 
by  the  more  or  less  permanently  registered  traces  of  past  re- 
sponses which  lie  far  outside  of  and  beyond  our  personal  ex- 
perience. The  first  chapter  of  a  scientific  psychology,  then,  is 
metabolic  and  nutritive,  and  the  first  function  of  the  soul  is,  as 
we  saw  in  the  last  chapter,  in  food-getting,  assimilation,  and 
dissimilation.  Whether  it  be  conceived  as  spiritual  or  subtly 
natural,  it  is  related  to  soft  protoplasmic  parts,  somewhat  as 
they  are  to  the  hard  parts  preserved  and  studied  in  paleontol- 
ogy. Just  as  soft  parts  are  primary  and  shape  hard  parts,  are 
more  vital,  plastic,  and  also  more  retentive  of  impression,  so 
soul  is  related  to  body  generally.  Conceptions  of  idioplasm, 
psychoplasm,  germplasm  as  distinct  from  somatic  elements, 
help  us  on  toward  more  adequate  soul  concepts.  Mind  and  life 
are  one  and  inseparable.  Soul  is  thus  at  bottom  homogeneous 
and  also  continuous  throughout  the  animal  kingdom,  the  chief 
differences  being  in  degree  and  proportion.  There  are  as  many 
types  of  mind  as  of  body,  and  vice  versa,  and  we  can  truly  know 
soul  only  through  body,  and  conversely,  can  know  body  only 
through  the  soul.  A  brain  without  a  mind  is  as  impossible  as 
a  mind  without  a  brain,  every  normal  and  pathological  change 


64  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

in  either  affecting  the  other.  Whatever  soul  stuff  may  or  may 
not  be,  it  is  most  susceptible  and  responsive  to  all  present  influ- 
ences, and  also,  in  a  yet  far  deeper  sense,  most  pervaded  with 
reverberations  from  an  immeasurable  past.  As  Heraclitus  says, 
"  None  can  find  the  roots  of  soul,  in  such  depths  does  it  hide." 
Consciousness  and  personality  are  far  later,  modal,  attributive, 
and  specific  determinations — irrelevant  to  a  psycJwlogia  prima. 

From  this  it  follows  that  much  if  not  most  soul  is  lost. 
With  every  extinct  species  of  animal  life  a  soul  type  also  van- 
ished irrecoverably  from  the  world,  and  as  dead  far  outnumber 
living  varieties,  the  great  body  of  soul  is  irrecoverable  by  psy- 
chologists; thus  the  world  of  soul  must  remain  fragmentary, 
and  many  faculties,  traits,  and  genetic  stages  are  gone  forever. 
Man  can  with  great  difficulty  form  any  conception  of  how  the 
world  appeared  to  the  majority  of  even  existing  animal  types ; 
what  their  senses  were  and  could  do ;  what  perceptive  elements 
they  were  sensitized  to;  what  their  instincts  and  their  organs 
were ;  how  they  reared  their  young,  obtained  their  food,  mated, 
fought  their  enemies,  organized  their  societies,  etc.  Many  of 
them  are  in  our  pedigree,  and  we  inherit  the  stored  results  of 
this  experience,  but  of  how  it  was  stored  up  we  know  little.  It 
is  hard  enough  for  us  to  understand,  after  generations  of  study, 
what  photodermatism  means  as  a  form  of  sense,  or  how  the 
world  looks  through  the  ant's  nose,  hand  or  odor-contact  or- 
gans, and  how  much  more  inaccessible  the  psychromes  of  van- 
ished genera. 

It  is  just  because  we  have  thus  come  into  possession  of  a 
vast  and  relatively  sudden  wealth,  which  we  did  not  acquire, 
that  the  world  often  seems  unreal  to  us  and  we  try  to  validate 
it  by  strident  and  curious  arguments  which  can  never  vicariate 
for  the  actual  experiences  we  prate  of,  but  which,  vast  as  they 
were,  must  ever  remain  dim  and  unexplored,  like  a  submerged 
continent  once  full  of  life,  now  only  of  buried  secrets.  Our 
own  soul  is  full  in  all  its  parts  of  faint  hints,  rudimentary 
specters  flitting  for  an  instant  at  some  moment  of  our  indi- 
vidual life  and  then  gone  forever, dim  and  scarcely  audible  mur- 
murs of  a  great  and  prolonged  life,  hot,  intense,  richly  dight 
with  incident  and  detail  that  is  no  more;  a  slight  automatism, 
perhaps,  being  the  sole  relic  of  the  most  central  experiences 
of  many  generations,  a  fleeting  fancy  all  that  survives  of  ages 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC   EVOLUTION  65 

of  toil  and  blood,  a  feeling  that  only  peeps  out  for  a  moment 
in  infancy,  the  far-off  dying  echo  of  what  was  once  the  voice 
of  a  great  multitude.  Yet  these  psychophores,  whatever  they 
are,  are  wax  to  receive  and  marble  to  retain.  Thus  soul  is  truly 
telepathic  only  to  its  own  past,  and  thus  these  limitations  are 
nearly  every  one  of  our  remote  psychic  pedigree,  or  of  the 
present,  and  never  of  a  future  state.  The  automatic  or  ancestral 
and  the  plastic  and  adaptive  constantly  interact  and  influence 
each  other,  the  former  predominating  most  in  animals,  but  also 
profoundly  influencing  man.  The  former  is  somehow  repre- 
sented in  the  lower,  and  the  latter  in  the  higher,  brain  levels, 
the  sequence  up  the  cord,  medulla,  basal  ganglia,  cerebellum  be- 
ing a  better  picture  of  the  real  evolution  of  mind  when  we  can 
read  its  meaning  aright  than  the  chambered  nautilus  gives  us 
of  its  stages  of  growth. 

Many  of  these  archeopsychisms  penetrate  at  times  up  to 
consciousness.  They  pass  up  over  we  know  not  how  many 
thresholds  and  invade  the  adult  mind.  Even  the  soma  itself 
is  resonant  in  every  cell,  fiber,  and  reflex  arc  with  these  remi- 
niscences of  extinct  generations.  Our  souls  are  phyletic  long 
before  and  far  more  than  they  are  individual.  Each  has,  at 
least  ideally,  a  capacity  to  comprehend  much  if  not  most  of 
the  experience  of  the  race  from  the  beginning,  but  this  experi- 
ence is  dormant  in  us  unless  brought  out  by  objective  life  or 
observation.  It  is  also  the  only  reservoir  and  storehouse  of 
introspection.  But  even  our  line  of  descent  is  restricted,  and  if 
we  had  all  that  our  heredity  could  possibly  bestow,  we  should  be 
but  specialized  and  partial  beings.  It  is  not  inconceivable  or 
even  impossible  that  many  a  species  that  has  become  extinct 
took  with  it  out  of  the  world  the  promise  and  potency  of  a 
higher  psychic  development  than  that  of  man,  but  of  a  radically 
different  type  from  his.  In  the  annelid  or  amphioxus  stage 
there  was  little  promise  of  man  who  has  since  sprung  from  it. 
Although  the  highest  being  that  is,  he  is  not  perhaps  the  high- 
est, or  even  among  the  highest,  that  might  have  been,  to  say 
nothing  of  what  we  know  nothing  of — what  may  be  in  other 
planets,  or  that  will  be  on  or.rs.  The  best  and  only  key  to  truly 
explain  mind  in  man  is  mind  in  the  animals  he  has  sprung  frojn 
and  in  his  own  infancy,  which  so  faintly  recapitulates  them ; 
for  about  every  property  of  the  human  mind  is  found  in  animal 
44 


66  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

mind,  as  those  of  higher  animals  are  found  in  the  powers  of 
the  lower. 

Each  species  is  a  special  set  of  reactions  and  adaptations  to 
a  certain  environment  and  illustrates  a  moving  equilibrium  of 
forces.  Now  much  that  was  in  the  past  has  quite  lapsed  from 
consciousness,  and  therefore  can  only  be  studied  in  motor  re- 
sponses and  subconscious  psychoses  objectively,  empirically, 
and  inductively,  so  that  introspection,  upon  which  so  much  of 
the  philosophy  of  the  past  and  present  rests,  is  narrow,  pro- 
vincial, and  perhaps  merely  terminal,  and  possibly  even  in  some 
sense  degenerative.  Thus  observation  must  supplement  self- 
analysis,  which  is  merely  individual  and  now  often  even. con- 
fessedly solipsistic  and  abortive.  The  conscious  adult  person 
is  not  a  monad  reflecting  the  universe,  but  a  fragment  broken 
off  and  detached  from  the  great  world  of  soul,  always  maimed, 
defined  by  special  limitations,  like,  yet  different,  from  all  others, 
with  some  incommensurability  parting  it  off  as  something 
unique,  well  fitted  to  illustrate  some  aspects  and  hopelessly  un- 
able to  exemplify  or  even  know  other  regions  in  the  cosmos 
of  soul.  The  very  self-consciousness  that  burns  so  intensely  at 
some  point,  with  attention  often  so  obsessive,  blinds  us  from 
seeing  the  larger  rest  of  our  selves.  Not  so  much  our  birth, 
but  every  year  of  growth  and  every  degree  of  mental  illumina- 
tion, "  is  a  forgetting  "  of  preexisting  states  and  involves  a 
lapse  of  other  sections  and  activities  of  soul,  as  it  were,  to 
lower  meristic  levels,  of  which  augmented  self-consciousness 
involves  progressive  ignorance. 

Highest,  narrowest,  most  apical,  and  mobile  as  a  tongue 
of  flame  is  the  attentive  state  of  the  present  flitting  moment, 
related  to  general  personal  mind  a  little  as  it  to  the  impersonal 
phyletic,  or  as  it  again  to  general  soul.  Greatest  in  intent  and 
least  in  extent,  most  foreground  and  least  background,  natural, 
spontaneous  attention,  with  all  its  special  problems  and  all  its 
marvelous,  somatic, and  psychic  effects,  is  often  in  form  farthest 
of  all  from  the  depths  wherein  soul  life  began.  It  is  most 
specialized  and  least  germinal.  Like  the  soma  of  highly  special- 
ized organs,  it  is  most  ancillary  and  most  in  evidence,  but  is 
really  valuable  only  as  it  serves  psychoses,  which  it  can  no  more 
see  than  the  sun  can  see  shadows.  All  psychology  that  starts 
or  ends  here  is  deciduous.    The  soul,  as  it  conceives  it,  is  not 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  67 

worth  saving,  although  personal  immortality,  as  we  have  seen, 
is  often  the  dominant  note  in  thought  thus  centered.  Indeed, 
the  salvation  motive  that  in  our  day  often  becomes  almost  hys- 
terical is  profoundly  antiscientific,  and  the  immortality  pros- 
pectors that  neglect  the  past  are  enemies  of  real  knowledge  or 
sound  investigation  in  this  field.  The  true  researcher  must  be 
as  indifferent  to  his  own  salvability  as  pure  science  is  to  crass 
utility  or  profit-making,  or  as  the  absolute  moralist  is  to  pleas- 
ure or  pain  here  or  hereafter.  Till  our  science  can  cut  entirely 
loose  from  every  soteriological  influence  and  drop  the  future, 
which  has  its  true  place  for  study  elsewhere,  and  turn  to  the 
past,  it  can  not  flourish. 

We  can  not  believe  that  consciousness  is  even  quite  the  ef- 
florescence of  the  human  plant.  It  may  be  a  wart  raised  by  the 
sting  of  sin,  a  product  of  alienation  or  a  remedial  process.  We 
have  no  warrant  that  natural  selection  or  the  law  of  the  survival 
of  the  fittest  determines  what  rises  above  the  highest  of  the 
series  of  thresholds  in  mind.  Consciousness  seems  in  some  of 
its  aspects  more  likely  a  fall  or  a  process  of  purgation  so  far  as 
it  is  merely  adaptive,  and  that  which  is  best  and  survives  is  that 
which  sinks  deepest,  beyond  the  test  of  recallability,  and  so  be- 
comes most  fundamental  whether  as  mental  act  or  organ.  In 
lower  forms  of  life,  thought  is  motion,  and  later  consciousness 
seems  to  develop  inversely  as  movement.  Feeling  may  be  de- 
specialization,  dissolution,  and  preliminary  to  evolution  along 
new  lines.  The  moving  phantasmagoria  of  images  and  con- 
scious objects  are  not  the  chief  facts  of  mind,  as  are  the  many- 
voiced  comments,  the  sense  of  assent  and  dissent,  pleasure  and 
pain,  the  illation  of  strength  or  the  esthetic  responses,  the  play 
of  intuitions,  the  impulses  to  do  or  not  to  do,  automatic  ten- 
sions or  contractions.  These  are  not  epiphenomenal,  but 
noumenal  in  soul  life,  its  palmary  facts  and  experiences. 

Conscious  life,  too,  in  the  best  of  us  is  pitifully  unorganized 
and  loose-jointed,  and  it  differs  perhaps  most  from  the  body 
in  its  fragmentary,  incomplete,  and  heterogeneous  nature.  The 
sanest  soul  can  not  escape  many  mild  or  incipient  insanities, 
and  the  most  vigorous  bear  many  marks  of  degeneration.  Since 
writing  made  permanent  records  possible,  the  mind  has  reared 
the  sublime  structure  of  science,  the  greatest  achievement  of 
the  soul  thus  far,  but  a  very  few  out  of  vast  multitudes  have 


68  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

done  all  the  work,  and  any  single  individual,  even  the  best,  but 
a  very  small  part.  Marvelous  as  the  brain  is,  we  have  probably 
yet  learned  but  little  how  to  use  or  control  it,  and  are  still  in- 
fants of  mind.  As  we  know  more  of  it,  it  seems  built  layer 
upon  layer  of  partly  isolated  yet  strangely  interacting  strata. 
Very  ancient  hereditary  tendencies  often  push  up  perhaps  even 
into  consciousness,  or  affect  conduct  as  if  striving  to  be  relived 
and  competing  for  the  focus  of  attention  or  perhaps  leading  a 
submerged  life  in  nearly  faded  automatisms.  Layers  are  often 
reversed.  Perhaps  man  acquired  his  massive  brain  largely  in 
fighting  the  great  reptiles  and  mammals  of  past  ages,  but  now 
in  the  individual  it  is  developed  very  early  in  life,  and  so 
reproduction,  although  phyletically  it  develops  very  early, 
is  now  in  the  individual  almost  the  last  power  to  be  evolved 
to  normal  function.  Some  psychic  elements  are  hypertro- 
phied  and  some  latent  and  dumb.  There  are  sudden  resur- 
gences of  long-forgotten  facts,  and  feelings  and  impulses  of 
an  immeasurable  past,  while  recent  salient  occurrences  often 
appear  to  sink  to  fathomless  oblivion.  Other  experiences 
and  traits,  that  ought  to  be  less  stable  because  later  ac- 
quired, are  sometimes  suddenly  fixed  like  adamant  with  no 
apparent  cause.  Instead  of  the  old  classic  unity,  consciousness 
tends  to  break  up  into  disparate  personalities  in  each  of  us,  and 
each  mood  and  time  has  its  own  association  plexus  and  its  own 
character.  Dreams  and  narcotics  shatter  it  or  dissolve  it  into 
nebulous  clouds,  anger  and  passion  seize  the  rein  and  we  are 
demented  and  bestial  for  a  time.  While,  on  the  whole,  nor- 
mal qualities  usually  have  superior  momentum  and  survival 
power,  they  may  be  choked  and  overcome  by  lush  weeds  of 
vice.  Who  that  is  honest  and  has  true  self-knowledge  will  not 
confess  to  recognizing  in  his  own  soul  the  germs  and  possi- 
bilities of  about  every  crime,  vice,  insanity,  superstition,  and 
folly  in  conduct  he  ever  heard  of?  Taine  thought  every  im- 
pression tended  to  burgeon  to  illusory  or  hallucinatory  inten- 
sity, and  that  each  was  kept  from  doing  so  by  collision  with  op- 
posite ones,  and  thus  something  like  sanity  is  preserved  by  an 
equilibrium  or  balance  between  many  lunacies.  Barbaric  and 
animal  traits  and  instincts  jostle  and  mix  with  each  other  in 
leaderless  mobs  of  impression.  Reason  makes  in  every  age 
errors  almost  as  colossal  as  superstition  with  which  it  is  often 


FEELINGS   AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  69 

veined.  In  all  this  flux  and  chaos,  however,  common  sense, 
that  knows  and  adjusts  to  facts  and  to  the  external  world,  and 
the  sciences  of  nature  are  the  two  solidest  of  all  foundations 
and  are  represented  by  the  soundest  and  most  firmly  woven 
brain  texture;  if  man  can  ever  bring  order  into  the  rest 
of  his  confused  psychic  life  it  must  be  by  going  back  to  these 
and  working  out  and  upward  from  them  by  observational 
methods  in  the  inner  as  well  as  the  outer  world. 

Thus,  in  fine,  the  psyche  is  a  quantum  and  direction  of 
vital  energy,  the  processes  of  which  most  need  exploration  and 
description,  ordering  and  directing.  By  looking  inward,  we 
see  for  the  most  part  only  the  topmost  twigs  of  the  buried  tree 
of  mind.  The  real  ego  is  a  spark  struck  off  from  the  central 
source  of  all  being,  freighted  with  meanings  that,  could  we 
interpret  them,  would  give  us  the  salient  facts  of  its  develop- 
ment history.  Its  essence  is  its  processes  of  becoming.  It  is 
not  a  fixed,  abiding  thing,  but  grew  out  of  antecedent  soul 
states  as  different  from  its  present  forms  as  protoplasm  is  from 
the  mature  body.  It  tends  to  vary  constantly  and  to  depart 
indefinitely  from  what  it  is  at  any  given  moment.  Every  ele- 
ment has  shaped  and  tempered  it.  Its  long  experience  with 
light  and  darkness,  day  and  night,  has  fashioned  its  rhythm 
indelibly.  Heat  and  cold,  the  flickering  of  flame,  smoke  and 
ashes,  especially  since  man  learned  the  control  of  fire,  have 
oriented  it  toward  both  thermal  extremes.  Cloud  forms  have 
almost  created  the  imagination.  Water  and  a  long  apprentice- 
ship to  aquatics  and  arboreal  life  have  left  as  plain  and  indelible 
marks  upon  the  soul  as  upon  the  body.  Sky,  stars,  wind, 
storms,  fetishism,  flowers,  animals,  ancient  battles,  industries, 
occupations,  and  worship  have  polarized  the  soul  to  fear  and 
affection,  and  created  anger  and  pity.  The  superficial  phe- 
nomena change,  but  all  the  deeper  roots  of  the  soul  strike  down 
and  back  to  a  past  that  long  preceded  history.  The  soul  is  thus 
a  product  of  heredity.  As  such,  it  has  been  hammered,  molded, 
shocked,  and  worked  by  the  stern  law  of  labor  and  suffering 
into  its  present  crude  form.  It  is  covered  with  scars  and 
wounds  not  yet  healed.  It  is  still  in  the  rough,  and  patch- 
worky,  full  of  contradictions,  although  the  most  marvelous  of 
all  the  products  of  nature.  Where  most  educated  and  polished 
externally,  it  still  has  inner  veins  where  barbaric  and  animal 


70  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

impulses  are  felt.  Every  individual  soul  is  marked  by  limita- 
tions, defects,  and  arrests,  often  beside  traits  of  marvelous 
beauty  and  virtue.  None  are  complete,  perfect,  typical.  Collec- 
tive soul,  however,  is  a  sensorium  of  wondrous  subtlety  that  re- 
flects in  its  multipersonal  facets  most,  perhaps  all,  that  has  been 
in  the  world.  Our  present  quest  is  to  detect  some  characteristic 
changes  at  that  age  of  life  when  a  certain  group  of  powers 
emerges  from  the  past;  w^hen  heredity  is  bestowing  its  latest 
and  therefore  highest  gifts;  when  the  mind  is  most  exquisitely 
sensitized  to  the  aspects  of  nature  and  to  social  life,  is  repeat- 
ing most  rapidly  the  later  neopsychic  stages  of  phyletic  expe- 
riences, and  laying  on  this  foundation  the  corner-stones  of  a 
new  and  unique  adult  personality. 

These  considerations  must  serve  here  to  define  the  stand- 
point from  which  we  now  proceed  to  consider  the  more  specific 
psychic  changes  which  mark  adolescence.  We  here  face  prob- 
lems both  more  complex  and  more  inaccessible  than  those  con- 
nected with  the  somatic  changes.  The  most  important  and 
basal  of  these  are  connected  with  the  fact  that  powers  and  facul- 
ties, essentially  non-existent  before,  are  now  born,  and  of  all 
the  older  impulses  and  instincts  some  are  reenforced  and 
greatly  developed,  while  others  are  subordinated,  so  that  new 
relations  are  established  and  the  ego  finds  a  new  center.  In 
connection  with  the  reproduction  function,  love  is  born  with  all 
its  attendant  passions — jealousy,  rivalry,  and  all  the  manifold 
phenomena  of  human  courtship.  All  the  previous  religious 
sentiments  are  regenerated  and  some  now  arise  for  the  first 
time,  motivating  a  wide  plexus  of  new  psychic  relations  be- 
tween the  individual  and  the  race,  and  irradiating  to  the 
cosmos.  Nature  is  felt  and  plays  upon  the  soul  with  all  its  rich 
orchestra  of  influences.  Art  at  this  time  may  become  an  enthu- 
siasm and  is  now  first  deeply  and  truly  felt,  even  though  it  had 
been  known  and  practised  before.  The  ethical  life  is  immensely 
broadened  and  deepened,  because  now  a  far  deeper  possibility 
and  sense  of  sin  and  impurity  arises.  The  floodgates  of  hered- 
ity are  thrown  open  again  somewhat  as  in  infancy.  As  in  the 
prenatal  and  infant  stage  man  hears  from  his  remoter  fore- 
bears back  perhaps  to  primitive  organisms,  now  the  later  and 
higher  ancestry  takes  up  the  burden  of  the  song  of  life,  and  the 


I 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC   EVOLUTION  7^ 

voices  of  our  extinct  and  perhaps  forgotten,  and  our  later  and 
more  human  ancestry,  are  heard  in  the  soul.  Just  as  in  the  first 
birth  the  gifts  of  nature  are  of  fundamental  psycho-physic  qual- 
ities, which  are  later  elaborated  and  differentiated  by  develop- 
ment, so  now  her  rich  dotations  are  generic,  and  the  accessory 
qualities  that  are  unfolded  out  of  them  arise  slowly  from  the 
feelings,  instincts,  impulses,  dispositions,  Anlangen  and  Triebe, 
which  are  the  products  of  this  later  heritage. 

In  some  respects,  early  adolescence  is  thus  the  infancy  of 
man's  higher  nature,  when  he  receives  from  the  great  all- 
mother  his  last  capital  of  energy  and  evolutionary  momentum. 
Thus  the  child  is  father  of  the  man,  far  older  and  conditioning 
his  nature.  He  is  at  the  same  time  reduced  back  to  a  state  of 
nature,  so  far  as  some  of  the  highest  faculties  are  concerned, 
again  helpless,  in  need  not  only  of  guidance  but  of  shelter  and 
protection.  His  knowledge  of  self  is  less  adequate  and  he  must 
slowly  work  out  his  salvation.  Character,  temperament,  emo- 
tions, and  appetites  are  changed ;  the  youth  moves  about  in  both 
an  inner  and  an  outer  world  unrealized.  The  parent  and 
teacher  must  understand  that  mother  nature  has  again  taken 
her  child  upon  her  knee  and  must  stand  off  a  little  to  see  and 
make  room  for  her  more  perfect  education.  These  years  again, 
like  infancy,  should  be  sacred  to  heredity,  and  we  should  have 
a  good  warrant  indeed  before  we  venture  to  interfere  with  its 
processes. 

Psychic  adolescence  is  heralded  by  all-sided  mobilization. 
The  child  from  nine  to  tw-elve  is  well  adjusted  to  his  environ- 
ment and  proportionately  developed ;  he  represents  probably  an 
old  and  relatively  perfected  stage  of  race-maturity,  still  in  some 
sense  and  degree  feasible  in  warm  climates,  which,  as  we  have 
previously  urged,  stands  for  a  long-continued  one,  a  terminal 
stage  of  human  development  at  some  post-simian  point.  At 
dawning  adolescence  this  old  unity  and  harmony  with  nature  is 
broken  up;  the  child  is  driven  from  his  paradise  and  must  enter 
upon  a  long  viaticum  of  ascent,  must  conquer  a  higher  kingdom 
of  man  for  himself,  break  out  a  new  sphere,  and  evolve  a  more 
modern  story  to  his  psycho-physical  nature.  Because  his  en- 
vironment is  to  be  far  more  complex,  the  combinations  are  less 
stable,  the  ascent  less  easy  and  secure ;  there  is  more  danger  that 


72  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

the  youth  in  his  upward  progress,  under  the  influence  of  this 
"excelsior"  motive,  will  backslide  in  one  or  several  of  the  many 
ways  possible.  New  dangers  threaten  on  all  sides.  It  is  the 
most  critical  stage  of  life,  because  failure  to  mount  almost  al- 
ways means  retrogression,  degeneracy,  or  fall.  One  may  be  in 
all  respects  better  or  worse,  but  can  never  be  the  same.  The 
old  level  is  left  forever.  Perhaps  the  myth  of  Adam  and 
Eden  describe  this  epoch.  The  consciousness  of  childhood 
is  molted,  and  a  new,  larger,  better  consciousness  must  be 
developed,  or  increased  exposure  and  vulnerability  will  bring 
deterioration.  Before  this,  boys  and  girls  have  been  inter- 
ested largely  in  those  of  their  own  age  and  have  had  little 
interest  in  their  future  or  in  the  life  of  adults.  Their  own  life 
is  too  varied,  intense,  and  absorbing.  But  the  soul  now  realizes 
in  a  deeper  sense  the  meaning  of  maturity  and  is  protensive 
toward  its  higher  plateau.  Slowly  the  color  and  life  fade  from 
juvenile  interests,  which  are  deciduous  like  foliage  or  like  milk 
teeth.  Vocations  beckon  first  faintly,  and  then  more  and  more 
imperatively.  Hero  worship  arises ;  youth  aspires  to  excel,  first 
perhaps  by  the  order  of  nature  in  athletic  contests,  then  in  those 
of  the  mind.  The  young  savage  can  not  attain  his  new  name  or 
be  initiated  into  adolescence  until  he  has  shown  prowess  or  won 
some  fame  as  a  doer  of  deeds,  as,  e.g.,  by  killing  some  large 
animal  or  in  successful  head-hunting.  It  is  perhaps  on  the 
athletic  field  that  youth  has  his  first  taste  of  gratified  ambition 
and  is  fired  thereby  to  constant  discontent  and  Sehnsiicht  there- 
after. He  longs  to  struggle,  make  an  effort,  combat,  loves  a 
hard  and  strenuous  and  scorns  an  easy  life.  The  great  deeds 
and  lives  and  prizes  in  the  human  world  never  shine  so  bright, 
seem  so  near,  or  beckon  so  alluringly.  The  youth  wills  all  that 
he  must  or  can;  would  be  wnse,  strong,  famous,  talented, 
learned,  rich,  loved,  and  withal  good  and  perfect.  When 
the  thought  of  death  forces  its  presence  upon  his  soul,  though 
at  first  cast  down,  he  reacts  by  immortal  longings.  The  tran- 
scendental world  opens  before  him;  he  dreams  of  an  ideal 
future  of  the  race  or  of  a  heaven  where  all  his  wishes  shall  be 
realized  in  the  glory  of  the  world  to  be;  and  in  these  "  vague 
snatches  of  Uranian  antiphony,"  instead  of  its  finding  remi- 
niscences of  the  preexistent  state  of  the  soul,  the  more  progres- 
sive Occidental  world  sees  anticipations  of  a  future  immortality, 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  73 

as  it  has  taken  its  conceptions  of  paradise  from  the  past  where 
antiquity  placed  them,  and  reconstructed  them  and  set  them  up 
in  the  future. 

This  long  pilgrimage  of  the  soul  from  its  old  level  to  a 
higher  maturity  which  adolescence  recapitulates  must  have 
taken  place  in  the  race  in  certain  of  its  important  lines  long 
before  the  historic  period,  because  its  very  nature  seems  to  in- 
volve the  destruction  of  all  its  products  and  extinction  of  all 
records.  Just  as  the  well-matured  adult,  as  is  elsewhere  shown, 
has  utterly  lost  all  traces  and  recollection  of  the  perturbations 
of  the  storm  and  stress  period,  because  they  are  so  contradictory 
and  mutually  destructive  and  because  feelings  themselves  can 
not  be  well  remembered,  so  the  race  must  have  gone  through  a 
long  heat  and  ferment,  of  which  consciousness,  which  best  de- 
velops in  stationary  periods,  was  lost,  partly  because  growth 
was  so  rapid.  Incidents  are  never  better  remembered  by  the 
individual,  but  they  are  never  more  transformed  and  changed, 
and  just  so  the  precious  but  often  grotesque  myths  and  legends 
of  races,  sacred  to  them  but  often  meaningless  to  others,  afford 
the  only  traces  of  ethnic  adolescence  which  races  retain.  They 
are  told  about  camp-fires,  perhaps  laboriously  and  allegorically 
interpreted  or  developed  into  literary  form  with  the  same  gusto 
with  which  the  man  recounts  in  ever  more  mythic  form  the 
most  vivid  incidents  his  memory  has  rescued  from  the  turmoil 
of  these  years  of  transformation  and  reconstruction,  when  na- 
ture's first  call  is  heard  to  go  out  from  the  home  to  some  prom- 
ised land  or  career,  to  establish  a  new  domicile  for  body  and 
soul,  and  to  be  the  progenitor  of  offspring  of  both,  that  to 
the  inflamed  youthful  heart  seem  like  the  stars  of  heaven  in 
number. 

Youth  loves  intense  states  of  mind  and  is  passionately  fond 
of  excitement.  Tranquil,  mild  enjoyments  are  not  its  forte. 
The  heart  and  arteries  are,  as  we  have  seen,  rapidly  increasing 
in  size,  and  perhaps  heightened  blood  pressure  is  necessary  to 
cause  the  expansion  normal  at  this  stage.  Nutritive  activities 
are  greatly  increased ;  the  temperature  of  the  body  is  probably 
a  trifle  higher.  After  its  period  of  most  rapid  growth,  the  heart 
walls  are  a  little  weak,  and  peripheral  circulation  is  liable  to 
slight  stagnation,  so  that  in  the  interests  of  proper  irrigation 


74  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

of  the  tissues  after  the  vascular  growth  has  begun,  tension 
seems  necessary.  Although  we  do  not  know  precisely  the  rela- 
tion between  blood  pressure  and  the  strong  instinct  to  tingle 
and  glow,  some  correlation  may  safely  be  postulated.  It  is  the 
age  of  erectile  diathesis,  and  the  erethism  that  is  now  so  in- 
creased in  the  sexual  parts  is  probably  more  or  less  so  in  nearly 
every  organ  and  tissue.  The  whole  psycho-physic  organism  is 
expanding,  stretching  out,  and  proper  elasticity  that  relaxes 
and  contracts  and  gives  vaso-motor  range  is  coordinated  with 
the  instinct  for  calenture  or  warming  up,  which  is  shown  in 
phenomena  of  second  breath  in  both  physical  and  mental  activ- 
ity. In  savage  life  this  period  is  marked  by  epochs  of  orgasm 
and  carousal,  which  is  perhaps  one  expression  of  nature's  effort 
to  secure  a  proper  and  ready  reflex  range  of  elasticity  in  the 
circulatory  apparatus.  The  "  teens  "  are  emotionally  unstable 
and  pathic.  It  is  the  age  of  natural  inebriation  without  the 
need  of  intoxicants,  which  made  Plato  define  youth  as  spiritual 
drunkenness.  It  is  a  natural  impulse  to  experience  hot  and 
perfervid  psychic  states,  and  is  characterized  by  emotionalism. 
This  gives  a  sense  of  vitality  and  the  hunger  for  more  and 
fuller  life.  This  desire  to  feel  and  to  be  very  much  alive,  and 
the  horror  of  inertness  and  apathy,  is,  as  we  saw  in  Chapter  V, 
one  of  the  chief  features  which  incline  youth  to  intoxicants. 
Indeed,  everything  men  strive  for — fame,  wealth,  knowledge, 
power,  love — are  only  specialized  forms  of  the  will  to  attain 
and  to  feel  the  maximum  of  vitality.  Hence  comes  the  pro- 
clivity to  superlativeness,  to  high,  lurid  color  and  fast  life,  be- 
cause youth  must  have  excitement,  and  if  this  be  not  at  hand 
in  the  form  of  moral  and  intellectual  enthusiasms,  it  is  more 
prone,  on  the  principle  of  kinetic  equivalents,  to  be  sought  for  in 
sex  or  in  drink.  Athletic  enthusiasm,  the  disposition  of  high 
school  and  college  youth  to  yell  and  paint  the  town,  to  laugh, 
become  boisterous  and  convivial,  are  better  than  sensuality  and 
reduce  temptation  to  it.  Better  that  a  few  of  the  most  promis- 
ing youth  should  be  maimed  or  even  killed  on  the  gridiron  or 
in  college  rushes,  or  lose  standing  in  their  devotion  to  teams 
and  to  emotional  culture,  than  that  they  should  find  excesses, 
some  forms  of  which  seem  necessary  now,  in  the  lower  life  of 
sinful  indulgence,  which  is  so  prone  to  stunt  and  arrest  the 
precious  last  stages  of  growth  in  mind  and  body.    More  or  less 


FEELINGS   AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  75 

of  this  erethic  diathesis  is  necessary  and  inevitable,  and  one  of 
the  chief  problems  of  education  is  to  prevent  its  lower  forms 
and  give  it  ever  higher  vents  and  fields.  Interest  in  and  devo- 
tion to  all  that  is  good,  beautiful,  and  true  is  its  loftiest  ex- 
pression, but  it  is  often  best  cultivated  on  a  lower  plane,  to  be 
applied  later  on  the  higher. 

We  here  see  the  instability  and  fluctuation  now  so  charac- 
teristic. The  emotions  develop  by  contrast  and  reaction  into 
the  opposite.  We  will  specify  a  few  of  its  antithetic  impulses 
now  so  marked. 

I.  There  are  hours, days,  weeks, and  perhaps  months  of  over- 
energetic  action.  The  young  man  trains  with  ardor;  perhaps 
breaks  a  record ;  sleep  may  be  reduced ;  he  studies  all  night  in 
a  persistent  cram ;  is  swept  away  by  some  new  fad ;  is  exalted 
and  hilarious  and  then  reacts ;  is  limp,  languid,  inert,  indiffer- 
ent, fatigued,  apathetic,  sleepy,  lazy;  feels  the  lack  of  motive 
power,  and  from  overwork  and  excessive  effort,  when  he 
goaded  himself  to  do  or  die,  he  relapses  to  a  dull  state  of  relax- 
ation and  doubts  whether  anything  is  really  worth  while  in 
the  world.  Thus  youth  now  is  really  and  easily  overworked ; 
is  never  so  fresh  or  more  rested  as  when  at  the  top  of  its  condi- 
tion, but  very  easily  wearied  and  exhausted  with  the  languor 
due  to  overtraining.  We  have  seen  that  early  adolescent  years 
are  prone  to  be  sickly,  although  the  death  rate  is  now  lowest, 
and  this  is  closely  connected  with  the  changes  from  overeffi- 
ciency  to  low  tension  so  frequent.  Sometimes  the  stage  of 
torpor  comes  first  or  predominates  and  causes  friends  to  be 
anxious.  Many  great  men,  as  we  saw  in  Chapter  VIII,  loitered 
in  their  development,  dawdled  in  their  work  and  seemed 
to  all  about  them  entirely  unpromising;  but  later  woke  up, 
went  to  work,  made  up  for  lost  time,  and  outstripped  their  fel- 
lows. These  changes  are  perhaps  in  slight  degree  modified 
by  weather,  like  moods,  and  have  no  doubt  a  physiological 
basis.  Sometimes  it  is  as  if  anemia  and  hyperemia  followed 
each  other  with  extreme  sloth  and  then  almost  convulsive  activ- 
ity of  motor  centers.  There  are  periods  when  one  can  do  easily 
twice  the  ordinary  task  without  fatigue.  Girls  of  fifteen  or 
sixteen  would  often  like  to  sleep  or  rest  a  week,  and  seem  in- 
capable of  putting  forth  real  effort,  and  then  there  are  fevers 


76  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

of  craving  hard  and  even  disagreeable  work.  Many  returns 
show  that  in  the  spring  there  is  very  often  great  loathing  to 
exert  one's  self,  but  this  is  occasionally  broken  by  hours,  days, 
or  even  weeks  of  supernormal  activity,  when  stints  are  not  only 
completed,  but  extra  and  self-imposed  tasks  are  done  with  alac- 
rity and  satisfaction.  Often  there  is  a  periodicity  of  activity  in 
young  men  that  suggests  a  monthly  and  sometimes  a  seasonal 
rhythm.  The  regular  changes  of  day  and  night  do  not  suffice, 
but  this  is  complicated  by  some  larger  cycle  of  alternating  re- 
cuperative and  energetic  periods  of  latent  and  patent,  or  inner 
and  outer  work.  This,  like  so  much  else,  suggests  an  atavistic 
trace  of  savage  life,  more  controlled  by  moon  and  tides  and 
warm  and  cold  seasons.  Indeed,  diurnal  regularity  of  work, 
play,  food,  and  sleep  is  a  recent  thing  in  the  development-his- 
tory of  man,  is  hard  to  establish,  and  in  the  vagrant,  criminal, 
vicious,  and  pauper  class  is  often  never  reached.  But  spells  of 
overactivity,  alternating  with  those  of  sluggishness  and  inert- 
ness, still  seem  in  these  years  like  neural  echoes  of  ancient  hunts 
and  feasts,  fasts  and  famines,  migration  and  stagnation.  Now 
at  least  nature  pushes  on  her  work  of  growth  by  alternation, 
now  centering  her  energies  upon  function,  now  upon  increase 
in  size  of  organs,  and  perhaps  by  this  method  of  economy  at- 
tains a  higher  level  than  would  be  reached  by  too  much  poise, 
balance,  and  steadiness.  It  is  as  if  the  momentum  of  growth 
energies  had  to  overcome  obstacles  at  every  point,  by  removing 
now  this,  now  that  hindrance,  where  if  its  energies  had  been 
applied  to  all  simultaneously  they  would  have  been  less  effec- 
tive. 

2.  Closely  connected  with  this  are  the  oscillations  between 
pleasure  and  pain — the  two  poles  of  life,  its  sovereign  masters. 
The  fluctuations  of  mood  in  children  are  rapid  and  incessant. 
Tears  and  laughter  are  in  close  juxtaposition.  Their  emo- 
tional responses  to  impressions  are  immediate.  They  live  in 
the  present  and  reflect  all  its  changes,  and  their  feelings  are 
little  affected  by  the  past  or  the  future.^  With  the  dawn  of 
adolescence,  the  fluctuations  are  slower  and  often  for  a  time 


1  See  Karl  Just :  Die  Gefiihle  des  Frohsinns  und  der  Heiterkeit  und  der  Wech- 
sel  der  Stimmung  im  Gemuthsleben  des  Kindes.  Jahrbuch  des  Vereins  f.  wis. 
Ped.,  also  his  Gefiihlsleben  des  Kindes. 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC   EVOLUTION  77 

more  extreme,  and  recovery  from  elation  and  especially  from 
depression  is  retarded.  The  past,  and  still  more  the  future,  is 
involved,  and  as  the  mental  life  widens,  either  tendency  acquires 
more  momentum.  Youth  can  not  be  temperate,  in  the  philo- 
sophical sense.  Now  it  is  prone  to  laughter,  hearty  and  per- 
haps almost  convulsive,  and  is  abandoned  to  pleasure,  the  field 
of  which  ought  gradually  to  widen  with  perhaps  the  pain  field, 
although  more.  There  is  gaiety,  irrepressible  levity,  an  euphoria 
that  overflows  in  every  absurd  manifestation  of  excess  of  ani- 
mal spirits,  that  can  not  be  repressed,  that  danger  and  affliction, 
appeals  to  responsibility  and  to  the  future,  can  not  daunt  nor 
temper.  To  have  a  good  time  is  felt  to  be  an  inalienable  right. 
The  joys  of  life  are  never  felt  with  so  keen  a  relish ;  youth  lives 
for  pleasure,  whether  of  an  epicurean  or  an  esthetic  type.  It 
must  and  ought  to  enjoy  life  without  alloy.  Every  day  seems 
to  bring  passionate  love  of  just  being  alive,  and  the  genius  for 
extracting  pleasure  and  gratification  from  everything  is  never 
so  great. 

But  this,  too,  reacts  into  pain  and  disphoria,  as  surely  as  the 
thesis  of  the  Hegelian  logic  passes  over  to  its  antithesis. 
Young  people  weep  and  sigh,  they  know  not  why ;  depressive 
are  almost  as  characteristic  as  expansive  states  of  conscious- 
ness. The  sad  Thanatopsis  mood  of  gloom  paints  the  world 
in  black.  Far-off  anticipations  of  death  come  in  a  foreboding 
way,  as  it  is  dimly  felt,  though  not  realized,  that  life  is  not  all 
joy  and  that  the  individual  must  be  subordinated  and  eventually 
die.  Hence  statistics  show,  as  we  have  seen,  a  strange  rise  in 
the  percentage  of  suicides.  Now  there  is  gloom  and  anon  spon- 
taneous exuberance.  In  766  of  Lancaster's  returns,  thirteen 
had  thought  seriously  of  suicide,  although  only  three  had  suc- 
cessfully attempted  it.  Perhaps  elation  precedes  and  depres- 
sion comes  as  a  reaction  in  the  majority  of  cases,  although  this 
is  not  yet  clear.  Some  feel  despondent  on  awakening,  at  school 
time,  or  at  noon,  suggesting  nutritive  changes.  "  The  curve  of 
despondency  starts  at  eleven,  rises  steadily  and  rapidly  till  fif- 
teen, culminates  at  seventeen,  then  falls  steadily  till  twenty 
three."  Young  people  are  often  unaccountably  pleased  with 
every  trifle.  They  can  shout  for  joy  from  the  very  fact  of 
being  alive.  The  far-off  destiny  of  senescence  looms  up,  and 
in   fatigue  the   atrabiliar  psychic  basis  of  pessimism  clouds 


78  .THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

life  for  a  time  and  brings  into  dominance  a  new  set  of 
associations  like  another  personality.  Youth  fears  inade- 
quacy of  its  powers  to  cope  with  the  world.  How  this  is 
connected  with  the  alternating  extremes  of  sexual  tension, 
we  have  seen,  although  this  by  no  means  explains  all.  Some- 
times the  tears  are  from  no  assignable  cause,  and  often 
from  factitious  motives.  Suspicion  of  being  disliked  by 
friends,  of  having  faults  of  person  or  character  that  can  not 
be  overcome;  the  fancy  of  being  a  supposititious  child  of  their 
parents,  of  having  unwittingly  caused  calamity  to  others,  of 
hopeless  love;  failure  in  some  special  effort;  a  sense  of  the 
necessity  of  a  life  of  work  and  hardship — these  bring  moods 
that  may  be  more  or  less  extreme  according  to  environment, 
heredity,  temperament,  and  other  causes,  may  succeed  each 
other  with  greater  or  less  frequency,  and  may  threaten  to  issue 
in  brooding,  depression,  and  melancholy,  or  in  a  careless  and 
blind  instinct  to  live  for  the  day ;  but  these,  too,  are  due  to  the 
fact  that  the  range  of  pleasure  and  pain  is  increased,  so  that 
there  are  new  motives  to  each,  and  perhaps  a  long  period  with 
occasional  special  dangers  must  elapse  before  a  final  adjust- 
ment. 

This  is  the  age  of  giggling,  especially  with  girls,  who  are 
at  this  stage  of  life  farthest  from  Vassey's  ^  view  that  man  is 
not  originally  a  laughing  animal  and  that  the  gentleman  and 
lady  should  never  laugh,  but  only  smile.  If  convulsive  laughter 
is  an  epilepsy,  it  is  one  that  begins  in  the  highest  regions  and 
passes  down  the  meristic  levels.^  Goethe  well  says,  that  noth- 
ing is  more  significant  of  men's  character  than  what  they  find 
laughable.  The  adolescent  perhaps  is  most  hilarious  over  cari- 
cature of  nationalities,  teachers,  freshmen,  the  other  sex,  etc., 
who  are  mimicked,  burlesqued,  and  satirized.  Ridicule  is  now 
a  powerful  weapon  of  propriety.  Again,  the  wit  of  the  ephebos 
sometimes  provokes  a  mental  ticklishness  about  certain  sacred 
and  sometimes  sexual  topics,  which  may  make  jocularity  and 
waggishness  almost  a  plague.  Another  of  the  chief  butts  of 
adolescent  fun  is  what  is  naive  and  unconscious;  the  blunders 


*  The  Philosophy  of  Laughing  and  Smiling.     London,  1877,  p.  194. 
'  The  Psychology  of  Tickling,  Laughing,  and  the  Comic,  by  G.  flail  and  the 
late  Arthur  Allin.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  October,  1897,  vol.  ix,  pp.  1-41. 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  79 

of  the  greeny,  the  unsophisticated  way  not  only  of  the  fresh- 
man, but  of  the  countryman,  the  emigrant,  and  the  Backfisch  girl 
now  abound,  while  the  simple  idea  of  disaster  or  misfortune, 
which  constitutes  the  humor  of  nine-tenths  of  the  professional 
joke-makers,  is  rare.  The  horror  of  old  or  even  once-told  jests 
is  never  so  intense,  nor  the  appreciation  for  novelty  so  keen. 

3.  Self-feeling  is  increased,  and  we  have  all  degrees  of  ego- 
ism and  all  forms  of  self-affirmation.  The  chief  outcrop  may 
be  vanity  and  a  sense  of  personal  beauty  and  attractiveness,  that 
is  felt  to  be  stunning  to  the  other  sex.  It  may  be  expressed  in 
swagger  ways;  thrusting  one's  self  into  conspicuous  places; 
talking,  acting,  dressing,  to  attract  notice;  or  in  complacency 
and  even  conceit  for  supposed  superiority  over  others.  Impu- 
dence, affront,  insult,  and  sometimes  even  physical  aggressive- 
ness are  forms  of  it.  Growth  of  mind  and  body  is  so  rapid  that 
it  is  felt  to  the  point  of  overestimation.  Self-feeling  is  fed  by 
all  the  compliment  and  sweet  flattery  of  affection,  which  is  the 
food  often  really  tasted  for  the  first  time  with  true  gusto,  on 
which  it  shoots  up  with  mushroom  growth.  The  wisdom  and 
advice  of  parents  and  teachers  is  overtopped,  and  in  ruder  na- 
tures may  be  met  by  blank  contradiction.  It  is  all  a  new  con- 
sciousness of  altitude  and  the  desire  to  be,  and  to  be  taken  for, 
men  and  women ;  to  be  respected,  consulted,  and  taken  into 
confidence.  The  new  sense  of  self  may  be  so  exquisitely  deli- 
cate that  a  hundred  things  in  the  environment,  that  would  never 
rankle  before,  now  sting  and  irritate.  This  is  sometimes  ex- 
pressed in  more  or  less  conscious  and  formulated  codes  of 
honor,  which  among  youth  is  often  a  strange  and  wondrous 
thing  which  must  be  defended  by  the  wager  of  battle,  with  fists, 
or  among  German  students  with  the  sword,  with  all  the  punc- 
tilio of  chivalry.  Sometimes  the  formulas  by  which  honor  and 
self-respect  may  be  gained,  maintained,  impaired,  and  restored 
are  detailed.  Courage,  honesty,  parents,  especially  the  mother, 
and  perhaps  a  sweetheart,  are  involved,  and  the  youth  must 
perhaps  represent  honor  for  two.  Ideals  are  so  high  and  the 
tedious  labor  by  which  they  are  attained  so  constitutionally 
ignored  that  the  goal  seems  very  near  and  attainable  if  the  pur- 
pose is  high,  so  that  the  spirited,  mettlesome  ephebos  or  cadet 
summarily  demands  the  world  to  take  him  on  credit,  as  if  the 
promise  of  his  ambition  were  already  fulfilled.  The  youth  who 


8o  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

has  been  amenable  to  advice  and  even  suggestion,  now  becomes 
obstreperous,  recalcitrant,  filled  with  a  spirit  of  opposition,  and 
can  not  repress  a  sense  of  top-lofty  superiority  to  the  ways  and 
persons  of  his  environment.  Age  is  often  made  to  suffer  dis- 
courtesy, and  it  sometimes  seems  as  though  the  faculties  of 
reverence  and  respect,  to  say  nothing  of  admiration,  were  sud- 
denly gone. 

But  the  ebb  of  this  tide  is  no  less  pronounced,  and  may  pre- 
cede in  time  its  flood.  The  same  youth  with  all  his  brazen 
effrontery  may  feel  a  distrust  of  self  and  a  sinking  of  heart, 
which  all  his  bravado  is  needed  to  hide.  He  doubts  his  own 
powers,  is  perilously  anxious  about  his  future,  his  self-love  is 
wounded  and  humiliated  in  innumerable  ways  keenly  felt,  per- 
haps at  heart  resented,  but  with  a  feeling  of  impotence  to  resist. 
The  collapsing  moods  bring  a  sense  of  abasement  and  humil- 
iation, which  sometimes  seems  like  a  degree  of  complacency 
to  all  that  comes,  suggesting  spiritlessness.  Youth  often 
fears  itself  lacking  in  some  essential  trait  of  manhood  or 
womanhood,  or  wanting  the  qualities  of  success.  He  is  often 
vanquished  in  innumerable  rivalries  and  competitions  that  now 
make  so  much  of  life,  and  loses  heart  and  face.  The  world 
seems  all  the  more  hopeless  because  of  the  great  demands  which 
the  opposite  mood  has  imposed.  Sometimes  a  sense  of  shame 
from  purely  imaginary  causes  is  so  poignant  as  to  plunge  the 
soul  for  a  time  into  the  deepest  and  most  doleful  dumps ;  fancied 
slights  suggest  despair,  and  in  place  of  wonted  self-confidence 
there  is  a  retiring  bashfulness,  which  no  coaxing  or  encourage- 
ment of  friends  can  overcome  or  fathom,  and  which  may  ex- 
press itself  only  in  some  secret  diary  or  perhaps  in  prayer. 
This,  too,  of  course,  often  shades  into  elation  and  depression 
from  moral  causes. 

Youth,  too,  may  become  overfastidious  and  efifeminate, 
and  this  may  pervade  toilet,  manners,  care  for  health,  or  even 
take  the  form  of  moral  nicety,  overscrupulousness,  and  casuis- 
try. Time  was  when  the  freshman  was  really  green,  awkward, 
inept  in  speech,  without  repose,  but  now  too  often  the  sub- 
freshman  is  a  polished  gentleman,  confident  and  at  home  every- 
where, though  happily  often  betraying  in  some  respects  the  ear- 
marks of  the  native  roughness  w-hich  goes  along  with  strength, 
in  the  midst  of  the  overrefinement,  suggestive  of  weakness. 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  8 1 

4.  Another  clearly  related  alternation  is  that  between 
selfishness  and  altruism.  Before  puberty,  children  are  fed, 
clothed,  sheltered,  instructed,  and  done  for,  so  that  all  the  cur- 
rents in  their  environment,  especially  with  parents  who  follow 
Froebel's  injunction  to  live  for  their  children,  have  flowed 
toward  and  converge  in  them.  Now  currents  in  the  oppo- 
site direction  arise  and  should  normally  gather  strength  until 
they  predominate.  Life  is  sacrifice,  and  in  trite  parlance,  we 
really  live  for  what  we  die  for.  Before,  youth  must  be  served ; 
now,  it  must  serve.  Its  wants,  perhaps  even  its  whims,  have 
been  supreme,  but  in  the  matin  song  of  love  the  precepts  of 
renunciation  are  heard.  Just  as  the  embryonic  cell  grows  large 
till  it  can  no  longer  be  nourished  from  without  and  must  then 
divide  or  die,  so  the  individual  must  be  subordinated  to  society 
and  posterity.  Life  is  no  longer  ego-centric,  bat  altro-centric. 
Politeness  and  courtesy,  and  respect  for  the  feelings  of  others, 
are  often  hard  at  first,  but  are  a  school  of  minor  morals  grad- 
uating into  that  of  the  higher  virtues.  Sympathy,  and  especially 
love,  wither  the  individual,  until  self-subordination  may  be- 
come a  passion.  Youth  devotes  himself,  perhaps  by  a  vow,  to 
a  lifetime  of  self-denial  or  painful  servitude  to  some  great 
cause,  or  a  career  in  which  some  of  the  deepest  of  human  in- 
stincts must  be  mortified  and  eradicated.  He  or  she  would  go 
on  missions ;  labor  for  the  sick,  ignorant,  depraved,  and  de- 
fective classes ;  espouse  great  philanthropic  causes,  and  very 
often  practise  in  secret  asceticisms  in  the  common  and  harmless 
pleasures  and  comforts  of  life,  in  food,  drink,  sleep,  it  may  be, 
to  the  point  of  impairment  of  health,  as  if  now  glimpsing  from 
afar  the  universal  law  which  makes  all  individual  good  merely 
ancillary  to  the  welfare  of  the  species.  Self-sacrifice  may  be  ex- 
orbitant and  vows  gifts;  humiliations  are  enthusiastic;  selfish- 
ness seems  mean;  the  ideal  becomes  a  "pure  life  ruled  by  love 
alone" ;  the  unselfishness  may  sometimes  come  in  streaks  and  is 
often  secreted,  young  people  giving  food  or  sweetmeats,  stay- 
ing at  home  to  give  others  pleasure,  without  telling.  There  is, 
on  the  one  hand,  increase  of  self-confidence,  a  sense  that  the 
individual  "  is  important  enough  to  be  noticed  anywhere  " ;  but 
this  is  not  incompatible  with  helping  others  as  never  before,  and 
even  performing  disagreeable  tasks  for  them,  associating  with 

the  bad  in  order  to  make  them  better,  and  greater  readiness  to 
45 


82  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

give  up  any  individual  good.  Our  returns  here  show  outcrops 
of  the  grossest  selfishness  and  greediness  side  by  side  with  a 
generosity  and  magnanimity  rarely  found  in  adult  life  save  in 
poetry  and  romance.  Others'  rights  of  possession,  food,  and 
clothing  sometimes  are  rudely  trampled  under  foot,  while  the 
most  delicate  attentions  and  services,  involving  both  fore- 
thought and  hardship,  are  carried  out  to  others  or  perhaps  to 
the  same  persons.  It  seems  as  if  expressions  of  extremely 
puerile  selfishness  were  now  particularly  prone  to  be  compen- 
sated for  by  extremes  of  the  opposite  nature,  and  vice  versa; 
that  often  those  most  tender  and  considerate,  most  prone  to 
take  pains,  to  prefer  others'  enjoyment  to  their  own,  and  to 
renounce  ease,  abandon  cherished  plans,  and  conquer  the 
strongest  natural  desires  in  doing  this,  were  those  most  liable 
occasionally  to  fall  lowest  in  gloating  self-gratification  at  the 
expense  of  others.^ 

Here,  too,  parents  and  teachers  sometimes  alternate  between 
hope  and  despair  for  the  young,  before  they  slowly  settle  to 
fixed  characteristics  and  conduct.  Moreover,  there  is  often  ar- 
rest before  the  process  of  self-effacement  is  duly  complete,  so 
that  we  see  in  adults  noble  lives  and  acts  veined  with  petty 
meannesses,  which  are  the  residual  and  unreduced  organs  of 
childhood. 

5,  Closely  connected  with  the  above  are  the  alternations 
between  good  and  bad  conduct  generally.  Perhaps  at  no  time 
of  life  can  goodness  be  so  exotically  pure  and  true,  virtue  so 
spotless,  and  good  works  spring  from  such  a  depth  of  good- 
will, which,  since  Kant,  is  often  made  the  source  of  all  real 
morality.    Conscience,  though  not  new-born,  now  can  first  be- 


*  The  ego,  Fichte  argued,  created  not  only  its  own  consciousness  but  the  objec- 
tive world,  and  is  therefore  sovereign  lord  of  all.  The  self  only  exists,  and  all 
else,  even  other  persons,  are  phantasmic  projections  of  it.  On  this  basis  Max 
.Stirner  (Das  Ich  und  sein  Eigenthum)  bases  his  monstrous  ethics  of  absolute  self- 
ishness. Each  must  get  every  possible  pleasure  and  seek  his  own  aggrandizement 
in  every  way.  Fame,  property,  sense,  and  enjoyment  must  be  striven  for  by  every 
means  that  can  be  successful,  and  all  ideas  of  morality,  truthfulness,  duty,  are  utter 
nullities  evolved  from  the  brain  of  superior  individuals  in  furtherance  of  this  aim. 
Nietzsche's  "will  to  power"  is  a  no  less  crass  reversion  to  the  egoism  of  savagery. 
Lust  of  power  is  glorified  to  the  point  of  tyranny  and  to  the  actual  disparagement 
of  tenderness  and  humanity.  Whatever  truth  there  is  in  this  view,  it  has  its  best 
outcrop  in  this  age. 


FEELINGS   AND   PSYCHIC   EVOLUTION  83 

gin  to  play  a  leading  role.  It  awakens  with  a  longing  hunger 
and  thirst  for  righteousness,  prompts  to  highest  aspiration  and 
resolve.  Benevolence  and  love  to  all  persons  and  all  being  is 
fresh  from  its  original  source,  and  there  are  hearty  good  wishes 
for  the  general  and  special  weal  of  others  and  ingenuity  in 
anticipating  and  gratifying  their  desires,  so  that  for  brief 
periods  youth  and  maidens  sometimes  seem  too  good  for  this 
earth. 

But  we  need  have  no  fear.  From  the  same  soil  in  which 
these  budding  virtues  spring  and  bloom  so  delicately  arise  rank 
weeds;  physical  appetites  are  grossly  indulged  naively,  even 
though  they  may  sometimes  seem  almost  bestial ;  propensities  to 
lie  break  out,  perhaps  irresistibly,  for  a  time.  Anger  slips  its 
leash  and  wreaks  havoc.  Some  petty  and  perhaps  undreamed 
meanness  surprises  the  onlooker.  The  common  constraints  of 
society  are  ruptured,  or  there  are  spasms  of  profanity ;  perhaps 
a  sudden  night  of  debauch,  before  knowledge  had  put  up  proper 
defenses ;  perhaps  some  lapse  from  virtue,  which  seems  almost 
irretrievable,  but  which  in  fact  should  never  be  so  readily  par- 
doned and  forgotten.  The  forces  of  sin  and  those  of  virtue 
never  struggle  so  hotly  for  possession  of  the  youthful  soul.  As 
statistics  show,  the  age  of  most  frequent  conversions  to  true 
religion  is  precisely  the  years  of  the  largest  percentage  of  first 
commitments  to  houses  of  detention  for  crime.  Now  some  new 
manifestations  of  vice  surprise  the  soul  in  the  midst  of  its  ideal 
longings  for  absolute  perfection,  and  wring  it  with  grief  and 
remorse.  It  seems  a  law  of  psychic  development,  that  more  or 
less  evil  must  be  done  to  unloose  the  higher  powers  of  constraint 
and  to  practise  them  until  they  can  keep  down  the  baser  in- 
stincts. The  religious  struggles  of  this  stage  bear  abundant 
evidence  to  the  violence  of  these  storms  and  counter  currents 
of  which  the  human  soul  is  now  the  arena.  Temptations  hith- 
erto unknown  to  sins  hitherto  impossible  bring  redeeming 
agencies  also  new  into  action,  and  while  the  juvenile  offender 
and  the  debauchee  is  arrested  in  his  development  and  remains 
through  life  under  the  power  of  evil,  growth  is  benign,  and 
those  who  achieve  normal  maturity  domesticate  their  baser  in- 
stincts into  the  service  of  goodness. 

6.  The  same  is  true  of  the  great  group  of  social  instincts, 
some  of  which  rest  upon  the  preceding.    Youth  is  often  bashful, 


84  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

retiring,  in  love  with  solitude ;  perhaps  wanders  alone  and  com- 
munes with  stars,  sea,  forest,  animals ;  prefers  nature  to  man ; 
loves  midnight  walks ;  shuns  the  face  of  man,  and  especially  the 
other  sex ;  becomes  interested  in  its  own  inner  states  and  care- 
less of  the  objective  while  sunken  in  the  subjective  life.  Some 
youth  take  to  drink  chiefly  or  solely  to  gain  through  it  the 
courage  to  go  into  society.  They  know  not  how,  or  if  they  do 
so,  find  it  hard  to  assert  themselves  sufficiently  to  do  justice  to 
their  ideas  of  their  own  merits.  This  is  most  common  among 
country  youth,  but  it  is  also  frequent  enough  in  the  city.  Others 
spring  into  a  new  love  of  companionship ;  friendships  are  ce- 
mented ;  "  mashes  "  and  "  crushes  "  occur ;  the  gregarious  pas- 
sion vents  itself  in  all  kinds  of  convivial  associations,  in  organi- 
zations of  many  kinds,  sometimes  in  riotous  bouts  and  carous- 
als; some  can  never  be  alone  and  seem  to  have  for  a  time  no 
resources  in  themselves,  but  to  be  abjectly  dependent  for  their 
happiness  upon  their  mates.  They  lose  independence,  and  not 
only  run,  but  think  and  feel,  with  the  gang  and  the  class.  Alone, 
they  are  uninteresting  and  uninterested,  but  with  others,  viva- 
cious, lively,  and  entertaining.  To  the  inner  circle  of  their 
chosen  associates  they  bare  their  inmost  soul.  There  are  no 
reserves  or  secrets,  but  a  love  of  confessional  outpourings  in 
intimate  hours  together  or  sometimes  in  letters.  The  desire  to 
please  dominates  some,  and  that  to  rule  and  lead,  others ;  while 
the  more  passive  and  inert  gradually  lose  the  power  of  indepen- 
dent action,  thought,  or  impulse,  and  come  into  the  settled  hab- 
its of  dependent  henchmen  and  followers.  The  psychology  of 
crowds  show  us  how  all  human  qualities  are  kept  in  counte- 
nance and  developed,  when  like  is  paired  with  like;  how  joys  are 
doubled  and  pains  divided ;  how  responsibility  is  attenuated 
until  the  greatest  outrages  are  perpetrated  by  masses,  from 
which  every  individual  would  revolt.  Alternations  between 
these  two  extremes  of  excessive  or  defective  sociability  are  less 
frequent  in  the  same  individual,  and  if  they  occur,  are  at  longer 
intervals. 

At  times,  young  people  feel  that  those  who  are  liked  fail  to 
appreciate  or  even  dislike  them.  They  are  repelled  by  society, 
feel  sinful  and  lonely,  and  perhaps  need  a  good  cry,  which  quite 
relieves  them.  We  find,  too,  admiration  and  contempt  strangely 
mingled;  now  appreciation,  which  almost  becomes  abject  hero 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  85 

worship  or  fanaticism  for  great  and  new  ideas,  gushing  devo- 
tion to  literary  and  art  products,  etc.,  but  all  alternating  with 
satire,  burlesque,  and  parody,  which  seem  to  indicate  that  the 
power  of  reverence  is  lost  and  all  the  charm  and  modesty,  which 
Plato  found  so  becoming  in  youth,  for  a  season  quite  extinct. 
There  is  always  a  wide  range  of  change  between  more 
and  less  before  a  center  of  gravity  is  found  and  a  definite  social 
character  established.  Both,  of  course,  are  necessary,  and  there 
is  much  that  is  true  in  the  Baconian  adage,  that  character  is 
perfected  in  solitude  and  talent  in  society.  City  life,  the  in- 
numerable clubs,  business  aggregations,  sodalities,  political  and 
religious  fraternization,  seem  a  characteristic  of  this  growingly 
urban  age,  and  have  no  doubt  perturbed  the  oscillations  of  the 
compass,  so  that  it  settles  more  slowly  toward  the  pole  of  man's 
destiny  than  in  other  historic  periods.  We  have  seen  these 
phenomena  unusually  accented  in  the  early  lives  of  Savonarola, 
Newton,  Shelley,  Patrick  Henry,  Keats,  Hawthorne,  Gifford, 
Jeffries,  Boyeson,  Nansen,  and  in  the  scores  of  our  returns 
from  men  and  women  unknown  to  fame. 

7.  Closely  akin  to  this  are  the  changes  from  exquisite  sen- 
sitiveness to  imperturbability  and  even  apathy,  hard-hearted- 
ness,  and  perhaps  cruelty.  Many  youthful  murderers,  callous 
to  the  sufferings  of  their  victims,  have  had  the  keenest  sym- 
pathy with  pets  and  even  with  children.  Most  criminals  are 
unfeeling  and  unhumane.  They  can  not  pity,  and  the  sus- 
ceptibility to  pathos  is  alien  to  them.  The  juvenile  torturers 
often  seem  to  have  specialized  psychic  zones,  where  tenderness 
is  excessive,  as  if  to  compensate  for  their  defect.  They  weep 
over  the  pain,  actual  or  imaginary,  of  their  pets,  while  utterly 
hardened  to  the  normal  sentiments  of  kindness  and  help  for 
suffering.  The  development  of  sympathy,  as  Sutherland  has 
shown,  has  been  slow  and  hard  in  the  world,  but  it  is  basal  for 
most  of  the  factors  of  morality, 

8.  Curiosity  and  interest  are  generally  the  first  outcrop  of 
intellectual  ability.  Youth  is  normally  greedy  for  knowledge, 
and  that,  not  in  one  but  in  many  directions.  There  is  eagerness, 
zest,  enthusiasm,  which  inspires  corresponding  activity  to 
know  that  and  only  that  which  is  of  the  highest  worth.  Wher- 
ever a  new  mine  of  great  and  fruitful  discovery  of  truth  is 
opened,  a  new  field  of  activity  appears,  or  new  motives  of  self- 


86  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

sacrifice  are  made  operative,  there  youth  is  in  its  element.  It 
is  the  age  of  questioning,  exploration,  investigation,  testing 
ideas,  men,  and  the  world.  Expectation  is  at  its  best  and  the 
impulse  to  be  ready  for  any  new  occasion  is  at  its  strongest. 
Now  first  it  is  really  felt  that  knowledge  is  power,  and  the 
noetic  fever  sometimes  becomes  too  hot  for  the  convenience  of 
others,  for  conventionality,  the  routine  of  life,  or  even  for 
health. 

But  the  opposite  is  no  less  germane  to  these  years.  Here 
we  find  the  inert  moods  and  types,  which  are  apathetic,  which 
can  not  be  profoundly  stirred,  that  regard  passionate  mental 
interest  as  bad  form,  and  cultivate  indifference,  that  can  not 
and  will  not  admire.  No  devoted  teacher  need  attempt  to  arouse 
and  fire  the  mind  in  this  condition.  Sometimes  this  is  all  an  af- 
fectation, mental  posing,  provoked  by  fashion  or  environment, 
and  unconsciously  imitative.  Sometimes,  alas !  it  is  the  direct 
result  of  excess,  which  saps  the  springs  of  life  and  brings  senes- 
cent inertia  before  its  time.  It  may  be  a  product  of  fatigue  and 
reaction  from  excessive  effort,  as  in  the  case  of  Stuart  Mill. 
It  is  not  pain  or  pessimism,  although,  if  real,  it  is  the  raw 
material  out  of  which  the  latter  is  made.  To  the  wise  adult 
this  is  always  pathetic,  for  what  is  youth  without  enthusiasm? 
These  states  always  need  wise  diagnosis,  because  if  they  are 
recuperative,  they  should  be  let  alone,  and  if  results  of  dissipa- 
tion, they  should  be  drastically  treated.  Institutions,  especially 
the  tone  and  traditions  of  colleges  and  high  schools,  differ 
widely  in  their  prevailing  atmosphere  in  this  regard.  Here,  too, 
a  considerable  range  is  no  doubt  normal. 

9.  Another  vacillation  is  between  knowing  and  doing.  Now 
the  life  of  the  study  charms,  and  the  ambition  is  to  be  learned, 
bookish,  or  there  is  a  passion  to  read.  Perhaps  there  is  a  love 
of  poetic  intoxication  or  of  contemplation,  such  as  Scott, 
Bryant,  Fulton,  Franklin,  Newton,  etc.,  experienced.  This 
afferent,  more  passive,  receptive  mood  is  necessary,  because  in 
the  civilized  state  youth  always  lives  in  the  midst  of  a  far 
higher  culture  than  it  could  produce.  But  a  reaction  is  almost 
always  inevitable  where  this  receptive  passion  is  extreme,  and 
soon  either  unconscious  instinct  or  else  purpose  takes  the  youth 
out  of  doors,  because  he  has  fallen  in  love  with  nature,  or,  it 
may  be,  to  cultivate  muscle.    His  tastes  and  plans  turn  to  active 


FEELINGS  AND   PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  S7 

occupation.  He  would  achieve  rather  than  learn.  He  feels 
sometimes,  more  or  less  unconsciously,  the  vanity  of  mere  eru- 
dition, and  wishes  to  storm  the  world  of  reality  and  win  his 
spurs,  make  his  mark,  and  become  an  active  and  perhaps  crea- 
tive cause. 

10.  Less  often  we  see  one  or  more  alternations  between 
dominance  by  conservative  and  by  radical  instincts.  The  young 
man  finds  the  world  out  of  joint  and  would  reform  the  church, 
school,  perhaps  social  and  family  life;  is  sick  at  heart  at  the 
hollowness  of  established  conventionality ;  is  fired  at  the  tyranny 
of  wealth  or  trusts,  and  would  himself  reconstruct  by  doubting, 
casting  out  everything  which  does  not  seem  to  his  own  fledgling 
intelligence  good,  true,  and  beautiful.  Some  do  and  all  ought 
to  react  from  the  party  of  progress  to  that  of  order,  from  burn- 
ing the  products  of  the  past  to  worshiping  them,  to  caring  and 
working  that  no  good  already  attained  be  lost ;  they  should  at 
some  period  feel  the  force  of  conventionalities,  the  truth  of 
highly  saturated  creeds,  the  value  of  established  institutions, 
despite  their  possible  betterment.  There  is  especial  danger  that 
temperament  or  environment  will  destroy  this  balance  and  pre- 
cipitate the  mind  for  life  into  one  or  another  of  these  camps 
where  extreme  views  are  so  easy  and  simple,  and  moderate  ones 
so  hard  and  complex.  This  is  especially  seen  in  the  religious 
sphere,  to  which  we  shall  turn  later.  The  equipoise  between 
atheism  and  bigotry  is  almost  always  disturbed ;  there  is  excess 
of  skepticism  or  of  credulity,  affirmation  or  denial,  doubt  or 
faith,  and  youth  is  especially  prone  to  be  distracted  between 
the  instincts  that  make  the  devotee  and  those  that  make  the 
heretic. 

11.  We  find  many  cases  of  signal  interest  in  which  there 
is  a  distinct  reciprocity  between  sense  and  intellect,  as  if  each 
had  its  nascent  period.  We  have  already  seen  how  the  senses 
are  acuminated  and  sense  interests  modified  and  generally  en- 
hanced, so  that  occasionally  youth  is  passionately  devoted  to 
seeing  and  hearing  new  things,  is  all  eye,  ear,  taste,  and  would 
widen  the  surface  of  contact  with  the  external  world  to  the 
maximum,  as  if  laying  in  stock  for  future  mental  elaboration; 
but  there  are  also  periods  of  inner  absorption  and  meditation, 
when  reality  fades  and  its  very  existence  is  questioned,  when 
the  elements  that  make  the  content  of  the  sensory  shoot  to- 


88  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

gether  into  new  unities.  The  inner  eye  that  sees  larger  corre- 
spondences in  time  and  space  is  opened ;  the  bearings  of  familiar 
facts  appear;  wisdom  is  sought  from  books  or  friends,  and  is 
assimilated  with  amazing  facility,  so  that  a  new  consciousness 
is  born  within  or  above  the  old,  and  the  attention  is  attracted  to 
inner  states  which  demand  explanation.  It  is  as  if  the  projec- 
tive system,  which  acts  and  reacts  upon  the  external  world, 
had  now  its  innings,  to  be  later  followed  by  a  period  when  the 
energy  of  psychic  growth  is  largely  turned  to  the  associative 
fibers,  both  ends  of  which  are  in  the  brain. 

12.  Closely  connected  with  this  is  the  juxtaposition  of 
wisdom  and  folly.  Now  there  are  high  intuitions  that  antici- 
pate maturity  and  even  the  best  mental  products  of  old  age, 
an  attitude  of  mind  that  seems  to  have  anticipated  the  experi- 
ences of  a  lifetime,  and  to  have  found  rest  in  the  true  goal  of 
wisdom.  Yet,  interspersed  with  all  this  precocious  philosophy, 
we  find  pitfalls  of  collapsing  and  childish  folly.  This  may  be 
ethical,  in  the  form  of  irritability,  greed,  causeless  and  irra- 
tional freakishness  and  abandon  to  the  lower  impulses,  or 
downright  silliness.  Those  precocious  in  some  are  often  ar- 
rested in  other  respects. 

We  have  already  seen  that  body  growth  is  not  symmetrical, 
but  to  some  extent  the  parts,  functions,  and  organs  grow  in 
succession,  so  that  the  exact  normal  proportions  of  the  body 
are  temporarily  lost,  to  be  regained  later  on  a  new  plan.  The 
mind  now  grows  in  like  manijer.  It  is  as  if  the  various  quali- 
ties of  soul  were  developed  successively;  as  if  the  energy  of 
growth  now  stretched  out  to  new  boundaries,  now  in  this  and 
now  in  that  direction.  This  is  biological  economy,  as  well  as 
recapitulatory,  because  in  some  way  that  we  do  not  understand 
nature  follows  in  the  psychic  field  the  familiar  mechanical  prin- 
ciple we  must  so  often  appeal  to  by  which  power  is  best  devel- 
oped over  a  large  surface,  to  be  later  best  applied  at  a  point. 
The  human  plant  circumnutates  in  a  wider  and  wider  circle, 
and  the  endeavor  should  be  to  prevent  it  from  prematurely 
finding  a  support,  to  prolong  the  period  of  variation  to  which 
this  stage  of  life  is  sacred,  and  to  prevent  natural  selection  from 
confirming  too  soon,  the  slight  advantage  which  any  quality 
may  temporarily  have  in  this  struggle  for  existence  among 


FEELINGS  AND  PSYCHIC  EVOLUTION  89 

many  faculties  and  tendencies  within  us.  The  educational  ideal 
is  now  to  develop  capacities  in  as  many  directions  as  possible, 
to  indulge  caprice  and  velleity  a  little,  to  delay  consistency  for 
a  time,  and  let  the  diverse  prepotencies  struggle  with  each  other. 
Now  everything  psychic  tends  in  its  turn  to  be  intense  to  the 
point  of  illusion  or  positive  obsession,  but  nature's  rhythm,  if 
allowed  to  have  its  due  course,  prevents  stagnation  and  hebe- 
tude, and  the  passion  to  change  keeps  all  powers  fluent  and 
plastic,  gives  elasticity  and  develops  power  of  sanification. 
Sometimes  there  seem  almost  to  be  dual  or  multiplex  personal- 
ities. The  venerable  four  temperaments  of  the  phrenologists 
seem  contending  with  each  other  for  dominance,  but  the  soul 
should  make  some  place  for  all  of  them  in  its  many  mansions. 
It  is  veritably  like  a  batrachian,  or  insect  struggling  to  get  out 
of  its  last  year's  skin  or  chitin,  or  like  sloughing  off  the  old  con- 
sciousness of  childhood  for  the  new  one  of  maturity.  It  is  thus 
that  the  soul  explores  the  maximum  area  possible  of  human 
experience.  This  is  now  the  meaning  of  the  freedom  of  the 
will,  and  captious  though  it  often  seems,  it  is  thus  that  the  foun- 
dations of  wise  choices  that  first  hear  from  all  parts  and  parties 
are  preformed.  The  mind  is  now  in  what  the  biologists  call  its 
generalized  form.  It  is  as  if  man  were  polyphyletic  in  his  ori- 
gin and  now  the  different  ethnic  stocks  were  successively  harked 
back  to.  The  possibility  of  variation  in  the  soul  is  now  at  its 
height.  Especially  in  races  of  mixed  blood,  our  returns  con- 
vince me,  that  more  prepotencies  clash  or  coincide,  as  the  case 
may  be,  and  we  can  often  detect  the  voices  of  our  forebears 
of  very  different  races  in  the  soul.  Psychic  life  is  thus  for  a 
term  greatly  perturbed.  When  the  youth  takes  the  helm  of  his 
own  being,  he  navigates  a  choppy  sea.  Thus  it  would  appear 
in  nature's  economy  he  must  strive,  fight,  and  storm  his  way  up, 
if  he  would  break  into  the  kingdom  of  man.  Here,  too,  many 
an  impulse  seeks  expression,  which  seems  strong  for  a  time, 
but  which  will  never  be  heard  of  later.  Its  function  is  to  stimu- 
late the  next  higher  power  that  can  only  thus  be  provoked  to 
development,  in  order  to  direct,  repress,  or  supersede  it.  Never 
is  it  so  true  that  nothing  human  is  alien  from  each  individual, 
as  in  this  fever  of  ephebeitis,  which  has  so  many  peculiar  fea- 
tures in  the  American  temperament. 

The  popular  idea,  that  youth  must  have  its  fling,  implies 


90  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

the  need  of  greatly  and  sometimes  suddenly  widened  liberty, 
which  nevertheless  needs  careful  supervision  and  wise  direc- 
tion, from  afar  and  by  indirect  methods.  The  forces  of  growth 
now  strain  to  their  uttermost  against  old  restrictions.  It  is  the 
age  of  bathmism,  or  most  rapid  variation,  which  is  sometimes 
almost  saltatory.  Nearly  every  latency  must  be  developed,  or 
else  some  higher  power,  that  later  tempers  and  coordinates  it, 
lacks  normal  stimulus  to  develop.  Instead  of  the  phenomena  of 
alternate  generation,  where  certain  potentialities  lie  dormant  in 
one  generation  to  appear  in  the  next,  we  have  corresponding 
psychic  phenomena  in  one  and  the  same  individual  by  which 
faculties  and  impulses,  which  are  denied  legitimate  expression 
during  their  nascent  periods,  break  out  well  on  in  adult  life — 
falsetto  notes  mingling  with  manly  bass  as  strange  puerilities. 
The  chief  end  in  view  must  now  be  to  bring  out  all  the  poly- 
phonous  harmonies  of  human  nature.  The  individual  can  never 
again  expand  his  nature  to  so  nearly  compass  the  life  of  the 
species.  The  voices  of  extinct  generations,  sometimes  still  and 
small,  sometimes  strident  and  shrill,  now  reverberate,  and 
psychic  development  is  by  leaps  and  bounds,  of  which  psycho- 
logical science  has  so  far  been  able  to  know  but  very  little. 

Mental  unity  comes  later.  Consistency  then  has  its  place. 
The  supreme  Aristotelian  virtue  of  temperance  and  the  golden 
mean — which  is  courage  well  poised  between  timidity  and  fool- 
hardiness,  liberality  midway  between  the  extremes  of  avarice 
and  prodigality,  modesty  which  combines  the  good  and  rejects 
the  evil  by  excess  of  bashfulness  and  impudence,  self-respect 
which  is  neither  vainglory  nor  self-abasement — slowly  knits 
up  the  soul,  coordinates  its  many  elements,  represses  illusions, 
and  issues  in  settled  character.  The  logical  as  contrasted  with 
the  genetic  ideal  now  arises  and  prompts  to  reason,  consistency, 
and  coordinations  in  ever  higher  associations  as  cosmos  rises 
from  chaos.  We  see  over  and  over  again  that  the  metamorphic 
stages  of  early  adolescence  are  forgotten,  and  how  impossible  it 
is  for  the  mature  mind  to  remember  or  even  credit,  when  they 
are  noted  or  told  by  others,  the  preceding  phases  of  instinctive 
transformations.  In  one  sense,  youth  loses  very  much  in  be- 
coming adult.  The  ordered,  regular  life  of  maturity  involves 
necessarily  more  or  less  degeneration  for  simple  tendencies. 
Indeed,  the  best  definition  of  genius  is  intensified  and  pro- 


FEELINGS   AND   PSYCHIC   EVOLUTION  9' 

longed  adolescence,  to  which  excessive  or  premature  system- 
atization  is  fatal.  Even  in  commonplace  lives,  higher  qualities, 
and  often  the  very  highest,  appear  in  the  teens  for  a  brief  flit- 
ting moment,  or  at  least  they  barely  hint  their  existence  and 
then  fade,  sometimes  because  the  demands  of  adulthood  are 
too  early  or  too  insistently  enforced. 

This  law  of  a  period  of  freedom  that  leans  a  little  toward 
license  before  the  human  colt  is  haltered  and  broken  to  any  of 
the  harnesses  of  severe  discipline,  is  favored  by  every  aspect  of 
the  bionomic  law.  It  is  a  fact  of  great  significance  not  only 
unexplored  but  hitherto  unnoted,  that  even  as  the  psychic  per- 
turbations of  this  stage  of  multifarious  impulsions  are  lost  to 
recollection,  because  they  are  so  inconsistent  and  blind,  since 
they  lack  the  intellectual  factor  of  experience,  just  so  the  phy- 
letic  stages  iri  the  development  of  the  race  that  correspond  to 
puberty  fall  largely  in  the  unhistoric  period — the  darkest  of  all 
dark  ages,  during  which  brute  became  man.  Science  explores 
the  simian  forms  of  life,  but  here  our  sense  of  ignorance  is 
increasingly  painful.  The  distribution  of  the  gorilla  is  rapidly 
narrowing  toward  early  extinction,  and  we  know  far  less  of 
its  characteristics,  or  those  of  the  gibbon,  ourang,  and  chim- 
panzee, than  we  do  of  the  lowest  races  of  men.  The  interval 
between  the  highest  anthropoid  brain  of  550  cubic  centimeters, 
and  that  of  the  lowest  man,  1,150  cubic  centimeters,  is  almost 
as  lost  as  a  sunken  Atlantis.  If  we  take  Canstadt  man,  per- 
haps the  lowest  in  Europe,  as  the  point  of  reemergence  of 
man's  phyletic  history,  we  find  the  most  radical  transforma- 
tions. 

In  the  interval  that  separates  the  pithecoid  from  the  trog- 
lodyte, many  changes,  perhaps  more  momentous  than  any  in  the 
historic  period,  took  place.  Arboreal  life  and  a  diet  of  fruits, 
nuts,  and  buds  was  exchanged  for  a  life  well  adjusted  to  fluvial 
and  littoral  conditions.  The  shore — the  most  changing  of  all 
the  life  areas,  the  great  feeding-ground  of  aquatic  and  terres- 
trial forms,  where  all  land  animals  originally  came  from  their 
primordial  home  in  the  sea,  after  long  amphibian  apprentice- 
ship, and  where  the  whale,  seal,  and  other  backsliders  to  aquatic 
life  reverted  after  long  experience  on  the  land — had  already 
been  the  highway  of  extended  migration  ;  and  man,  especially  if 
monophyletic  and  if  the  qualities  that  gave  him  supremacy  over 


9^  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

the  brutes  were  developed  in  a  single  narrow  area,  had  multi- 
plied rapidly ;  had  learned  the  use  of  fire  and  cooking,  thus  free- 
ing energy,  hitherto  needed  for  digestion,  to  higher  uses ;  had 
entered  the  paleolithic  stage  of  chipped  stone  for  spear  and  ar- 
row heads ;  had  asserted  his  dominion  over  the  mammoth,  cave- 
bear,  hyena,  woolly  rhinoceros,  Irish  elk ;  had  invested  himself 
with  the  freedom  of  the  world ;  had  become  the  most  migratory 
of  all  species,  thus  favoring  amphimixis  and  variation  by  ex- 
ogamy, and  knew  no  barrier  because  only  man  stops  man.  He 
had  been  forced  from  some  primitive  home  or  cunabula,  perhaps 
by  the  slow  submergence  of  Sclater's  Lemuria,  or  driven  from 
his  pristine  habitat  on  the  high  table-lands  north  of  the  Hima- 
layas, and  had  already  begun  his  career  over  the  globe.  During 
this  period  many  of  the  scores  of  domestic  animals  had  been 
tamed — perhaps  mostly,  as  O.T.Mason  thinks — by  women  who 
began  pastoral  life.  Many  of  the  two  hundred  and  forty-nine 
species  of  plants  of  which  de  Candolle  traces  the  history — all 
phanerogamous — were  brought  under  culture  also  perhaps  first 
by  women,  and  thus  settled  agricultural  life  had  been  intro- 
duced. The  hand  had  been  developed  much  in  structure,  and 
far  more  in  function,  from  a  simple  prehensile  organ  to  a  tool 
and  weapon  user  and  even  maker.  Dress  had  evolved,  a  mo- 
mentous change  had  come  about  by  focusing  development  upon 
intelligence  as  soon  as  its  high  survival  and  selective  value  made 
itself  felt,  leaving  the  body  relatively  unchanged  while  mind 
evolved  enormously,  if  not  disproportionately,  like  the  giraffe's 
neck.  Infancy  had  been  prolonged,  and,  with  it,  parental  care, 
love  and  home,  and  the  possibilities  of  education  unfolded. 
Speech  and  tradition  had  been  acquired.  From  this  point  all 
is  relatively  easy  of  explanation,  for  as  Lyell  said,  if  all  but  one 
race  of  men  in  a  single  spot  of  the  globe  were  exterminated, 
they  would  soon  people  the  earth  again  though  they  were  as  low 
as  the  Eskimo  or  South  Sea  Islander.  Perhaps  primitive  man 
had  already  grown  to  gigantic  stature,  as  Principal  Dawson 
conjectures,  and  did  and  dared  at  sea,  in  hunting,  and  in  cross- 
ing barriers,  that  which  modern  man  would  not.  Perhaps  he 
was  a  pigmoid,  as  the  horse  has  grown  from  the  orohippus  of 
fox  size;  perhaps  he  was  Broca's  estromelian,  half  monster  and 
half  man ;  or  more  akin  to  Lombroso's  degenerate  mattoid,  or 
to  Sergi's  hominidae.     Perhaps  McRitchie's  conjecture  that 


FEELINGS   AND   PSYCHIC   EVOLUTION  93 

fairies  were  primitive  dwarfs  or  mid-men  is  valuable;  it  is  in 
line  with  the  wide-spread  superstition  that  arrow-heads  are 
fairy  darts.  He  may  have  been  pliocene,  diluvial,  or  even 
tertiary. 

My  own  belief,  as  I  have  set  forth  elsewhere,^  is  that  man 
early  became  the  wanderer  and  the  exterminator  par  excellence. 
Less  than  any  other  animal,  can  man  tolerate  rivals  in  the 
struggle  for  existence.  The  instinct  which  impelled  him  to 
exterminate  the  North  sea-cow  in  1767,  and,  in  the  nineteenth 
century,  the  great  awk  in  1840,  the  African  quagga  in  1870, 
and  scores  of  other  animals  and  birds  that  in  recent  times  have 
gone  forever  even  beyond  the  reach  of  the  collector,  that  is  now 
rapidly  reducing  to  the  vanishing  point  the  American  bison, 
the  Indian  lion  and  rhinoceros,  the  walrus,  the  zebra-giraffe, 
halibut,  oyster,  lobster,  etc.,  and  that  prepares  and  sells  the  skins 
of  two  million  birds  a  year,  which  are  dying  out  that  man  may 
have  food,  safety,  or  sport,  is  the  same  instinct  which  in  pre- 
historic times  destroyed  chiefly  or  with  aid  of  other  causes  the 
gigantic  extinct  mammals,  and  has  forever  scarred  man's  soul 
with  fear,  anger,  and  wanton  cruelty.  The  same  enmity  against 
the  lower  races,  which  in  our  day  has  exterminated  forever  the 
Boethuks,  the  Tasmanians,  and  is  reducing  so  many  lower 
human  ethnic  stocks  to  make  way  for  favored  races,  is  but  a 
relic  of  the  rage  which  exterminated  the  missing  links  and 
made  man  for  ages  the  passionate  destroyer  of  his  own  pedi- 
gree, so  that  no  trace  of  it  is  left. 

A  great  number  of  the  phyletic  corollates  of  some  of  the 
most  marked  stages  by  which  prepubescent  boyhood  passes  to 
maturity  exist  only  in  the  later  phases  of  this  transition  from 
anthropoid  to  savage  life,  although  many  are  found  earlier  and 
others  later  yet.  To  much  in  this  dark  interval  early  adoles- 
cence is  the  only  key,  but  even  here  the  record  is  so  distorted, 
falsified,  so  often  inverted,  so  mingled  with  what  belongs  to 
later  phases,  that  we  know  as  yet  but  little  how  to  use  this  key. 
To-day  youth  is  passed  in  an  environment  of  culture,  nearly 
every  element  of  which  is  far  superior  to  anything  that  it  could 
produce.     The  powers  of  imitation  and  appropriation  are  so 


^  The  Relation  of  Civilization  and  Savagery.     Proc.  Mass.  Hist.  Soc,  January, 
1903. 


94  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

developed  and  perhaps  hypertrophied  that  it  is  impossible  to 
distinguish  what  comes  from  indigenous  and  what  from  ac- 
quired sources.  The  past  and  future  contend  with  each  other 
for  mastery.  In  his  elegiac  moods,  youth  seems  to  long  for  a 
lost  idea  in  a  way  that  suggests  transmigration  of  a  Platonic 
Wordsworthian  type,  as  plants  dream  of  the  sun,  and  on  the 
other  hand,  his  esthetic  sensibilities  are  presentiments  of  a 
superior  stage  of  the  race  that  will  develop  out  of  the  present 
human  type  which  it  is  the  function  of  art  to  prophesy  and 
anticipate.  The  processes  last  to  be  attained  are  least  assured 
by  heredity  and  most  dependent  upon  individual  effort,  in  aid  of 
which  nature  gives  only  propulsion,  often  less  defined  the  later 
it  can  be  acquired,  like  the  Kantian  pure  autonomous  "  ought- 
ness,"  which  the  individual  must  laboriously  shape  by  a  wise 
use  of  heteronymous  and  consciously  regulated  motives.  While 
adolescence  is  the  great  revealer  of  the  past  of  the  race,  its 
earlier  stages  must  be  ever  surer  and  safer  and  the  later  possi- 
bilities ever  greater  and  more  prolonged,  for  it,  and  not 
maturity  as  now  defined,  is  the  only  point  of  departure  for  the 
superanthropoid  that  man  is  to  become.  This  can  be  only  by  an 
ever  higher  adolescence  lifting  him  to  a  plane  related  to  his 
present  maturity  as  that  is  to  the  well-adjusted  stage  of  boy- 
hood where  our  puberty  now  begins  its  regenerating  metamor- 
phoses. 


CHAPTER   XI 

ADOLESCENT    LOVE 

Physical  self-consciousness — Nudity  in  history  and  its  pedagogy — Early  phallicism 
and  the  reactions  against  it — Sex  and  mental  growth — Relations  between  the 
child  and  the  race — Evolutionary  stages  of  secondary  sex  qualities — Morbid- 
ities of  this  instinct — Inadequate  treatment  of  the  topic — Animal  and  primi- 
tive human  courtship — The  dominant  influence  of  the  female — Common  love 
fetishes  in  the  young — Highly  specialized  points  of  attraction  and  repulsion 
between  the  sexes — Coquetry — Convention  and  suggestiveness — Relation  of 
love  to  man,  death,  esthetics,  music,  and  religion — Courtship — First  falling  in 
love — Its  power  to  sensitize  the  soul  to  nature — Psychological  states  and 
metaphors — Love  as  related  to  interests  and  achievements  and  to  friendship — 
Its  irradiations  to  children,  the  community  and  humanity — Knowledge  as  a 
form  of  love — Classification  of  theories — Lessons  for  education  and  morality. 

In  the  child's  slowly  progressive  knowledge  of  its  own 
body,  hands,  fingers,  mouth,  feet,  toes,  ears,  eyes,  hair,  and  nose, 
in  about  this  order,  seem  to  be  especially  noticed  or  attended  to 
with  interest  each  at  its  own  period  before  the  sex  parts,  which 
in  children  normally  reared  attract  little  attention  in  early 
years.  But  in  infants,  these  organs  may  very  early  become  the 
sea  of  knismogenic  (i^m,ymo.?  =  tickling)  sensations,  and  a 
little  later  in  early  boyhood  the  least  allusion  to  them  is  ex- 
tremely gelogenic  {gelos  =  laughter).  These  experiences  are 
different  from  the  tickle  feeling  aroused  by  contact  with  other 
parts  of  the  body  or  by  other  humorous  suggestions,  and  may 
be  infantile  rudiment  from  which,  if  we  knew  more  of  genetic 
psychology,  we  could  trace  the  evolution  of  the  whole  sym- 
phony of  sexual  feelings  and  acts.^  Young  children  sometimes 
become  so  exquisitely  sensitized  that  the  remotest  hint  or  sug- 
gestion, act,  or  indication  without  contact,  is  sufficient  to  pro- 
duce convulsions  of  often  suppressed  laughter.  Even  after 
adolescence  there  is  a  strange  rapport  and  perhaps  some  kinetic 
equivalence   between    giggling   and   sexual    psychoses;    more 

'  See  my  Early  Sense  of  Self.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  April,  1898,  vol.  ix,  pp. 
351-394- 

95 


96  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

probably,  however,  giggling  is  due  to  atavism  or  to  arrest. 
It  would  almost  seem  in  infancy  that  these  sensations  are  re- 
lated to  those  of  adult  sexual  activity  somewhat  as  the  organs 
of  the  infant  are  to  those  of  the  man.  Laughter  and  tears  are 
as  primal  and  generic  as  pleasure  and  pain,  the  sovereign  mas- 
ters of  human  life,  and  in  hysteria  sometimes  seem  to  function 
not  only  alternately  but  vicariously. 

I.  The  unconsciousness  of  the  normal  child  makes  it, 
though  naked,  not  ashamed.  It  has  no  private  parts,  and  its 
consciousness  is  in  this  respect  not  unlike  that  of  animals. 
Many  have  praised  this  pristine  Adamic  innocence,  and  some 
have  even  thought  it  desirable  to  preserve  it  as  long  as  possible. 
The  Spartans  required  their  youth  not  only  to  exercise  publicly 
thus  and  even  in  the  presence  of  the  other  sex,  but  compelled 
them  to  show  themselves  every  six  weeks  to  the  Ephors  that 
they  might  satisfy  themselves,  by  inspection,  of  their  purity  and 
general  vigor.  It  has  been  suggested  that  this  makes  directly 
for  virtue,  and  so  eminent  an  anthropologist  as  Angus  has 
urged  that,  other  things  being  equal,  the  more  naked  savages  are 
the  more  moral  they  are  found  to  be.  The  state  of  the  organs 
to  some  extent  reveals  vice,  which  clothing  conceals.  Diogenes 
and  the  cynics  may  or  may  not  have  had  this  in  mind  in  their 
exposures  and  in  performing  all  acts  usually  concealed  in  pub- 
lic. The  Spartan  ideal  evidently  was  that  exposure  made  for 
healthfulness  in  these  parts,  and  that  heat  and  cold,  wind  and 
W'Cather,  tempered  virtue,  while  covering  not  only  concealed 
the  immediate  effects  of  vice,  but  both  its  warmth  and  its  fric- 
tion tended  to  provoke  it.  Strikingly  akin  to  the  effects  of 
more  or  less  nudity  or  dress  are  the  effects  of  the  wider 
or  narrower  range  of  reserve  in  speech,  which  the  fashions 
of  different  ages  and  races  prescribe  with  such  accuracy. 
When  we  reflect  that  just  whatever  area  of  topics  parents 
and  adults  shun  is  instinctively  counted  vile  by  children  and 
becomes  a  psychic  zone  of  prudery,  which  curiosity  ever  at- 
tempts to  invade  and  modesty  to  avoid,  we  can  realize  how 
strong  a  case  might  be  made  out,  provided  man  lived  in  warm 
climates,  in  primitive  conditions,  in  the  country,  etc.,  for  naked- 
ness and  plainness  of  speech,  and  how  well  this  might  comport 
with  an  ideal  state  of  innocence,  which,  if  it  ever  existed,  is 
now  forever  gone.    As  a  psycho-pedagogic  theory,  a  reversion- 


ADOLESCENT   LOVE  97 

ary  goal  or  term,  or  as  an  even  possible  reminiscence  of  the 
race,  this  conception  is  a  precious  element  in  man's  spiritual 
idealization  of  his  own  life. 

II.  The  dawn  of  adolescence  is  marked  by  a  special  con- 
sciousness of  sex.  Young  people  are  psychologically  in  the  con- 
dition of  Adam  and  Eve  when  they  first  knew  they  were  naked. 
There  is  a  special  kind  of  sex  shame  hitherto  unknown.  This 
access  of  modesty  is  a  favorite  and  theoretically  fasc'inating 
theme  for  genetic  psychology.  It  supplies  one  of  the  powerful 
motives  for  dress.  The  reason  of  this  instinct  is  not  all  to  be 
sought  in  convention,  but  one  of  its  motives  seems  to  be  a  part 
of  the  impulse  to  round  out  and  command  one's  own  personal- 
ity, and  also  to  enlarge  it,  which  is  analogous  to  Lotze's  theory 
that  clothes  are  to  extend  the  limits  of  self  and  make  the  wearer 
feel  himself  to  the  extremity  of  every  feather,  skirt,  ribbon,  hat, 
and  even  cane.  The  new  sensitiveness  of  these  organs,  which 
makes  them  so  acutely  responsive  to  psychic  states  which  their 
condition  reveals,  is  also  involved.  But  we  have  much  reason 
to  assume  that  in  a  state  of  nature  there  is  a  certain  instinctive 
pride  and  ostentation  that  accompanies  the  new  local  develop- 
ment. I  think  it  will  be  found  that  exhibitionists  are  usually 
those  who  have  excessive  growth  here,  and  that  much  that 
modern  society  stigmatizes  as  obscene  is  at  bottom  more  or 
less  spontaneous  and  perhaps  in  some  cases  not  abnormal. 
Dr.  Seerley  tells  me  he  has  never  examined  a  young  man 
largely  developed  who  had  the  usual  strong  instinctive  tend- 
ency of  modesty  to  cover  himself  w'ith  his  hand,  but  he  finds 
this  instinct  general  with  those  whose  development  is  less  than 
the  average. 

My  distinguished  teacher,  Ludwig,  the  leading  physiolo- 
gist of  his  time,  once  told  me  that  he  thought  that  for  some 
years  about  nine-tenths  of  the  psychic  processes  of  adolescents 
centered  in  sex  and  its  functions,  if  w^e  give  the  latter  a  broad 
interpretation.  However  excessive  this  estimate  may  be,  there 
is  an  intense  natural  curiosity  and  possibly  sometimes  a  faint 
recrudescence  of  the  sentiment  ascribed  to  the  cynics  that  it  is 
a  bad  sign  to  cover,  and  thit  exposure  is  a  sign  of  honesty  as 
well  as  of  purity.  The  virtuous  man  strips  well  if  necessary, 
and  does  not  blush.  The  literature  on  sex  abounds  in  cases 
not  only  of  virtuous  young  men,  but  even  women,  who  rather 
46 


98  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

glory  in  occasions  when  they  can  display  the  beauty  of  their 
forms  without  reserve,  not  only  to  themselves  and  to  loved 
ones,  but  even  to  others  with  proper  pretexts.  Medical  experi- 
ence, art  school,  and  gymnasia  abound  in  such  instances,  and 
there  are  still  other  fields  of  evidence  that  where  the  common 
reserves  of  concealment  have  once  been  broken  down,  there  is 
a  sort  of  wild  and  perhaps  atavistic  ecstasy  in  exposure.  In 
many  primitive  religions  it  has  been  an  act  of  worship  to  glory 
in  what  society  deems  shame,  and  many  a  youth  and  even 
maiden,  from  the  Spartan  days  down,  often  under  elaborately 
ritualized  conditions,  have  stripped  od  majorem  Dei  gloriam. 
God  sees  through  all  disguises,  and  hence  unclothing  is  a  sym- 
bol of  successfully  challenging  divine  inspection.  Moreover, 
not  only  malicious  rumor  and  libel  may  be  defied,  for  vice  seeks 
concealment,  but  in  many  times  and  places  it  has  been  thought 
a  bad  sign  to  keep  the  body  too  persistently  covered.  Disrob- 
ing has  been  the  climax  of  many  a  romance,  defied  many  an 
enemy,  vindicated  the  innocence  of  many  a  suspected  or  accused 
person.  Tertullian  prayed  in  substance  that  his  soul  and  body 
might  stand  forth  naked,  stripped  of  every  rag  of  disguise  be- 
fore God  and  man.  It  is  a  hard  and  high  principle,  alien  to 
most  civilizations  of  history,  but  on  occasions  of  great  emprise, 
of  oath  or  solemn  vow,  in  times  of  national  calamity,  or  as  the 
most  spermatic  ritual  of  prayer,  man  may  attest  the  profundity 
of  his  sincerity  and  faith,  and  woman  may  offer  herself  in  the 
arena  as  a  martyr  and  become  a  sacrifice  fit  for  the  altar  of  the 
gods  and  make  this  reversion  to  pristine  innocence  sublime.  It 
is  a  talisman  of  wondrous  power  with  gods  and  men.^ 

It  is  a  lamentable  fact  that  most  of  the  writers  on  phallicism 
— Jennings,    Inman,    Forlong,     Rocco,    Westorp,     Howard, 

'  The  story  of  Lady  Godiva,  Dr.  A.  F.  Chamberlain  tells  me,  has  Bengal  and 
Hindu  parallels  (Gomme:  Ethnology  and  Folk-Lore,  p.  28  et  scq.).  Witness  also 
Grimm's  Marchen  of  the  Star  Dollars.  Maitland's  Science  of  Fairy  Tales,  p.  71 
et  seq.  An  experience  of  my  own  ended  in  complete  undress  and  a  rank  sense  of 
freedom  and  lightness.  (My  Early  Memories.  Fed.  Stm.,  vol.  vi,  p.  504.) 
Papuans  "glory  in  their  nudeness  and  consider  clothing  fit  only  for  women." 
(Westermarck  :  History  of  Human  Marriage,  p.  1 18  et  seq.)  Reclus  (Primitive 
Folk,  pp.  91,  22iZ)  describes  nudity  in  religious  rites,  and  Ploss,  its  ceremonial  use 
as  a  love  charm  (Das  Weib,  vol.  i,  p.  352).  Nakedness  is  probably,  as  Schurtz 
says  (Philosophic  der  Tracht,  p  48),  more  often  a  reversion  than  the  survival  of  a 
primitive  state,  although  it  may  sometimes  be  the  latter. 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  99 

Knight,  and  many  others — seem  to  lack  greatly  either  in  learn- 
ing or  the  critical  spirit  and  moderation  of  science,  or  both ;  but 
this  fact  is  rather  a  result  of  the  long  taboo  that  has  been  placed 
upon  this  subject  than  an  indication  that  it  is  either  less  vast 
or  less  important  than  these  writers  claim.  None  can  doubt 
that  Phallos  and  Kteis,  or  Linga  and  Yoni,  and  their  emblems 
under  many  a  name  and  in  many  forms,  have  been  widely,  if 
not  almost  universally,  worshiped  at  some  stage  of  the  devel- 
opment of  our  race,  and  that  Lares  and  Penates,  El  and  Jah, 
Astarte  and  Ashtaroth,  Baal  and  Peor,  Istar  and  Libissa,  Isis 
and  Osiris,  Lira  and  Kali,  and  perhaps  many  other  gods  and 
goddesses,  have  phallic  features  or  traits  in  their  cult.  L.  Gu- 
lick  ^  has  popularly  summed  up  the  evidence  that  Judaism  owed 
many  of  its  chief  traits  to  the  long  struggle  with  the  phallic 
religion  of  Canaan  to  which  its  adherents  were  so  prone  to 
lapse,  and  Buckley  ^  has  epitomized  its  status  in  modern  Japan. 
The  fact  that  in  all  primitive  languages  gender  plays  so  im- 
portant a  role,  and  that  most  objects  are  sexed,  makes  even  the 
contention  that  not  only  the  symbolic  ichthus  and  the  sun,  but 
perhaps  many  ancient  monoliths  and  towers  from  Babel  down 
to  the  caduceus,  and  it  may  be  the  cross,  are  understood  as 
male ;  and  the  moon,  the  golden  fleece,  Dante's  mystic  rose  of 
dawn,  the  Grail,  and  many  a  cave  and  vase,  female  organs. 
Moreover,  one  need  not  be  versed  in  the  occult,  gnostic,  sibyl- 
line, Orphic,  Rosicrucian,  or  other  recondite  and  esoteric  mys- 
teries, to  understand  that  the  gem  in  the  lotus,  the  serpent,  the 
marriage  of  heaven  and  earth,  and  many  a  round  table  or  sacra- 
mental mystery,  may  be  typical  of  the  function  of  the  Teutonic 
goddess,  Frigga.^  We  have  in  the  Christian  doctrine  of  love, 
and  of  the  spermatic  logos,  in  the  Platonic  stages  of  eroticism 
in  the  symposium,  abundant  evidence  that  the  race  has  had  a 
sexual  consciousness  more  all-dominating  and  pervasive  than 
now  appears,  and  many  a  conception  in  nearly  if  not  quite  all 


'  A  series  of  articles  in  the  Association  Outlook,  iqor. 

'  Phallicism  in  Japan.      Dissertation.      University  of  Chicago,  1895. 

'  Gushing,  speaking  of  the  Zunis  (First  National  Congress  of  Mothers,  p.  41), 
says:  "They  worship  the  sun  and  the  moon,  earth,  and  the  phenomena  of  the 
seasons  personified  chiefly  in  relation  to  reproductivity  and  growth.  In  other 
words,  these  people  are  so-called  phallic  worshipers,  but  a  far  better  name  for  this 
kind  of  worship  would  be  mother-worshipers.     I  have  scant  patience  with  those 


100  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

religions,  primitive,  ethnic,  or  Christian,  shows  many  traces  of 
having  been  slowly  sublimated  and  refined  out  of  these  bases. 
Perhaps  this  phanerogamic  stage  had  much  to  do  in  making 
man  an  aberrant  type,  but  certainly  transcendental  phallicism  is 
one  of  the  great — if  not  the  greatest — achievements  of  the 
race. 

Both  ancient  miithos  and  logos  are  full  of  this  element,  and 
the  recognition  of  this  fact  gives  us  a  key  of  magic  power  to 
unlock  many  of  the  most  abstruse  mysteries  of  life,  creed,  and 
of  cult.  The  power  of  this  factor  to  extend  its  subtle  connota- 
tions afar  and  to  keep  alive  many  a  rite  and  faith  that  seemed 
to  have  no  raison  d'etre;  to  work  its  mystic  charm  through 
many  a  sphere  of  influence  where  it  is  not  suspected ;  to  speak 
with  a  subtle  voice  that  is  heard  through  many  ages,  so  that  its 
fainter  accents  are  not  easily  lost — when  all  this  is  understood, 
we  shall  be  able  to  extend  some  charity  even  to  the  many  writers 
like  the  above,  often  accused  of  illustrating  a  strange  tendency 
to  go  crazy  when  sex  is  spoken  of,  and  perhaps  even  condone 
many  such  errors  and  crudities  of  all  who  have  attained  true 
biological  insight  into  human  life.  Indeed,  for  one,  the  more 
I  read,  ponder,  lecture,  and  know  life,  especially  among  adoles- 
cents, whose  lives  are  such  an  open  sesame  to  the  history  of  the 
race,  tlie  more  natural  it  seems  to  expect  that  the  vaticinations 
of  these  sex-intoxicated  mystics  should  be  not  more,  but  less, 
than  the  actual  historic  truth.  Poetry  abounds  in  archaic  sym- 
bolisms that  suggest  it ;  etymologies  are  steeped  in  it ;  it  supplies 
a  long-sought  missing  link  in  psychogenesis ;  it  shows  forth  the 
work  of  religion  in  the  world  as  even  more  sublime  and  majes- 
tic than  any  of  its  devotees  have  ever  dreamed ;  it  furnishes  the 
simple  solution  of  many  a  problem  of  life  and  mind,  and  re- 
veals how  entirely  the  burden  of  the  Bible  has  sprung  from 
the  very  heart  of  man's  deepest  nature  and  his  direst  need. 

III.   Having  had  its  career  and  done  its  work  first  where  it 

of  our  race  who  denounce,  on  the  mere  notion  that  its  name  conveys,  this  religion 
of  reproduction,  for  in  reality,  although  one  of  the  earliest,  it  is  certainly  also  one 
of  the  most  beautiful  of  the  religions  of  mankind.  We  hear  much  about  sensuosity 
and  indecency  as  connected  with  the  ceremonials  of  this  worship,  but,  believe  me, 
such  claims  are  in  most  cases  due  to  the  evil  imagination  or  else  misrepresentation 
of  those  who  make  them.  There  is  certainly  no  truth  in  their  allegations  regard- 
ing the  worship  of  reproduction  so  long  at  least  as  it  is  associated  or  idertified  with 
the  matriarchate  phase  of  human  development  and  with  the  worship  of  motherhood." 


ADOLESCENT   LOVE  10 1 

was  indigenous,  no  doubt  a  great  and  sacramental  one,  laying 
just  stress  upon  the  supreme  function  of  man,  giving  it  the 
place  of  highest  sanctity  and  perhaps  making  it  the  act  of  con- 
summate worship,  phallicism  gradually  lapsed  to  an  ever  lower 
position,  long  persisting  as  a  secret  cult,  until  it  became,  in  the 
unworthy,  a  stimulus  for  sense  and  passion,  and  in  the  logic  of 
history  was  slowly  sloughed  off  as  the  elect  remnant  of  man- 
kind slowly  found  out  a  new  and  higher  way.  Possibly  this 
change  may  have  been  in  some  way  related  to  the  slow  migra- 
tion northward  of  races,  and  a  new  thermal  function  of  cloth- 
ing. Perhaps  as  races  grew  and  spread  and  life  had  to  be  sus- 
tained by  work  in  soils  not  tropically  spontaneous,  labor  and 
healthful  fatigue  became  a  factor  of  purity.  With  dress,  even 
the  scantiest  and  most  local,  attention  was  more  and  more 
long-circuited  to  general  form,  figure,  complexion,  face,  eyes, 
hair,  and  all  the  secondary  sexual  qualities,  love  antics,  dances, 
and  song,  helped  to  drag  the  race  upward  from  a  flood  of  cor- 
ruption. Asceticism  is  based  on  a  normal  instinct,  and  as  the 
soul  realized  the  cause  of  its  woe,  it  abhorred  what  it  had  most 
loved,  burned  what  it  had  worshiped,  and  perhaps  by  instincts 
akin  to  those  that  vowed  poverty,  chastity,  and  obedience,  re- 
garded every  manifestation  that  could  be  called  sexual  as  lewd 
and  crapulous.  At  any  rate,  I  think  no  one  who  has  carefully 
availed  himself  of  the  knowledge  now  at  hand  can  doubt  that 
there  was  a  later  period  when  men  assiduously  scored  away, 
wherever  it  was  possible,  all  traces  of  earlier  phallicism  and  be- 
came iconoclastic  toward  all  its  documents — literary,  monu- 
mental, symbolic,  verbal,  and  religious;  when  they  thought 
races  who  still  held  the  old  faith  were  only  worthy  of  exter- 
mination, and  were  often  blind  and  fanatical  in  their  holy  rage. 
This  counter  current  would  be  true  to  the  laws  of  sexual  psy- 
chology, in  which  reaction  always  follows  activity,  and  explains 
very  simply  so  much  that  is  baffling  in  the  contrasts  and  fre- 
quently the  sudden  alternations  of  individuals  from  debauchery 
to  prudery  and  z'icc  versa. 

My  contention,  then,  is  that  young  people,  especially  boys, 
in  their  development,  as  later  shown,  afford  the  ontogenetic 
parallel  to  these  phyletic  stages,  each,  as  I  think  no  one  has 
previously  suggested,  confirming  and  illustrating  the  other  and 
affording  the  developmental  bases  of  explanation,  hitherto  lack- 


102  THE  PSYCHOLOGV  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

ing,  for  certain  forms  of  sexual  perversion  or  arrest.^  If  this 
view  be  correct,  the  race  at  one  time,  or  nearly  every  ethnic 
stock  at  some  time  early  in  its  development,  let  itself  go  until  it 
found  that,  as  Hegel  describes  in  his  Phenomenology,  pleasure 
has  its  limits  in  pain  and  must  be  compensated.  Then  came  a 
period  of  humiliation  and  conviction  of  unworthiness  or  sin, 
in  which  man  undertook  to  convert  himself,  but  although  he 
groveled  and  many  despaired,  the  elect  pressed  on,  yearning 
for  the  reincarnation  of  love  in  its  primitive,  high,  holy,  and 
wholesome  sense  in  their  midst.  Perhaps  in  this  abjectness 
there  was  pious  longing  upward  for  a  purer  love  to  supervene 
from  above.  Thus  man's  history  may  explain  to  some  degree 
why  it  is  that  sexual  remorse  is  still,  as  we  have  seen  in  Chap- 
ter VI,  the  religious  teacher's  great  opportunity,  and  may  make 
us  realize  how,  in  the  philosophy  of  history,  a  true  incarnation 
of  love  is  the  object  of  such  long,  fervent,  and  prophetic  desire, 
and  its  evangel  so  welcome  to  those  who  need  it. 

As  to  the  typical  development  of  the  sentiment  of  love  in 
the  individual,  we  still  know  too  little,  i.  An  infantile  form 
of  it  is  often  seen  betw^een  boys  and  girls  under  the  age  of 
eight.^  It  is  then  transparent,  with  no  self-consciousness,  and 
appears  in  fondness  for  each  other's  company,  gifts  for  keep- 
sakes, especially  edibles,  and  often  in  embraces  and  kisses. 
Jealousy  is  often  well  developed,  and  there  is  no  mutual  shyness 
or  fear  of  ridicule  between  the  little  sweethearts,  who  some- 
times assume  that  they  will  marry  and  even  prattle  of  details 
of  life  together.  In  rare  cases  such  attraction  has  culminated  in 
happy  and  fruitful  wedlock.  This  precocity  of  love  is  of  scien- 
tific interest  as  illustrating  in  the  individual  what  is  probably 
an  inversion  of  the  order  of  the  development  of  the  race,  in 
which  the  somatic  seems  to  precede.  It  is  Platonic  and  in  a 
sense  sexless,  a  purer  affinity  of  soul  than  is  generally  possible 
later.    To  adult  onlookers  it  is  an  entertaining  spectacle,  and  to 

^  It  is  chiefly  the  degraded  aspect  of  these  themes  that  Barnes  (Feelings  and 
Ideas  of  Sex  in  Children;  Ped.  Sem.,  vol.  ii,  p.  199)  thinks  nineteen-twentieths 
of  American  children  learn  from  back  alleys,  servants,  etc.,  filling  their  minds 
with  words  that  go  back  to  Aryan  beginnings,  but  which  it  is  a  crime  to  print, 
and  with  abnormal  visual  images  highly  potentialized  at  puberty  that  are  not  only 
dirty  and  vulgar,  but  false. 

'  The  Emotion  of  Love  between  the  Sexes,  by  Sanford  Bell.  Am.  Jour,  of 
Psy. ,  July,  1902. 


ADOLESCENT   LOVE  103 

some,  especially  women,  an  ideal  and  prophecy  of  a  new  Edenic 
state  of  purity,  but  it  is  very  doubtful  if  it  is  either  a  good  sign 
or  a  desirable  educational  experience,  especially  for  boys,  to 
thus  early  individualize  their  interest  in  others,  although  it  is 
immeasurably  better  than  the  vile  physical  precocity  described 
in  Chapter  VI.  The  child  marriages  of  the  Orient  do  not,  of 
course,  rest  on  any  such  basis.  It  is  exotic,  like  infant  piety, 
limits  the  range  of  association  normal  at  this  age,  tends  to 
physical  prematurity,  and  a  fostering  interest  of  grown-ups  in 
it  is,  albeit  unconsciously  to  them,  a  form  of  selfishness  on  their 
part  which  indulges  their  own  delectation  at  the  expense  of  the 
best  interests  of  the  child.  Yet,  like  so  many  other  phenomena, 
it  suggests,  as  does  very  early  physical  development,  the  possi- 
bility of  traces  of  a  prehistoric  early  ripeness  in  some  pigmoid 
stage  that,  like  the  persistence  or  hypertrophy  of  rudimentary 
organs  seen  in  teratology,  has  failed  of  proper  reduction  in  its 
season.  If  so,  it  is  a  phenomenon  of  arrest  and  not  of  progress. 
2.  Later,  as  Bell  has  shown,  at  from  perhaps  eight  to  twelve 
or  fourteen,  comes  another  phase  of  juvenile  love.  There  is 
acute  interest  in  some  person  of  the  other  sex,  but  it  is  no  longer 
unconscious.  The  object  of  attraction  is  followed,  but  at  a 
distance.  There  are  gifts,  no  longer  face  to  face,  but  secretly 
and  perhaps  anonymously.  There  is  no  confession,  but  con- 
fusion in  each  other's  presence.  There  is  no  open  pairing  off, 
and  teasing  is  often  fatal.  Fear  of  ridicule  is  so  great  that 
accusation  of  interest  or  taunts  may  prompt  to  denial  or  even 
to  censure  and  asseveration  of  dislike,  which  may  lead  to  sudden 
mutual  aversion  and  even  hate.  Babcock,^  out  of  eighty-three 
games  of  Washington  children,  calls  thirty  love  games,  like 
post-office,  King  William,  London  Bridge,  picking  grapes, 
dropping  the  handkerchief,  digging  a  well,  etc.,  which  owe  their 
charm  to  choosing  a  partner,  embracing,  or  kissing,  or  both. 
Thus  preferences  are  freely  expressed,  but  apparently  imper- 
sonal and  masked  by  the  rules  of  the  game.  The  eyes  feast  on 
the  loved  one,  but  furtively  and  from  afar.  Boldness  is  in- 
creased with  the  fall  of  darkness.  The  girl  at  this  stage  is 
often  less  guarded  and  more  aggressive  than  the  boy.    It  is  not 


'  Am.   Anthropologist,  vol.   i,   p.   243.     Lippincott's    Mag.,   March  and    Sep- 
tember, 1886. 


104  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

called  loving,  but  liking,  which  is  partly  a  euphemism  and 
partly  a  fitter  designation  of  the  juvenile  state  of  mind.  Boys 
deny  it  far  more  readily  upon  occasion  than  girls.  Some 
never  confess  either  to  the  object  of  their  love  or  to  any  con- 
fidant, child  or  adult,  but  may  ostentatiously  speak  slightingly. 
They  are  ill  at  ease  with  each  other  and  perhaps  would  be 
ashamed  to  be  seen  together,  and  the  object  of  an  ardent  passion 
lasting  for  several  years  may  never  suspect  it.  Its  chief  out- 
crop may  be  a  hostile  demonstration  toward  a  fancied  rival. 
Perhaps  avowal  is  made  in  a  note  sent  through  a  friend,  or  even 
with  the  identity  of  the  writer  carefully  concealed,  or  motto 
candy,  valentines,  ornaments,  curios,  keepsakes,  fruit,  picture 
cards,  etc.,  are  sent.  In  school  these  mates  often  love  to  sit 
or  stand  together  and  seek  contact  that  must  appear  to  be  acci- 
dental. Favoritism  is  shown  by  intentionally  missing  a  word 
so  that  the  other  shall  profit  by  it,  or  helping  in  study  or  recita- 
tion. If  one  is  absent  from  school,  the  other  grows  lax,  indif- 
ferent, or  irritable,  suggesting  that  such  attractions  are  often 
an  incentive  to  good  work  that  pedagogic  tact  could  utilize. 
Some  brace  up  in  study  for  years  to  please  or  win  the  favor 
of  another.  A  form  of  courtship  may  consist  solely  in  touching 
feet  under  the  desk.  Sometimes  there  is  a  profusion  of  billets- 
doux,  pages  long,  by  those  who  are  tongue-tied  together.  A 
teacher  who  furnished  Bell  with  seventy-six  cases,  said  these 
childish  loves  "  fairly  broke  out  in  the  spring-time." 

Showing  off  is  perhaps  the  boy's  chief  expression  of  this 
callow  calf  love.  He  instinctively  seeks  to  charm  by  somer- 
saults, walking  fences,  yodeling,  aping  animals  in  voice  and 
act,  mimicking  people,  wrestling,  bullying  his  mates,  and  often 
tackling  bigger  boys,  and  sometimes  courting  danger,  which  in 
extreme  cases  has  brought  mayhem  or  death,  hanging  by  the 
toes  from  trees,  cutting  the  initials  of  his  favorite  in  the  ice,  or 
carving  or  drawing  them.  There  is  much  scuffling  and  horse- 
play, loud  or  grandiloquent  talk  to  others,  but  really  intended 
for  her.  A  boy  hugs  another,  his  sister,  or  a  pet  in  the  pres- 
ence and  for  the  benefit  of  his  affinity.  Here,  too,  the  boy's 
courtship  and  its  tension-vents  are  those  of  the  savage  writ 
small.  To  this  repertory  of  fascination  the  girl  responds  per- 
haps by  ostentatiously  and  studiously  ignoring  them  all.  Of 
all  boys,  the  one  who  is  so  assiduously  prancing  attendance 


ADOLESCENT   LOVE  1 05 

upon  her  as  the  best  form  of  admiration  he  can  offer,  is  the  one 
of  whose  very  presence  she  is  most  unconscious.  This  may  be 
aversion,  but  it  is  more  Hkely  to  be  due  to  her  dim  but  strong 
instinct  to  prompt  him  to  a  nearer  and  more  personal  expres- 
sion. No  psychologist,  but  only  her  trusted  confidante,  and 
perhaps  not  she,  can  tell  which  it  is.  She  might  upon  occa- 
sion slap  him  and  afterward  fancy  or  wish  it  had  been  a  kiss. 
Meanwhile  she  is  pondering  whether  she  likes  him  as  well  as 
papa,  mama,  or  even  God,  and  is  in  some  cases  raising  vexa- 
tious scruples  in  her  budding  conscience.  Perhaps  she  includes 
him  in  her  prayers  with  parents  or  pets,  or  fancies  love  and 
hate  by  turns.  She  writes  his  name  or  pronounces  it  in  secret 
and  wonders  if  she  likes  its  sound  or  its  association  with  others 
bearing  the  same  name,  is  nice  to  another  boy  to  goad  him  on, 
praises  before  him  qualities  he  lacks  or  in  which  others  excel, 
or  condemns  freckles,  light  hair,  or  some  item  of  attire  which 
characterizes  him,  but  if  he  shows  sign  of  lukewarmness  or  di- 
version to  another,  she  comes  forward  with  some  sudden  and 
unequivocal  token.  The  first  crude  impulse  of  coyness  often 
impels  her  to  open  scorn  of  what  is  secretly  fascinating.  Thus 
Boyville  and  Girldom  reenact  in  pantomime  a  love  life  that  was 
old  w^hen  history  began,  for  these  fore-courts  of  love,  which  are 
so  delicious,  are  more  ancient  than  all  the  temples  that  civiliza- 
tion and  culture  have  built  for  it,  and  these  crude  rehearsals  are 
more  essential  and  true  to  life  than  many  of  the  more  highly 
elaborated  expressions  of  it  that  modern  romance  and  conven- 
tion have  superposed. 

Another  characteristic  trait  of  this  age, often  strongly  accen- 
tuated also  in  the  next,  or  third  stage,  is  juvenile  love  of  an 
older  person  of  the  opposite  sex.  The  interval  may  be  ten  or 
twenty  years  or  even  more.  From  the  rather  meager  data  avail- 
able, it  would  appear  that  there  is  here  less  fickleness  and  more 
constancy,  partly  but  not  wholly  because  only  the  junior  party 
changes,  while  the  elder  remains  always  only  kind.  With 
extreme  disparity,  this  is  most  common  where  the  free  play  of 
intercourse  with  other  children  of  equal  age  is  restricted.  But 
beyond  this  there  is  a  marked  early  and  pre-adolescent  pro- 
clivity to  focus  affection  at  least  quite  as  sharply  differentiated 
from  that  felt  for  parents  as  from  the  love  of  riper  years,  upon 
older  counterparts.     Some  children  of  from  four  to  six  fall  in 


I06  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

love  with  those  of  the  later  teens  and  early  twenties  or  even 
older.^  These  youngsters  are  often  demonstrative,  persistent, 
jealous,  chatter  about  marriage,  appropriate  the  object  of  their 
infatuation  to  see  whom  they  eagerly  abandon  every  playmate 
or  occupation  and  comport  themselves  with  every  affectation  of 
young  gentlemen  and  ladies  that  they  can  attain.  Grief  at  the 
marriage  of  the  object  of  their  choice  is  often  violent.  Ridicu- 
lous and  often  ominous  as  this  is,  it  is  often  regarded  by 
parents  with  complacency. 

3.  In  the  period  from  eight  to  thirteen  or  later,  the  tendency 
to  older  loves  is  more  common,  but  the  law  seems  to  be  that  dis- 
parity lessens  with  age,  falling  to  ten,  five  or  less  years.  Al- 
though returns  do  not  yet  warrant  statistics  of  frequency,  boys 
seem  to  lead  during  the  first  part  of  this  period,  and  girls  later. 
Boys  in  the  grades  may  select  a  young  female  teacher  and  be- 
come abject  slaves  to  her  slightest  wish.  She  is  idealized,  at- 
tended on  every  occasion,  overwhelmed  with  gifts  and  con- 
fidences, flattered  by  imitation  conscious  and  unconscious.  The 
object  may  reciprocate  with  a  feeling  half  motherly  and  half 
amorous.  Where  the  male  is  older  there  is  more,  yet  still 
but  little,  real  danger.  The  disparity  of  years  is  itself  a  safe- 
guard and  the  older  feels  the  innocence  of  the  younger  to  be  a 
matter  of  honor,  though  conscious  recognition  and  even  more 
or  less  avowal  is  mutual.  Often  great  good,  especially  to  the 
younger,  results,  and  the  plasticity  thus  arising  is  wisely  util- 
ized. Plato  thought  boys  and  older  men  should  choose  each 
others  as  lovers,  and  teaching  should  be  a  pay-less  work  of 
love,  but  the  boy  now  often  has  female  teachers  only  and  must 
vent  this  propensity,  if  such  it  be,  on  them  for  want  of  an  avail- 
able male  mentor.  In  one  case  I  know,  there  was  a  series  of 
four  loves  in  about  as  many  years,  each  younger  than  the  pre- 
ceding, so  that  the  sum  of  the  ages  of  both  did  not  vary  greatly, 
the  last  being  of  nearly  the  same  age  as  the  lover — a  case  sug- 
gestive of  what,  as  we  shall  see  later,  is  by  some  thought  a  law 
of  constant  aggregate  age  of  both  parents  for  most  effective 
child-bearing.  Much  of  the  sentiment  of  the  younger  party  in 
most  of  these  cases  is  made  up  of  admiration,  respect,  and  even 
reverence,  and  whatever  return  there  may  be  by  the  older  is  of 

»  Bell,  op.  cit. ,  p.  348. 


ADOLESCENT   LOVE  107 

a  pleasing  sense  of  having  a  protege  to  shelter,  to  be  responsible 
for,  dominate,  and  occasionally  to  domineer.  Thus  such  rela- 
tions may  be  a  wholesome  fore-school  to  life.  The  charm  to  the 
younger  is  sometimes  partly  maturity  itself,  as  if  the  budding 
nature  was  not  satisfied  with  what  childhood  had  to  offer  and 
was  protensive  toward  adulthood.  This,  if  to  a  degree  that 
violates  the  wholesome  rule  of  exhausting  each  stage  of  life  as 
it  is  lived,  is  distinctly  bad.  So  far  as  it  is  due  to  unconscious 
discontent  with  the  little  conventionalities  that  the  sexes  in- 
stinctively assume  toward  each  other  and  to  attraction  toward 
one  too  old  to  think  of  them,  and  therefore  more  natural,  it  is 
better.  The  instability  of  childhood  often  turns  to  its  elders 
and  is  thus  saved  from  caprice  by  imitating  a  good  pattern,  and 
then  it  is  love  of  a  more  finished  product  and  of  shaping  the 
soul  to  an  idealized  model  of  the  other  sex.  Even  this  is  only 
a  partial  advantage  at  the  age  when  the  life  of  each  sex  should 
to  some  extent  include  rather  than  supplement  that  of  the 
other.  In  general,  attachments  for  elders  or  for  well-developed 
specimens  of  the  same  sex  are  better  at  this  age.^ 

'  The  extreme  of  this  latter,  however,  is  seen  in  the  so-called  "mashes"  so 
characteristic  of  adolescent  girls  and  the  hero-worship  and  fagging  of  boys. 
These  homo-sexual  relations  were  recognized  in  Greece  for  boys  who  were  thought 
unfortunate,  or  in  some  way  deficient  if  they  did  not  have  an  adult  patron.  This 
prompted  ideal  conduct  of  the  elder  in  the  presence  of  the  younger  partner  that 
none  but  the  highest  example  be  set,  and  general  but  not  technical  teaching  and 
initiation  into  life.  The  elder  must  assume  responsibility  for  the  younger,  inspire 
him  and  feel  shame  for  his  error  or  ignorance.  That  the  relation  lapsed  to  base- 
ness later  should  not  blind  us  to  the  great  possible  advantages  of  it  in  many,  if  not 
every  kind  of  social  organization.  Many  of  these,  as  we  shall  see  later,  are  now 
utilizing  it  with  good  results.  Not  only  is  the  ideal  teacher  primarily  an  older  friend, 
fertilizing  the  soul  with  knowledge  and  bringing  ideas  to  birth,  but,  as  it  is  some- 
times said,  every  woman  is  always  more  or  less  in  love  with  some  man,  so  in  the 
church,  club,  young  peoples'  organizations,  and  the  tutorial  system  at  its  best, 
every  youth  is  always  profoundly  influenced  by  some  one  a  little  older,  and  is  more 
or  less  plastic  to  his  or  her  will.  Each  is  impressionable  by  some  one  stronger, 
more  brilliant,  or  otherwise  specially  favored  by  nature  or  fortune,  as  he  is  not  by 
others.  The  old  and  great  are  too  far  away,  but  most  have  this  hero  embodying 
an  ideal.  In  girls,  especially  if  isolated  from  the  other  sex,  this  homo-sexuality  is 
also  pervasive  if  less  often  organized  under  a  leader,  and  its  extreme  form  of 
"  crushes  "  is  more  liable  to  do  harm.  The  parasite  is  often  given  nervous  poise, 
guided  aright  and  gains  new  incentive,  but  also  loses  independence,  and  becomes  a 
clinging  vine  just  when  she  should  learn  to  think  and  act  for  herself.  The  object 
of  this  kind  of  love  is  tempted  to  selfishness  in  accepting  service,  and  may  become 
domineering  and  masculine  in  manner.      With  girls,  especially,  these  dangers,  like 


108  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

4.  In  the  fourth  stage,  there  is  a  rather  distinct  period  that 
begins  with  puberty  which  is  marked  by  a  general  tendency  of 
the  sexes  to  draw  apart  for  a  season.  The  barks  of  love  built 
before  are  mostly  too  frail  to  cross  the  breakers  that  separate 
childhood  from  youth.  The  new  interests  now  born  are  too 
many,  strange,  sudden,  and  absorbing.  Each  is  a  new  creature, 
and  all  relations,  ideas,  and  ideals  are  changed.  A  new  im- 
pulsion to  develop  and  perfect  a  personality  all  one's  own  arises 
in  each  sex.  Sex  itself  means  other  and  more  than  before,  and 
reserve  and  a  new  sex  consciousness  unfold.  Modes  of  life,  in- 
terests, and  plans  for  the  future  differentiate.  The  boy  becomes 
a  little  ashamed  of  girl  associates  and  is  desirous  of  asserting  his 
manhood,  while  the  girl  is  more  conscious  if  not  more  coy. 
Each  is  more  aware  of  the  other's  scrutiny  and  often  a  little 
fearful  of  it.  Persistence  of  the  old  camaraderie  would  now 
have  a  different  and  more  serious  meaning,  and  each  is  a  little 
wary  of  being  attracted  into  the  other's  sphere.  Nearly  every 
known  primitive  race  now  isolates  the  sexes  for  a  time  from 
each  other,  and  perhaps  this  ancient  practise  now  appears  as  an 
instinct  which  reenforces  the  necessity  for  a  period  of  restraint. 
It  is  tempting  to  speculate  on  how  essential  this  stage  of  segre- 
gation has  been  for  the  progress  of  the  human  race,  and  how,  if 
it  is  ignored,  familiarity,  which  sometimes  breeds  contempt, 
may  here  disenchant  and  impair  the  motives  for  a  proper  rap- 
prochement later  when  full  nubility  is  achieved.  This  theme 
must  be  left  for  the  chapter  on  the  education  of  girls. 

5.  The  age  of  love,  in  the  full  and  proper  sense  of  the  word, 
slowly  supervenes  when  body  and  soul  are  mature,  and  on  this 
we  must  dwell  longer  and  seek  to  analyze  and  describe  its  ele- 
ments. The  world  has  long  waited  for  an  adequate  treatment 
of  this  vast  and  vital  theme,  but  that  modern  psychology  is  now 
approaching  it  from  so  many  sides  is  one  of  the  most  hopeful 
facts  of  the  present  age. 

The  development  of  the  sex  function  is  normally,  perhaps, 
the  greatest  of  all  stimuli  to  mental  growth.  The  new  curiosity 
and  interests  bring  the  alert  soul  into  rapport  with  very  many 
facts  and  laws  of  life  hitherto  unseen.    Each  of  its  phenomena 

worse  ones  for  both  sexes  previously  described,  are  part  of  the  price  modern  man 
must  pay  for  the  prolonged  prenubile  apprenticeship  to  life.  All  are  needful  to 
human  progress,  dearly  as  it  is  bought. 


ADOLESCENT   LOVE  109 

supplies  the  key  to  a  new  mystery.  Sex  is  the  most  potent  and 
magic  open  sesame  to  the  deepest  mysteries  of  Hfe,  death,  re- 
hgion,  and  love.  It  is,  therefore,  one  of  the  cardinal  sins 
against  youth  to  repress  healthy  thoughts  of  sex  at  the  proper 
age,  because  thus  the  mind  itself  is  darkened  and  its  wings 
clipped  for  many  of  the  higher  intuitions,  which  the  supreme 
muse  of  common  sense  at  this  its  psychologic  moment  ought 
to  give.  If  youth  are  left  to  themselves  and  the  contagion 
of  most  environments,  this  mental  stimulus  takes  a  low  turn 
toward  lewd  imaginations  and  vile  conceptions,  which  under- 
mine the  strength  of  virtue,  and  instead  of  helping  upward 
and  making  invulnerable  against  all  temptation,  it  makes  vir- 
tue safe  only  in  its  absence  and  prepares  the  way  for  a  fall, 
when  its  full  stress  is  first  felt.^ 

IV.  Neither  the  psychology  nor  the  pedagogy  of  adoles- 
cence can  be  treated  without  careful  consideration  of  the  whole 
problem  of  sex.  In  the  vast  literature  upon  this  subject,  the 
biologists  have  hitherto  treated  almost  exclusively  the  anatomy 
and  embryology  of  sex  and  its  physiology  in  the  lower  forms 
of  life,  and  have  had  little  to  say  concerning  its  function  in 
man.  The  alienists  have  given  us  a  most  painful  though  scien- 
tifically precious  body  of  facts  concerning  perversions,  but  no 
competent  writer  among  them  has  seriously  considered  their 
origin,  and  the  best  of  them  hardly  mention  puberty  or  adoles- 
cence, while  writers  on  this  topic,  like  Clouston  and  Marro, 


'  G.  Loisel  (Rev.  Scientifique,  May  30,  1903),  in  an  interesting  article  on  sex- 
uality, attempts  to  differentiate  four  different  groups  or  evolutionary  stages  of  sex- 
ual qualities  :  First,  those  that  accompany  the  act  of  fecundation  and  which  are 
very  early  both  in  ontogenesis  and  phylogenesis  like  the  glands  and  organs,  in- 
cluding those  of  prehension,  of  which  he  enumerates  twenty-three;  secondly, 
traits  that  prepare  for  this  act  which  appear  later  and  sometimes  disappear  with  the 
sexual  period,  like  pigmentation,  organs  of  locomotion,  differences  in  strength  and 
size,  horns,  spurs,  teeth,  song,  odors,  decorations,  etc.;  thirdly,  those  concerned 
with  the  eduction  of  the  new  being,  which  appear  later  yet,  such  as  organs  of  ovi- 
position,  nidification,  somatic  cavities,  cutaneous  formations,  permanent  or  tran- 
sitory, various  appendixes,  those  concerned  with  feeding  the  young — secretions, 
breasts,  placenta,  etc.;  and  fourthly,  psychic  and  ethnologic  traits  having  only  a 
remote  rapport  with  the  above  and  arising  only  as  a  result  of  very  accentuated  sex- 
ual evolution,  such  as  different  habits  of  male  and  female,  their  varied  conditions 
of  life,  modes  of  courtship,  modesty,  marriage,  family,  etc.  Under  these  primary, 
secondary,   tertiary,  and  c[uaternary  groups,  he  believes,    fall  all  important  phe- 


no  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

have  mostly  limited  themselves  to  the  psycho-physiological  as- 
pects of  the  age  they  treat  with  no  attempt  at  larger  coordina- 
tion. Ellis  has  so  far  confined  himself  mainly  to  a  record  of 
facts  and  opinions,  and  Scott/  who  has  approached  the  sub- 
ject from  the  broadest  standpoint,  has  written  only  a  single 
monograph  on  the  relations  between  sex  and  art.  The  cue 
given  by  Darwin's  treatment  of  sexual  selection  as  the  chief 
factor  in  the  descent  of  man  must  first  be  followed,  and  we 
may  well  invoke  Plato's  Diatoma  to  be  our  guide  in  this,  per- 
haps the  largest,  most  complex,  yet  most  interesting  and  most 
important  of  all  human  themes.  Geddes  and  Thompson  ^  state 
that  "  the  number  of  speculations  as  to  the  nature  of  sex  has 
been  well-nigh  doubled  since  Drelincourt  in  the  last  century 
brought  together  two  hundred  and  sixty-two  groundless  hy- 
potheses." But,  as  Schleiermacher  well  says,  sex  ought  to  be 
endlessly  studied,  because  it  is  the  most  endless  of  subjects. 

We  may  begin  by  recalling  the  now  familiar  facts  of  or- 
ganic decorations  in  the  mating  season  where,  in  the  animal 
world,  the  appeal  is  directly  intersexual,  and  not,  as  in  the  case 
of  blossoms  in  sexual  plants,  through  the  medium  of  insects. 
From  the  latter  up,  seasonal  sex  decorations  make  the  whole 
animal  world  beautiful  even  to  man.  Life  overflows  in  bright 
colors,  the  products  of  health.  Ocelli,  combs,  wattles,  horns, 
erectile  hairs,  top-knots,  lapettes,  crests,  bands,  spots,  nuptial 
plumage,  and  many  extra  appendages,  indicating  high  blood 
pressure  and  increased  tension  of  life,  herald  the  spring-time 
awakening.  The  ibex,  goat,  and  some  apes,  develop  beards; 
the  glow-worm  emits  its  love  light  to  signal  a  mate;  scent 
glands  are  censers  for  the  incense  of  love;  o'^ans  of  prehension 
and  of  warfare  grow  as  their  need  arises ;  and  musical  instru- 
ments are  developed  in  and  on  the  body.  Not  only  structure, 
but  function,  is  evolved.  In  the  mating  season  the  air  is  filled 
with  noises;  insects  tick  or  stridulate;  birds  drum,  slur,  and 
rattle,  and  if  they  live  in  the  dense  woods  where  bright  plumage 
would  be  less  effective,  they  are  endowed  with  song.  Almost 
every  animal  is  vocal  at  its  mating  time,  and  birds  pout,  tumble, 
strut,  balz,  or  dance,  open  their  wings  to  show  hidden  charms 

1  Sex  and  Art.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  January,  1896,  vol.  vii,  pp.  153-226. 
'  Evolution  of  Sex,  p.  117. 


ADOLESCENT   LOVE  HI 

of  color ;  they  often  perform  the  most  complex  love  antics,  and 
emit  their  most  charming  love  calls  in  their  courtships  often 
very  prolonged  and  elaborate,  their  ars  erotica  even  extending 
to  details  of  toilet  that  might  almost  be  called  cosmetic. 

Animated  by  this  same  instinct,  and  under  the  influence  of 
the  momentum  of  all  this  heritage,  primitive  races  attempt  to 
improve  upon  nature  and  exaggerate  or  modify  their  physical 
peculiarities.  There  are  mutilations,  often  of  the  sex  parts, 
sometimes  of  the  ear,  the  skull,  nose,  lips,  or  teeth,  which  may 
be  as  disfiguring  to  our  taste  as  the  pelele,  with  scarifications 
that  raise  ridges,  and  tattooing,  which  may  be  for  modesty, 
as  if  clothes  could  be  etched  on  for  beauty  or  ornament,  or  to 
make  the  wearer  feared,  or,  even  as  Wundt  and  Fraser  think, 
to  imprint  the  totem  of  their  tribe  upon  human  parchment. 
The  hair  is  most  diversely  treated  of  all.  It  is  pulled  out, 
shaved,  or  made  to  grow  as  long  as  possible  and  done  up  into 
highly  conventionalized  and  elaborate  forms.  Many  games 
and  dances  and  most  songs  and  cries  are  highly  sexual,  and 
owe  much  of  their  stimulus  to  the  presence  and  encouragement 
of  the  other  sex.  Ethnologists  often  discover  this  element 
where  it  is  no  longer  recognized  by  the  natives. 

In  early  puberty  the  same  instinct  is  often  normally  the 
very  first  manifestation  of  sex  feeling  in  boys;  the  primary 
outcrop  of  secondary  psychic  sexual  qualities  is  often  seen  in 
the  "  showing  off  "  instinct.  Hundreds  of  boys,  in  our  returns, 
run  fastest,  hit  hardest,  talk  largest,  are  most  stimulated  to 
compete  and  excel,  do  rash  and  foolhardy  or  unusual  things, 
when  observed  by  girls,  or  perhaps  by  one  in  particular.  They 
stand,  walk,  and  sit  more  erect;  use  larger  words  and  more 
ample  or  perhaps  softer  and  more  richly  cadenced  tones  and 
accents ;  their  eye  and  their  wits  are  brighter.  Older  youth  are 
not  without  sex  consciousness  in  the  display  of  athletic  feats  in 
which  the  body  is  more  or  less  exposed. 

The  influence  of  the  female  sex  upon  the  conflicts  between 
males  is  old,  deep,  and  manifold.  In  animals,  many  claws, 
horns,  beaks,  and  fangs  are  for  offensive  and  defensive  war  in 
the  battles  for  females,  and  many  organs  and  muscles  used  in 
combat  are  also  for  the  prehension  of  the  female.  In  a  primi- 
tive polygamous  state,  where  each  male  desires  as  many  females 
as  possible,  he  is  at  war  with  all  other  males  and  frequently  in  a 


112  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

life-and-death  struggle  with  them.  He  often  wars  on  neighbor- 
ing races  for  the  capture  of  wives,  where  exogamy  is  the  cus- 
tom. Where  the  female  is  the  prize,  victory  may  be  defined  as 
successful  courtship  and  war  is  for  the  sake  of  love.  Grad- 
ually with  advancing  civilization,  conflict  may  become  cere- 
monialized  as  in  the  tournaments  of  chivalry,  and  finally  battles 
become  more  and  more  mimetic,  and  the  stern,  fierce  look  and 
strong  frame,  that  could  be  aggressive,  the  quality  of  cour- 
age that  could  do  or  dare,  or  even  the  uniform  of  war  rather 
than  blood  itself  become  most  moving  to  the  female  soul.  Ex- 
cess tends  to  Sadistic  morbidity,  which  here  takes  its  rise.  The 
rage  of  war  is  expressed  in  the  rage  of  sex,  which  may  break 
all  barriers,  and,  strange  to  say,  so  plastic  is  the  adjustment  of 
the  sexes,  that  not  only  are  some  men  in  the  sad  clinical  ro- 
mances of  abnormality  all  anger  in  their  love,  but  some  women 
are  all  fear,  and  their  love  means  utter  subordination  and 
the  ultra  passivity  of  cruel  pain,  because  love  has  come  in 
this  guise,  which,  in  extreme  cases,  may  culminate  in  lust 
murder. 

It  is  a  prime  and  precious  fact  to  which  man  owes  we 
know  not  how  much  in  his  higher  evolution,  that  while  aggres- 
sive qualities  may  have  preceded  and  dominated  in  the  early 
developmental  stages,  the  esthetic  manifestations  of  sexual  ten- 
sion precede  and  exceed  them  now  in  youth.  The  female  may 
have  had  much  to  do  with  this,  and  it  is  certain  that  the  girl's 
delicate  appreciation,  though  often  veiled  by  affected  indiffer- 
ence, has  been  a  constant  biotonic  stimulus.  Through  it  all 
she  performs  her  great  role  of  sexual  selection.  Man  is  pass- 
ing her  examination,  part  by  part,  in  the  oldest  and  most  effec- 
tive of  all  nature's  schools.  To  her  power  of  appreciation  and 
her  capacity  to  admire  nothing  is  lost.  Her  high  function  is 
to  praise  aright.  While  chronic  militarism  is  bad  in  its  eft'ects 
on  woman,  her  tendency  is  constantly  to  subdue  it.  Her  very 
coyness  is  unconsciously  prized  because  it  is  a  stimulus  to  self- 
exhibition  and  all  the  parenetical  arts  of  courtship.  While 
for  man  the  original  pairing  season  is  mainly  lost,  yet  the  fancy 
of  each  sex  turns  more  lightly  to  love  and  is  more  hyperesthetic 
to  the  other  in  spring-time,  and  the  rapport  and  range  of  adjust- 
ment is  more  exquisite  and  marvelous.  So  great  is  the  plas- 
ticity of  this  relation  that  woman  may  acquire  a  Massochistic 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  1 13 

love  of  violence  and  pain  for  the  ideal  of  pleasure,  abhor  the 
bashful  man,  ostentatiously  affect  resistance  in  order  to  inflame 
him  to  overcome  it,  or  she  may  also  be  attracted  to  his  sphere 
and  become  herself  aggressive.  Each  sex  is  now  in  a  sense 
making,  choosing,  or  keenly  critical  of  secondary  sexual  qual- 
ities in  the  other. 

This  is  illustrated  in  a  comprehensive  census  of  data,  al- 
ready tabulated,  and  soon  to  appear  as  a  special  memoir,  on 
traits  mediating  sexual  likes  and  dislikes.  The  order  of  points 
specified  as  most  admired  in  the  other  sex  by  young  men  and 
women  in  their  teens,  who  answered  my  questionnaire,  is  as  fol- 
lows :  eyes,  hair,  stature  and  size,  feet,  brows,  complexion, 
cheeks,  form  of  head,  throat,  ears,  chin,  hands,  neck,  nose, 
nails  and  even  fingers,  and  shape  of  face.  In  Drew's  census  of 
356  love  poems  of  college  students,  where  eyes  and  hair  also 
lead,  where  kisses  (sixty-six  mentions)  are  often  unreal, 
dreamed,  fancied,  charms  of  the  hand,  and  walking,  riding, 
dancing,  eating  confectionery  follow;  the  sweetheart's  song, 
sigh,  pout,  smile,  and  even  chewing-gum,  are  also  specialized 
fascinations.^  In  each  case  many  often  highly  specialized 
points  are  mentioned.  For  instance,  eight  per  cent  of  young 
men  are  very  susceptible  to  sloping  or  drooping  shoulders; 
seven  per  cent  of  the  girls  specify  broad  shoulders;  ten  per  cent 
regular  and  six  per  cent  white  teeth ;  long  lashes  charm  five 
per  cent  of  the  young  men ;  long,  clean,  or  pink  finger-nails 
are  often  specified ;  arched  brows  among  girls  find  a  special 
susceptibility  in  four  per  cent  of  the  youth,  jwhijle  cowlicks 
charm  three  per  cent.  Often  the  specialization  of  taste  or 
preference  lays  great  stress  upon  the  color  of  the  hair,  the 
shape  of  the  hand  or  fingers ;  for  some  a  nose  slightly  retrousse, 
a  long  neck,  prominent  eyes,  dimples,  and  even  freckles,  haye 
special  erogenic  power. 

Passing  to  movements  or  acts,  the  voice  has  far  most 
preferences  and  is  highly  specialized.  Some  are  affected  by  a 
high,  some  a  low,  voice.  The  rising  inflection,  clearness,  flex- 
ibility, a  lisp,  special  intonations,  accents,  or  even  dialects,  aje 
often  prepotent.  The  mode  of  laughing  comes  next,  while 
carriage,  gait,  gesture,  the  movement  or  roll  of  the  eye,  the 

^  Fed.  Sem.,  vol.  ii,  p.  504. 
47 


"4  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

pose  of  the  head  and  shoulders,  the  mode  of  fanning,  use  of 
the  handkerchief,  holding  the  dress,  the  way  of  sitting  or  sigh- 
ing, may  each  have  a  special  preeminence. 

In  dress  or  toilet,  hair  leads,  and  length,  mode,  or  parting, 
dressing,  curling,  beau-catchers,  etc.,  are  detailed.  Rings, 
bracelets,  and  ribbons  come  next  with  the  girls,  and  with  boys, 
clothes  that  fit,  with  several  specifications,  especially  at  the 
shoulder,  waist,  etc.  Canes,  glasses,  furs  and  collars,  teeth 
filled  with  gold,  clean  linen,  white  handkerchiefs,  the  quality 
of  the  cloth,  pronounced  styles,  hats,  and  even  parasols  and 
umbrellas,  are  specialized.  For  some,  a  particular  mode  of 
wearing  the  hat,  stick-pins,  the  special  style  of  collar,  the  mode 
of  wearing  the  watch-chain,  frizzes,  or  coils,  symmetry,  neat- 
ness, etc.,  are  all  prominently  mentioned. 

Conversely,  dislikes  are  no  less  pronounced.  Here,  promi- 
nent, deep-set  eyes  lead,  and  fulness  of  neck,  ears  that  stand  out, 
brows  that  meet,  broad  and  long  feet,  high  cheek-bones,  light 
eyes,  large  nose,  small  stature,  long  neck  or  teeth,  bushy  brows, 
pimples,  red  hair,  and  a  score  and  a  half  other  points  are  speci- 
fied. Of  abhorred  habits,  the  following  lead  in  order :  snuffling, 
lisping,  making  faces,  swallowing,  rolling  the  eyes,  loud  voice, 
"  er-  "  and  "  um-ing,"  pausing  in  talk,  gesticulation,  sarcastic 
smiles,  hard  or  tasteless  laugh,  stiffness  in  movement  or  ex- 
treme lounging,  giggling,  shuffling,  bad  inflections,  swagger- 
ing, and  many  affectations. 

In  dress,  the  order  of  dislikes  mentioned  is :  earrings  worn 
by  men,  lost  teeth,  neglect  of  style,  bangs,  thumb  rings,  hat  on 
one  side  in  men,  short  hair  in  women,  baldness,  ultra  style, 
clothes  that  do  not  fit,  monocles,  flashy  ties,  untidy  linen,  hand- 
kerchiefs with  colors,  furs  and  rings  for  men,  cheap  or  coarse 
dress,  etc. 

Resemblance  to  animals  plays  a  great  and  surprising  role 
in  adolescence  among  sexual  dislikes.  Forty-one  are  men- 
tioned, and  the  resemblances  may  be  suggested  by  face,  voice, 
motion,  or  character,  the  order  being  monkey,  dog,  parrot, 
pig,  bird,  peacock,  cat,  hen,  donkey,  sheep,  rabbit,  bear,  fox, 
etc.  Qualities  disliked  were  as  follows :  impertinence,  flattery, 
affectation,  boldness,  complaint,  bashfulness,  languor,  criticism, 
impulsiveness,  deliberation,  overgallantry,  and  frankness. 
These  are  the  alphabet  or  stoichiological  material  of  which 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  "5 

romantic  love  is  so  largely  composed,  where  trivial  often  eclipse 
great  qualities  and  one  trait  may  be  magnified  beyond  all 
bounds.  We  see  love  charms  dissociated  from  sex  centers  and 
become  objects  of  independent  attraction,  and  also  how,  in  de- 
generates, sex  feelings  may  be  transferred  to  new  objects  with 
no  change  in  the  feelings  themselves.  If  touch,  smell,  voice, 
eye,  mind  or  body,  dress,  automatisms,  conscious  acts,  intelli- 
gence, are  the  decentric  series,  we  can  see  how  now  a  change  in 
fashion,  now  in  manners,  now  in  morals,  and  now  in  religion, 
may  each  be  only  a  change  of  fetish  groups. 

We  note  at  once  in  the  above  the  origin  of  morbid  fetish- 
isms,  the  buds  of  which  exist  in  many  cases  at  this  stage  of  life 
when  all  of  them  probably  take  their  rise.  Normally,  these 
special  preferences,  no  doubt  often  consciously,  and  still  more 
often  unconsciously,  associated  with  liking  for  individuals, 
already  well  developed,  are  instinctively  organized  as  parts  of 
a  larger  whole,  so  that  when  one  who  embodies  in  his  or  her 
own  person  most  of  these  fetishistic  traits  is  met  with,  love  may 
suddenly  recognize  and  focus  on  its  own.  There  is  quick  identi- 
fication and  fusion  of  ideals  that  are  fit.  Love  is  on  this  view 
the  practical  culmination  of  self-knowledge  which  is  aware  of 
defects,  and  the  systematization  of  counterpart  is  more  or  less 
unconsciously  proceeding  in  the  depths  of  the  soul.  On  the 
one  hand,  so  many  of  these  perfections  may  be  coordinated 
and  in  so  high  a  degree,  that  the  ideal  hovers  forever  above  the 
reality,  and  the  former  must  be  comprised  within  actual  mating. 
The  romantic  love,  which  Finck  shows  is  largely  a  modern 
product,  illustrates  the  ideals  of  the  minstrels  of  the  twelfth 
century,  and  many  of  the  modern  novelists  of  both  the  porno- 
graphic and  the  mystic  schools  must  share  with  many  other 
causes  the  responsibility  of  perturbing  the  plain  and  beauteous 
order  of  nature.  In  six  leading  contemporary  alienists,  I  find 
the  following  definitions  of  the  love  as  described  in  novels, 
"  emotive  delusion,"  ''  fixed  idea,"  "  rudimentary  paranoia," 
"  psychic  neurasthenia,"  "  psychic  emotive  obsession,"  and 
"  episodic  symptoms  of  hereditary  degeneracy."  In  the  de- 
generate soul,  the  whole  energy  of  love  may  center  upon  some 
single  trait  which  may  thus  come  to  play  a  disproportionate  or 
even  demiurgic  part  in  the  life  of  sex.  In  any  case,  esthetic 
taste  is  unconsciously  being  cultivated  over  a  wide  range  ot 


H6  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

topics  and  to  a  degree  of  which  the  mature  mind  generally  loses 
all  appreciation. 

Female  coyness  and  reluctance  or  refusal  is  so  deep-seated 
as  to  belie  the  Bible  imputation  that  this  sex  made  the  first  ad- 
vances. The  contrary  seems  true,  that  in  this  respect  woman 
is  normally  and  constitutionally  more  unfallen  than  man,  and 
that  the  world  owes  to  her  the  precious  and  primal  motive  of 
reserve.  All  through  the  animal  series  she  leads,  not  only 
organically,  because  her  parts  are  inward  and  hidden,  but  psy- 
chically, in  the  instinct  to  cover.  As  Ellis  well  suggests,  the 
attitude  of  the  Medicean  Venus  with  the  two  hands  concealing 
and  protecting  the  two  chief  sexual  zones  is  typical.  First, 
no  doubt,  comes  fear  and  her  shyness  and  timidity  accentuated 
by  male  aggression  and  full  of  reverberations  through  her 
whole  mental  and  physical  organism.  Next,  perhaps,  comes  the 
long  menstrual  taboo  to  which  man  has  condemned  her,  so 
that  her  instincts  shun  everything  that  could  betray  this  condi- 
tion and  seek  in  every  way  to  disguise  it.  To  these  are  added 
the  dread  of  exciting  disgust  and  the  close  association  of  ex- 
cremental  functions  and  the  shame  that  centers  in  them.  An- 
other factor  is  her  individual  preference  which  constantly 
tends  to  make  her  reserved  toward  all  others,  although  she 
would  be  unreserved  to  one.  Waitz  thinks  that  she  thus  antici- 
pates male  ownership,  and  in  civilized  life  the  feelings  of  a 
future  husband.  The  fact  that  during  most  or  all  of  the  stages 
of  gestation  she  is  averse  to  approach  would  place  a  psychic 
embargo  upon  these  periods.  Sixth,  the  pain  of  parturition 
and  the  labor  of  rearing  children  must  have  always  constituted, 
whenever  foresight  was  sufficiently  developed,  a  strong  toco- 
logical  and  prudential  restraint ;  while  lastly,  her  love  of  being 
admired,  courted,  and  wooed  would  make  delay  in  these  deli- 
cious forecourts  of  love  prolonged.  Dressed  and  fortified  by 
all  this  intricate  panoply  of  motives  to  anatomical,  physiolog- 
ical, and  psychological  modesty,  she  plays  her  role  of  sexual 
selection,  long-circuiting  primary  to  secondary  instincts,  slowly 
domesticating  man  and  developing  in  him  the  traits  she  pre- 
fers, and  endowing  him  with  many  of  his  best  secondary  sexual 
qualities.  Miss  Gamble  says,  in  substance,  that  woman  thus 
created  man,  gave  him  his  best  traits  of  mind  and  body,  and 
takes  pleasure  in  adding  that  she  had  to  make  him  attractive 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  n? 

in  order  to  endure  him.  But  the  reverse  process  has  been  no 
less  effective,  for  she  thus  diverted  selective  processes  to  higher 
secondary  qualities  in  herself,  and  gave  these  all  the  stimuli 
that  spring  from  natural  selection.  If  the  race  had  passed 
through  a  long  stage  of  female  supremacy  or  a  matriarchate, 
as  Bachofen  supposed,  this  would  naturally  intensify  and  re- 
fine all  these  long-circuit  influences. 

With,  and  probably  without,  this  latter  stress,  sexual  ten- 
sion would  have  been  sufficient  to  be  one  cause  of  the  now  well- 
established  greater  variability  of  the  male  as  compared  with  the 
female.  Sexual  sympathy  could  overdo  its  work  and  attract 
the  male  to  the  sphere  of  the  female.  This  would  supply  the 
cause  of  feminism  in  its  many  forms,  and  perhaps  the  sac- 
charinity  ineffable  of  many  an  ancient  and  modern  amorist  and 
bard.  If  man  loses  his  cue  and  becomes  overdocile,  interpret- 
ing the  woman's  states  of  mind  too  subtly,  playing  female  parts 
in  her  costume,  with  oily  voice  and  cadence,  we  have  the  germs 
of  inversion.  Not  only  in  the  body,  but  in  the  psyche  of  child- 
hood, there  are  well-marked  stages  in  which  male  and  female 
traits,  sensations,  and  instincts  struggle  for  prepotency.  Here, 
too,  the  instincts  peculiar  to  the  opposite  sex  may  not  vanish  as 
they  normally  should,  so  that  we  have  bi-sexual  souls.  In  these 
cases,  where  latencies  and  rudiments  of  the  other  sex  are 
aroused,  as  eviration  progresses,  instincts  in  the  male  predomi- 
nantly feminine,  which  should  be  relegated  to  the  background, 
are  brought  to  the  fore.  Moreover,  in  the  state  consecutive  to 
consummation,  exhaustion  in  the  male  produces  a  temporary 
passivity  akin  to  feminism,  and  this  state  is  the  background  of 
homo-sexuality.  Schopenhauer,  with  singular  lack  of  insight 
or  with  germs  of  inversion  in  his  own  soul,  thought  the  latter 
a  normal  state  for  men  over  fifty  and  a  wise  provision  of  nature 
to  turn  these  instincts  in  man  from  the  opposite  sex  to  his  own 
for  the  benefit  of  posterity. 

While  these  sad  phenomena  are  unquestionably  exceptional 
and  degenerate,  we  have,  in  the  excessive  predominance  of 
feminine  reluctance,  factors  which  Moll  has  made  the  basis  of  a 
theory  of  the  origin  of  fetishisms;  viz.,  that  where  clothing 
and  other  accessories  have  too  far  or  too  completely  irradiated 
man's  sexual  instinct,  it  may  focus  on  relatively  neutral  or  in- 
different parts,  objects,  and  acts,  until  instead  of  specializing  in 


Il8  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

an  individual  synthesis,  it  focuses  upon  one  single  item  which 
may  provoke  it  toward  any  person,  and  becomes  anesthetic 
toward  its  normal  stimulus.  Upon  this  view,  prudery  and 
mock  modesty  have  a  share  in  the  responsibility  for  this  perver- 
sion which  sometimes,  although  far  less  than  in  cases  of  in- 
version, is  reflected  in  bodily  modifications  at  puberty.  The 
fact  that  both  sexes  have  in  them  germs  of  the  other's  quality, 
makes  it  incumbent  upon  each  to  play  its  sex  symphony  with 
no  great  error,  lest  the  other  be  more  or  less  desexed  in  soul. 
The  function  of  dreams  and  of  heredity  in  these  abnormalities 
does  not  concern  us  here. 

It  is  one  important  office  of  convention,  custom,  and  eti- 
quette to  preside  over  this  balance  between  the  relationship  of 
the  sexes  at  large.  Modesty  is  at  root  mode,  and  woman  is  its 
priestess.  Nothing  can  be  more  diverse  among  different  people 
and  in  different  ages.  Nudity  is  perfectly  compatible  and  often 
associated  with  modesty,  whose  only  garb  may  be  virtue,  which 
may  express  itself  in  pose,  deportment,  and  make  itself  thor- 
oughly recognized  at  once  upon  acquaintance.  From  the  mere 
phalocript  and  the  mixed  bathing  in  Japan,  the  foot  modesty 
in  China  which  could  sooner  expose  anything  else,  from  the 
shame  of  male  models  up  to  the  sensitiveness  that  blushes  if 
the  neck  is  exposed  in  the  bath-suit  or  the  ankle  in  the  ballroom, 
that  does  not  permit  the  sight  of  one's  own  body  alone,  that 
drapes  statues  and  can  not  study  botany,  we  have  scales  and 
unwritten  codes  which  extend  no  less  rigorously  to  acts,  ges- 
tures, and  expressions.  These  are  like  psychic  garments  with 
changing  fashions,  but  erotology-  well  understands  that  some- 
times to  ignore  their  existence  is  itself  to  win,  for  like  clothes 
they  may  be  removed  with  reluctance,  but  once  off  the  wearer 
sinks  to  a  lower  psychic  plateau  on  which  the  race  long  lived, 
and  becomes  more  or  less  shameless. 

It  is  on  these  laws,  written  and  unwritten,  that  coquetry 
loves  to  play.  It  flees,  but  flees  in  a  circle,  or  to  excite  pursuit ; 
it  resists,  but  so  as  to  provoke  conquests ;  it  understands  that 
concealment  inflames  and  feeds  fancy,  that  dress  may  be  war- 
paint in  the  battle  of  sex  against  sex.  Without  consciously 
assuming  that  modesty  was  meant  only  to  be  overcome,  that 
many  of  the  original  dances  parody  the  closest  of  all  relations, 
and  that  modes  are  often  set  by  demi-mondaincs,  everything  is 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  "9 

risque.  Pudenda  are  concealed  but  with  colors  still  more  strik- 
ing, and,  as  Ellis  says,  dashes,  stars,  and  asterisks,  as  Swift 
first  used  them,  may  be  most  insidiously  suggestive.  The 
coquette  is  generally  discentered  and  hollow  at  the  root,  and 
her  fickleness  is  not  that  normal  to  the  monthly  rhythm,  but 
capricious  and  freaky.  Any  barrier,  no  matter  how  fantastic 
and  extreme,  if  consciously  let  down  may  become  provocative 
and  immoral.  The  early  stages  of  adolescent  development 
should  be  mainly  directed  toward  irradiation  and  the  cultiva- 
tion of  qualities  penumbral  and  accessory  to  the  fundamental 
one  of  sex.  Education,  religion,  art,  society,  and  philosophy 
must  build  a  well-constructed  stairway  up  the  same  height 
which  the  Platonic  ladder  sought  to  scale.  Almost  everything 
should  be  viewed  by  adults  in  its  bearing  to  this  one  end,  so 
that  orgies  may  be  restrained  and  calentures  be  experienced  on 
a  high  plane. 

Not  only  is  the  soma  itself  in  some  sense  a  secondary  sexual 
quality,  but  its  development  is  a  kind  of  nidification  for  the 
human  germ  to  be  molted  at  death,  when  it  has  served  its  pur- 
pose, while  work  with  intensity  is  necessary  so  that  erethisms 
and  second  breath  may  be  had  both  in  physical  and  mental 
activity.  Healthful  and  sufficient  society  of  noble  women, 
communion  with  whom  at  this  age  rapidly  passes  over  to 
adoration ;  diversion,  starting  out  in  business  as  the  majority 
of  young  people  do  in  the  early  teens  on  completing  the  legal 
requirements  of  education;  avoidance  of  self-consciousness, 
lest  it  be  turned  toward  parts  and  functions  the  premature  de- 
velopment of  which  stunts  all  the  higher  faculties ;  enthusiasm 
in  intellectual  work,  so  that  studies  be  not  dry  and  leave  us 
cold ;  experience  with  hardship  and  perhaps  some  asceticism 
and  mortification  of  the  flesh  at  the  age  when  the  blood  is 
hottest,  when  debauchees  became  flagellants  and  St.  Benedict 
rolled  in  the  thorn  bushes  to  divert  and  check  his  passion ;  even 
sorrow  and  grief  and  perhaps  love  melancholy,  which  glimpses 
in  pain  and  disappointment  its  Nemesis,  death — all  these,  if 
not  actually  building  up  higher  Jacksonian  levels  in  the  brain, 
are  constructing  nests  of  high  and  wholesome  thoughts  for  old 
age,  in  which  it  can  dwell  with  pleasure  and  dignity,  when  the 
stress  of  passion  is  gone,  and  are  working  out  the  higher  voca- 
tion of  man. 


120  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

One  of  the  functions  of  this  flood-time  of  Hfe  is  to  irrigate 
old  age  and  malce  it  green,  to  lay  up  psychic  treasure  anticipa- 
tory of  it,  and  make  senescence,  which  is  in  so  many  ways  a 
negative  repHca  or  intagho  of  adolescence,  pure  and  noble  in  a 
high  Ciceronian  sense.  It  is  perhaps  not  without  significance 
that  the  nervous  system  begins  its  development  with  sex  and 
increases  for  the  most  part  pari  passu  with  it.  Its  associative 
plexi  are  organs  of  irradiation  upward  and  they  have  widening 
correspondences  in  time  and  space,  so  that  the  satiety  of  the 
moment  does  not  breed  disgust,  and  the  physical  and  spiritual 
are  indissolubly  knit  together,  so  that  love  can  now  be  the  most 
unitary  act  of  a  highly  complex  life.  Offspring  is  literally  a 
continuation  or  a  part  of  the  body,  and  love  to  it  begins  in  and 
is  a  part  of  self-love.  In  lower  forms  even  the  nest  is  secreted, 
and  the  identity  of  body  between  parent  and  offspring  is  such 
that  defense  is  self-protection. 

Thus  starting  from  the  reproductive  act  and  widening  to 
love  of  features,  dress,  acts,  and  fair  forms,  and  so  on  in  en- 
larging concentric  circles,  to  all  the  arts  of  carezza,  then  to 
images  and  courtship,  ever  higher,  richer,  purged  of  fear  and 
anger,  love  with  the  mind  instead  of  with  sense  may  become 
the  kinetic  equivalent  and  catharsis  for  its  grosser  physical 
manifestations,  and  its  telluric-chthonic  type  may  be  transpe- 
ciated  to  reenforce  the  appreciation  of  all  that  is  good,  beauti- 
ful, and  true.  From  giving,  first,  edibles  and  toys  up  to  self- 
effacement;  from  love  of  being  together  to  complete  coordi- 
nation of  habits,  tastes,  and  instincts;  from  trying  to  please 
and  cause  a  smile  up  to  always  preferring  another's  good  to 
one's  own — all  this  is  not  alchemy  and  the  archaic  symbolism 
in  which  love  poems  revel,  but  the  plain,  simple  course  of 
evolution  if  normally  environed.  It  is  no  mystery  save  the 
supreme  mystery  of  spring-time  and  of  growth. 

The  apex  of  individuation  must  be  attained  before  genesis, 
but  only  for  the  sake  of  the  latter,  to  which  it  is  subordinate. 
This  means  the  postponement  of  every  nubile  function  till  as 
near  the  end  of  the  growth  period  as  possible,  so  that  maturity 
may  realize  as  far  as  practicable  the  ideal  of  Sir  Galahad,  who 
had  the  strength  of  ten  because  his  heart  was  pure.  The  most 
rigid  chastity  of  fancy,  heart,  and  body  is  physiologically  and 
psychologically  as  well  as  ethically  imperative  till  maturity  is 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  121 

complete  on  into  the  twenties,  nor  is  it  hard  if  continence  is 
inward,  for  nature  in  all  healthful  bodies  brings  normal  relief ; 
while  the  most  morbid  symptom  of  decadence  and  degeneration 
of  both  the  individual  and  his  stock  or  line  is  the  concession 
to  the  excuses  and  justification  now  often  current  even  among 
academic  youth  for  the  indulgences  of  passion.  Restraint  is 
now  true  manhood  and  makes  races  ascendent  and  not  de- 
scendent,  while  from  the  plant  world  up,  prematurity,  that 
goes  too  early  to  seed,  means  caducity.  The  perfected  adoles- 
cent will  now  have  systematized  his  ideals, 

A  sad  new  light  upon  the  peculiar  vulnerability  of  early 
adolescence  in  girls  is  presented  in  a  recent  minute  study  of 
eighteen  cases  of  hysteria  in  highly  cultivated  subjects,  to  each 
of  which  more  than  one  hundred  hours  of  work  was  devoted.^ 
In  nearly  every  case,  it  was  found  that  the  primary  disturbance 
was  due  to  some  lesion,  shock,  or  psychic  traumatism  at  pu- 
berty, such  as  a  sudden  indecent  proposal  from  a  revered  friend 
or  lover,  or  some  pornographic  scene,  the  private  nature  of 
which  caused  it  to  be  concealed  from  others  and  unacknowl- 
edged by  the  subject  of  it.  This  acted  like  a  foreign  body  in 
consciousness,  which  would  not  be  assimilated  in  the  general 
associative  plexus,  but  could  sometimes  be  brought  into  con- 
sciousness by  hypnosis ;  or  in  other  cases,  the  mere  act  of  con- 
fession relieved  the  hysterical  symptoms,  so  that  such  experi- 
ences no  longer  inhibited  motor  acts.  Sometimes  the  wounded 
feelings  were  almost  lost  to  consciousness  and  were  transmuted 
to  physical  pain  or  nausea,  or  else  the  fact  developed  a  hidden 
life  of  its  own,  or  produced  Charcot's  passional  attitudes  where 
physical  pain  did  not  relieve  the  intense  psychalgia.  Freud 
sums  up  by  saying  ^  that  their  chief  result  is  that  "  from  what- 
ever side  and  from  whatever  symptom  we  start,  we  always 
unfailingly  reach  the  region  of  the  sexual  life."  "  At  the  bot- 
tom of  every  case  of  hysteria,  and  reproducible  by  an  analytic 
effort  after  even  an  interval  of  ten  years,  may  be  found  one  or 
more  facts  of  previous  sexual  experience  belonging  to  early 
youth."  **  I  regard  this  important  result  as  the  discovery  of  a 
caput  Nili  of  neuropathology'."    This  view,  although  no  doubt 

'  Brauer  and  Freud,  o/>.  cit. 
'Wien.  klin.  Rundschau,  1896. 


122  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

partial  and  less  completely  explanatory  of  all  hysterical  phe- 
nomena, brings  it  back,  nevertheless,  to  its  etymology,  and  is 
suggestive  here  not  only  in  showing  the  wide  psychic  and  also 
somatic  resonance  of  this  function,  but  in  confirming  our  con- 
tention that  primary  sexual  facts  normally  come  in  the  later 
stages  of  adolescence  after  secondary  qualities  have  become 
familiar  to  consciousness.  To  my  thinking,  we  have  in  the 
above  theory  a  new  outcrop  of  the  old  problems  of  catharsis, 
which  is  suggested  in  Plato's  Symposium,  elaborated  in  Aris- 
totle's Poetics,  and  voluminously  discussed  ever  since  (Doring 
mentions  seventy  treatises  on  it  in  fifteen  years),  and  which  is 
destined  to  be  one  of  the  most  fundamental  themes  in  the  new 
psychology  of  art,  and  perhaps  still  more  of  religion. 

Now  love  can  include  the  whole  body  and  soul.  The  fact 
that,  as  we  have  seen,  woman  is  a  more  generic  being  than  man, 
closer  to  the  race,  and  less  mutilated  by  specializations  or  by 
deformities  of  body  or  of  soul,  makes  it  easy  and  normal  for 
man  to  see  in  his  chosen  Helen  the  entire  sex.  She  becomes  to 
him  the  flower  in  the  crannied  wall,  by  knowing  and  loving 
which  he  knows  God  and  man.  Every  part  of  her  body  and 
mind  is  attractive.  Pie  must  not  be  unable  to  see  her  coun- 
tenance for  her  soul,  or  her  soul  for  her  body,  and  will  find  in 
her  a  complete  microcosm  so  that  age  and  beauty  are  not  in- 
compatible, and  his  love  for  soma  and  psyche  will  each  keep 
the  other  from  atrophy.  Marriage  can  now  be  ideal,  infallible, 
and  impeccable  without  requiring  any  platonic  supervision  of 
elders.  The  erogenic  magnets  are  organized  so  that  a  life  of 
true  love  can  be  both  complemental  and  symbiotic.  Synthesis 
of  the  many  complex  elements  now  secures  against  any  form 
of  degradation ;  each  sex  is  conscious  of  its  own  good  points, 
but  still  more  so  of  those  of  the  other;  life,  which  has  hitherto 
been  partial,  provisional,  and  preparatory,  now  becomes  com- 
plete in  mutual,  spiritual  appropriation  and  mastery.  Defects 
are  balanced,  and  two  bodies  and  two  souls  are  a  finished  nidus 
for  the  development  of  the  new  resultant  life  which  can  now  be 
inaugurated. 

Every  gemmule  is  mobilized  and  the  sacred  hour  of  hered- 
ity normally  comes  when  adolescence  is  complete  in  wedlock 
and  the  cerebro-spinal  rings  up  the  sympathetic  system,  and 
this  hands  over  the  reins  to  the  biophores  and  germ  cells,  which 


ADOLESCENT   LOVE  1 23 

now  assert  their  dominance  over  those  of  the  soma.  In  the 
most  unitary  of  all  acts,  which  is  the  epitome  and  pleroma  of 
life,  we  have  the  most  intense  of  all  affirmations  of  the  will  to 
live  and  realize  that  the  only  true  God  is  love,  and  the  center 
of  life  is  worship.  Every  part  of  mind  and  body  participates 
in  a  true  pangenesis.  This  sacrament  is  the  annunciation  hour, 
with  hosannas  which  the  whole  world  reflects.  Communion  is 
fusion  and  beatitude.  It  is  the  supreme  hedonic  narcosis,  a 
holy  intoxication,  the  chief  ecstasy,  because  the  most  intense 
of  experiences ;  it  is  the  very  heart  of  psychology,  and  because 
it  is  the  supreme  pleasure  of  life  it  is  the  eternal  basis  and 
guarantee  of  optimism.  It  is  this  experience  more  than  any 
other  that  opens  to  man  the  ideal  world.  Now  the  race  is  in- 
carnated in  the  individual  and  remembers  its  lost  paradise. 
Man  must  experience  pleasure  in  order  to  know  the  good,  and 
the  long  reverberations  of  this  experience  remain,  transporting 
the  soul,  filling  it  with  a  sense  of  exquisite  rapture,  delicacy, 
and  deep  joy,  hovering  over  life  and  suffusing  it  with  a  glory 
not  hitherto  suspected,  enriching  the  past  like  a  "  vague  snatch 
of  Uranian  antiphone,"  and  lighting  the  future  with  the  per- 
manent possibility  of  a  higher  life  than  could  hitherto  be  con- 
ceived. Life  is  now  polarized,  oriented,  and  potentialized.  The 
soul  is  filled  with  a  Titanism  that  would  achieve  a  vita  ntiova 
upon  a  higher  plateau,  where  the  music  of  humanity  is  no 
longer  sad  but  triumphant.  The  conversion  of  the  Marquis 
of  Penalta,  by  the  act  of  love,  from  a  monk  to  a  hero  of  action, 
as  the  first  taste  of  blood  transforms  a  young  tiger,  illustrates 
how  this  act  can  never  be  normally  passionate  unless  it  is  pure. 
Now  the  soul  realizes  the  possibility  of  a  new  heaven  and  a  new 
earth  ;  that  the  highest  dreams  of  human  beatitude  may  be  real ; 
that  there  is  a  summiwi  bonum  awaiting  man  on  heights  not 
yet  scaled,  and  that  erethism  and  its  calentures  are  prophecies 
of  a  higher  human  estate.  It  pants  for  more  and  fuller  life. 
Nothing  is  such  a  potent  norm,  so  pervades  all  the  conscious 
and  unconscious  regions  with  a  controlling  force,  which  science 
can  not  describe  and  which  is  forever  too  subtle  for  the  intellect, 
which  is  a  more  individual  product,  to  trace.  Eyery^oaljthat  _ 
science,  art,  religion,  ambition  strives  for  becomes  more  real 
and  near,  and  in  no  other  act  are  body  and  soul  so  absolutely 
one,  and  the  rights  and  fullest_J[unctions  of  each  so  utterly 


124  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  V>OLESCENCE 

TfependenLjupgn  those  of  the  other;/  The  flesh  and  spirit  are 
mated,  and  now  Tor~The~fir5rTime  an  apperception  organ  is 
mohed  forth,  full  grown  like  Minerva  for  knowing,  doing,  and 
feeling  all  that  is  lawful  to  man's  estate.  Nature,  as  hitherto 
conceived,  is  transcended  in  the  soul's  natura  naturata,  and  the 
extra  and  supernatural  organ  of  faith  comes  into  possession  of 
its  kingdom. 

Alas  for  those  in  whom  this  experience  is  mutilated  by  pre- 
mature or  excessive  experience  in  Venusberg,  for  these  can 
never  know  the  highest,  largest,  and  deepest  things  of  life! 
Genesic  excess,  venery,  and  salacity  arrest  the  higher  develop- 
ment, forever  exclude  the  soul  from  the  higher  kingdom  of 
man  and  compel  it  to  dwell  in  lower  regions,  where  adolescence 
merges  into  senescence  too  early  and  without  normal  culmina- 
tion. Synthesis  on  the  psychic  side  and  amphimixis  on  the 
physical  issues  in  offspring  in  variation,  in  the  interests  of  which 
sex  was  developed.  The  effectiveness  of  the  rejuvenation  thus 
arising  in  the  new  generation  is  a  moral  as  well  as  a  physiolog- 
ical biometer,  or  test  of  life,  every  act  of  which  should  be  con- 
formable to  the  needs  of  the  unborn,  that  an  enfeebled  exist- 
ence be  not  transmitted  to  them,  but  that  the  sacred  torch  be 
passed  on  undimmed.  Many  a  mystery  of  human  existence  is 
only  the  dim  forecourt  to  this  great  clarifier.  As  Heraclitus 
thought  the  sun  each  night  was  absorbed  into  the  earth,  mak- 
ing all  its  mass  a  little  warmer  and  lighter,  and  secreted  anew 
each  morning;  as  the  sun  explains  many  a  mythic  cycle  of 
solar  heroes  and  brings  both  them  and  the  mind  into  a  higher 
unity,  so  the  high  potential  of  sex  pervades  and  gives  us  the 
key  by  which  to  unlock  many  obscurities.  When  chaste  and 
ripened  love  is  thus,  each  personality  is  a  god  to  the  other  and 
every  such  conception  is  immaculate  for  both. 

Reproduction  is  always  sacrificial.  Man  learns  to  live  by 
dying  and  his  life  is  at  best  a  masterly  retreat.  Relaxation  and 
detumescence  are  the  first  faint  symptoms  from  afar  of  senile 
involution  and  the  Nemesis  of  death,  toward  which  the  indi- 
vidual shrivels.  After  the  high  tide  in  which  the  ars  amandi 
culminates,  lifting  existence,  like  the  great  bore  on  the  Chinese 
rivers,  the  law  of  post  coitus  triste  is  gradually  accentuated  with 
increasing  age.  Now  man  truly  knows  good  and  evil,  euphoria 
and  disphoria,  and  is  polarized  to  pleasure  and  pain.  Hereafter 


ADOLESCENT   LOVE  125 

Nature  grows  more  and  more  indifferent  to  the  individual,  for 
the  species  is  his  true  essence  and  its  hfe  is  an  explanation 
and  paraphrase  of  sex.  In  natures  weakened  by  venery,  indif- 
ference and  impotence  deepen  to  remorse  and  sometimes  to 
psychic  pain  so  intense  that  the  fall  of  man  is  reenacted  and 
hate  and  even  murder  may  take  the  place  of  love.  Pleasure  at 
any  price  means  a  loveless  life  from  which  all  the  music  of 
humanity  has  gone.  If  it  is  hollow  or  diseased  at  the  core, 
even  pleasure  is  only  explosive  and  instantaneous,  and  the 
trough  of  the  wave  of  reaction  is  too  deep  and  broad.  This  sex- 
ual cause  of  neurasthenia,  "  in  the  morning  hectic,  in  the  even- 
ing electric,"  makes  life  a  living  death,  for  all  sin  either  is  or 
is  measured  by  the  degradation  of  this  function. 

The  soul  of  the  normal  mother  now  slowly  turns  toward  the 
child  and  toward  the  future,  and  the  father,  whom  she  original- 
ly reclaimed  from  feral,  roving  loves,  later  follows.  Marital  is 
enlarged  to  filial  love,  and  the  affections  are  slowly  pivoted 
over  into  alinement  with  the  race  and  its  interests.  The 
struggle  for  the  life  of  others,  which  has  taken  the  place  of  that 
for  individual  existence,  now  includes  the  family  and  is  triune. 
Childhood  is  studied  by  sympathy  through  all  stages  of  the 
miracle  of  growth.  In  the  lower  animal  series,  parents  die  in 
the  exercise  of  the  reproductive  function.  Many  animal 
mothers  never  see  their  children,  who  are  orphaned  before 
birth,  but  now  womb,  cradle,  nursery,  home,  family,  relatives, 
school,  church,  and  state  are  only  a  series  of  larger  cradles  or 
placenta,  as  the  soul,  like  the  chambered  nautilus,  builds  itself 
larger  mansions,  the  only  test  and  virtue  of  which  is  their 
service  in  bringing  the  youth  to  ever  fuller  maturity. 

Wedlock  and  the  family  are  thus  all  conditioning.  They 
must  be  perfect  because  they  are  symbols  and  types  of  life. 
These  masterpieces  are  the  choicest  products,  so  far  as  evolution 
is  yet  itself  evolved,  of  the  history  of  the  world,  which  is  at 
root  a  love  story.  Defect  here  destroys  an  organ  of  knowledge, 
for  the  larger  institutions  are  created  in  its  image  and  can  be 
rightly  known  only  through  it.  Without  children,  love  is  in- 
complete. If  woman  is  not  satisfied,  and  grows  mannish  and 
assumes  the  functions  of  the  other  sex  as  her  rights,  it  is  be- 
cause man  is  a  failure  and  has  not  met  her  highest  needs  of 
body  and  soul,  or  both ;  and  if  he  degenerates,  and  either  be-^ 


126  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

comes  feminine  or  relapses  to  his  predomesticated  stage  and 
ceases  to  be  primarily  husband,  it  is  because  she  no  longer  is 
primarily  wife  and  mother.  That  religion  and  sex  are  in  close 
psychological  relation  the  world  knows  well.  This  is  seen 
even  in  their  abnormalities  and  in  the  acute  attunement  of  the 
adolescent  soul  to  the  former.  This  stage  of  life  is  the  accepted 
time  when  the  teachers  of  all  faiths  have  found  their  chief  op- 
portunity, as  appears  at  length  in  another  chapter.  Christianity 
has  exercised  its  salvatory  and  soteriological  power  in  the  world 
because  it  rescued  love  by  deploying  it  upon  a  higher  plane 
and  building  a  temple  where  vice  makes  a  sewer.  It  is  this  upon 
which  the  claims  of  Christianity  chiefly  rest.  It  is  this  that 
makes  the  Jewish-Christian  story,  and  it  affects  the  very  heart 
of  human  history,  the  record  of  the  supreme  achievement  of  our 
race  thus  far,  and  our  Bible  its  pedagogic  masterpiece. 

V.  The  chief  reason  why  our  Bible  is  the  best  of  all  ethnic 
Bibles  is  because  it  is  so  deeply  based  upon  genetic  truth.  The 
story  of  creation  is  full  of  ancient  and  subtle  symbols  of  divine 
generation.  The  tale  of  Eden  and  the  fall,  whatever  historical 
validity  it  may  or  may  not  have,  is  a  masterly  allegory  of  the 
first  stage  in  the  decadence  of  love.  Abraham,  a  nomad  sheik, 
was  a  breeder  of  cattle,  and  the  promise  was  that  he  should 
be  a  breeder  of  men  like  the  stars  of  the  heavens  for  multitude. 
Circumcision  was  a  hygienic  measure  of  great  efficacy,  as  we 
shall  see,  as  well  as  a  covenant.  The  long  wars  with  the 
Canaanites  and  Baal  worshipers  were  conflicts  with  phallicism, 
to  the  gross  orgies  of  which  the  chosen  people  were  always 
lapsing.  All  early  Hebrew  history  shows  that  while  man 
knows  how  to  breed  cattle,  Jehovah  could  breed  men,  and  it  is 
a  study  of  human  heredity  far  more  effective  than  Plato  knew 
how  to  make  it.  The  New  Testament  begins  with  the  annun- 
ciation and  conception  from  on  high,  and  a  nursery  scene  of 
moving  bucolic  power,  while  Islam  hypostatizes  only  the  for- 
mer. We  glimpse  the  hero,  at  the  dawn  of  puberty,  in  the 
temple,  turning,  as  is  germane  to  gifted  souls  at  this  stage, 
to  the  great  themes  of  religion.  One  at  least  of  his  tempta- 
tions was  probably  fleshly,  but  gloriously  overcome.  He  dies 
at  the  acme  of  prolonged  adolescence,  nubility,  and  ideal  perfec- 
tion. Motherhood  is  idealized  in  the  adoration  of  Mary,  who 
has  lost  none  of  the  charm  of  virginity,  but  combines  the  two 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  127 

into  unique  glory.  God  is  our  Father  and  heavenly  Parent,  and 
the  Gospel  is  through  and  through  a  literal  deification  of  love 
as  the  chief  thing  in  the  world.  Paul's  teaching  culminates  in 
his  enthronement  of  charity,  which  is  love  fulfilling  all  the  law. 
Celibacy  and  asceticism  were  long  thought  the  Christian  service 
most  ad  majorem  Dei  gloriam.  The  logos  or  spirit  of  wisdom, 
which  made  the  world,  was  spermatic;  all  the  doctrines  of 
conversion  and  customs  of  confirmation  are  prefigured  in  the 
nature  and  the  needs  of  adolescence.  Liturgies  are  full  of 
adoration  and  passionate  declarations  of  love  to  God.  Thus 
the  great  work  of  Jesus  was,  when  all  else  save  love  alone  was 
dead,  to  create  the  world  from  this  vital  germ. 

Psychologically,  religion  and  love  rise  and  degenerate  to- 
gether. One  test  of  an  age,  race,  or  civilization  is  to  keep 
these  two  as  near  as  love  and  death  are  to  each  other,  and  in 
as  wholesome  relations.  Schleiermacher  deduces  theology  and 
religion  alike  from  a  sense  of  absolute  dependence,  which  al- 
most suggests  Massochistic  longings  toward  the  transcendent. 
The  same  erethic  diathesis  appears  in  Swedenborg,  to  whom, 
after  the  severest  conflicts  with  lust,  heaven  opened  with 
hedonic  raptures  as  epiphanies  have  often  come  to  saints  who 
abandon  themselves  to  heaven.  We  must  love  God  with  all 
the  heart,  soul,  mind,  and  strength,  because  he  can  only  be 
known  by  love  and  not  by  arguments  from  design  or  sufficient 
reason  or  cause,  and  if  we  do  so  aright  we  shall  not  make  him 
a  love  fetish  or  idol,  a  transcendent  or  extraneous  personality, 
nor  shall  we  approach  him  with  phallic  ecstasy  or  panisia 
mania  or  many  of  the  arts  of  pious  eroticism,  but  we  shall  real- 
ize that  he  is  the  most  immanent  of  all  things,  and  that  the 
higher  monotheism  is  not  altogether  separable  from  the  higher 
pantheism.  We  shall  not  love  him  on  Sundays  only,  or  in 
dreams  apart  from  life  as  sexual  love  is  narrowed  to  fetishistic 
perversion,  but  by  a  life  like  Abou  ben  Adhem's,  devoted  to  the 
service  of  the  race,  that  great  Being  the  lightest  whisper  from 
whose  soul  "  moves  us  more  than  all  the  ranged  reason  of  the 
world."  Because  he  is  love,  love  only  can  know  its  own. 
Prayer  will  not  be  a  ceremonial  ritual,  adulation,  or  petition, 
but  simply  approximation  and  desire,  on  the  principle  that  "  he 
prayeth  best  who  loveth  best  all  things  both  great  and  small." 
Miracle  will  no  longer  be  a  term  reserved  for  a  series  of  facts 


128  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

choicely  isolated  from  organic  connection  with  nature  or  life, 
but  will  be  best  seen  in  the  wonder  and  awe  felt  for  all  nature 
and  perhaps  especially  for  growth,  while  revelation  will  be 
truth  cherished  with  irresistible  conviction  as  its  criterion. 
All  longings  for  immortality  will  not  be  satisfied  with  the  per- 
petuation of  the  shell  of  our  selfish  selves,  but  will  focus  on  our 
immortal  race  as  its  true  and  proper  object,  with  the  larger 
perspective  of  all  being  in  the  background. 

In  the  later  sections  of  his  ethics,  the  God-intoxicated 
Spinoza  characterizes  the  intellectual  love  of  his  pantheistic 
God,  which  is  simply  nature  known  sub  specie  eternitatis,  as 
giving  freedom,  salvation,  blessedness,  joy,  and  immortality, 
and  which  can  only  be  known  by  love.  For  all  ontological 
Minnesingers  of  the  love  of  God,  it  is  eternal  life  to  know  him. 
Philosophy  is  a  noetic  Eros  or  impulse  of  the  soul  to  return  to 
its  preexistent  state,  of  which  all  things  mortal  remind  it.  It 
is  the  passion  for  general  ideas,  but  because  these  transcend  all 
particulate  existence  it  is  the  contemplation  of  death  or  a  real 
Thanatopsis,  and  death,  as  the  counterpart  of  love  which  never 
seems  so  black  as  when  contrasted  with  it,  has  been  the  great 
stimulus  to  thought.  Thus  the  heart  makes  the  theologian,  and 
if  its  impulses  are  strong  and  good,  must  impel  him  to  some- 
times believe  the  absurd  just  in  proportion  as  his  heart  trans- 
cends his  head,  and  is  a  more  adequate  organ  of  response  to  the 
universe.  The  supernatural  in  religion,  therefore,  is  the  homo- 
logue  of  the  idealization  of  the  mistress  in  whom,  despite  her 
defects,  the  lover  sees  all  perfection.  As  the  soul  of  the  rapt 
Yogi  reaches  the  mystic  On  and  hovers  on  the  edge  of  ab- 
sorption and  the  extinction  of  personality,  he  may  pause  and 
hark  back  for  a  moment  only  at  the  call  of  love.  All  else  per- 
ishes, but  it  endures,  for  love  in  the  Sanskrit  hymnology  is  the 
spring  of  mind,  and  without  it  all  things  are  as  a  root  out  of 
dry  ground. 

Jesus  was  the  consummate  artist  in  this  field,  for  he  with- 
stood the  contemplative  passion  which  has  irradiated  so  much 
of  the  best  human  motive  power  in  the  world  into  the  inane 
infinite,  and  addressed  himself  to  what  we  so  sadly  now  need 
again  in  terms  less  fossilized  by  convention,  the  reincarnation 
of  love.  It  is  reassuring  to  find  that  what  either  the  individual 
or  the  race  originated  at  an  age  when  the  feelings  and  instincts 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  129 

are  strongest  and  the  intellect  is  undeveloped  is  reaffirmed  by 
the  latter  when  it  comes  to  its  full  flower;  that  if  fashions  in 
orthodoxies  change,  it  is  because  all  these  are  stagings  which 
must  always  be  slowly  changed  or  demolished  as  the  great 
spiritual  temple  of  religion  is  being  reared  in  the  heart.  Our 
scripture  will  itself  be  regenerated  and  re-revealed  as  the  record 
of  man's  highest  insights  into  the  meaning,  and  his  most  prac- 
tical utilization  of  his  own  life,  which  far  transcends  anything 
known  to  modern  psychology  and  ethics,  and  all  chiefly  because 
it  recognized  love  as  the  central  power  in  the  soul  and  presented 
both  patterns  and  precepts  how,  instead  of  a  way  of  death,  it 
could  open  up  a  way  of  life. 

VI.  The  fact  that  love  sensitizes  the  soul  to  the  influences 
of  nature  makes  it  a  genetic  factor  in  the  evolution  of  art,  liter- 
ature, natural  religion,  and  perhaps  to  some  extent  of  science. 
The  lover  is  moved  not  only  by  his  mistress's  form,  features, 
and  every  act,  but  associates  her  with  a  larger  environment, 
almost  every  item  of  which  may  reflect  her  to  his  fancy,  senti- 
ment, or  both.  He  is  at  the  mercy  of  the  weather.  She  may  be 
cold  and  chill  as  death,  while  he  is  burning  or  melting  in  a 
flame  with  his  blood  lava,  or  alternating  from  the  torrid  to  the 
frigid  zone  of  passion,  while  climate  and  environment  in  poetry 
and  romance  are  always  propitious,  and  the  effiects  of  nature  are 
increased  by  the  descending  series  of  her  absence,  refusal,  or 
death.  The  lovesick  swain  borrows  the  poet's  heart  and  brain, 
or  the  artist's  eye  and  hand.  In  four  hundred  love  poems  and 
songs,  aquatic  phenomena  and  metaphors  abound.  His  heart 
sings  of  her  as  the  shell  ever  murmurs  of  the  sea.  His  passion, 
or  her  breast,  ebbs  and  flows  like  the  tides.  Its  waves  break 
and  burst  like  billows  upon  the  shore.  He  would  live  in  an 
ocean  of  love,  "  as  fishes  tipple  in  the  deep."  Love  draws  him, 
while  the  ocean  mirrors  his  ardors  as  it  reflects  the  sky.  He 
would  glide  with  her  over  sunlit  waves  with  sails  of  taffeta  and 
masts  of  beaten  gold,  or,  if  disappointed,  would  settle  into  un- 
known depths  where  old  Silenus  sank.  Lovers'  suicides  are 
often  by  drowning.  The  holy  water  of  affection  laves  the  soul 
and  stills  its  thirst.  The  course  of  love  runs  like  a  river  be- 
tween flowery  banks  or  plunges  over  a  cataract,  for  love  is  born 
out  of  and  came  up  from  the  sea. 

The  lover  is  in  special  rapport  with  the  winds  that  grieve, 
48 


130  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

sigh,  and  murmur.  The  zephyrs  whisper  to  him  of  his  absent 
love,  the  gales  from  the  south  are  amorous,  and  the  very  air 
in  which  he  gasps  is  wanton  or  lovesick.  Fourteen  per  cent 
of  three  hundred  and  forty  youths  and  maidens  confessed,  in  a 
questionnaire,  that  the  moon  always  made  them  want  to  see 
their  beau  or  girl.  It  is  invoked  to  pity  those  who  love  in  vain, 
to  carry  messages,  and  has  heard  the  confessions  of  wan  and 
moonsick  languishers  in  love  since  life  was  cadenced  to  its 
monthly  rhythm.  The  sun  burns  with  the  heat  of  love,  and 
though  there  is  no  day  till  Gloriana  awakes,  it  looks  dull  when 
she  appears,  or  when  he  "  opes  his  golden  eye  "  the  light  from 
hers  "  misleads  the  morn."  Love  would  be  not  only  blind  but 
aphasic  without  flowers,  the  language  of  which  is  the  signa- 
ture of  its  diverse  and  myrionomous  phases.  The  aspen, 
poppy,  willow,  violet,  forget-me-not,  lily,  hyacinth,  jessamine, 
eglantine,  asphodel,  amaranth,  harebell,  anemone,  are  states  of 
mind,  and  the  laureate  of  love  is  a  fool  in  its  college  without 
the  folk-lore  of  flowers,  in  terms  of  which  all  the  incidents  of 
courtship  can  be  symbolically  told.  Philomel  with  her  lyre  of 
gold,  the  lark  that  "  clinks  its  golden  anvil  at  heaven's  gate," 
the  bulbul,  the  boding  raven,  and  the  amorous  descant  of  es- 
pousals by  a  numerous  choir  of  feathered  songsters  are  another 
important  element  in  the  stock  vocabulary  of  the  lover.  In- 
deed, everything  in  nature  responds.  The  sky  is  deep  and 
cerulean  like  her  eyes,  pure  as  her  heart,  high  as  her  purpose. 
Night,  stars,  storm,  lightning,  moldering  earth,  grot  and  dell, 
sand  and  grave,  rock  and  all  the  precious  stones  and  a  copious 
fauna  and  flora,  both  real  and  imaginary,  are  ministers  of  love. 
Landscapes  are  vestiges  of  ancient  love  scenes  which,  until 
recent  times,  were  out-of-doors  and  in  the  country,  the  con- 
ventionalities of  which  make  us  recognize  the  sentiment  in  its 
stage  setting  before  the  lovers  appear.  When  she  has  gone, 
"  idolatrous  fancy  sanctifies  her  relics."  All  things  "  mind  me 
of  my  Jean,"  and  respond  by  a  unique  animism,  the  psychology 
of  which  has  not  yet  been  treated,  to  the  lover's  call  for  sym- 
pathy. They  are  his  valentines,  and  the  sounds  of  nature  have 
been  his  epithalamium  and  made  the  whole  world  a  pastoral 
Arcady  to  him  at  that  stage  of  life  when 

"AH  thoughts,  all  passions,  all  delights,  whatever  stirs  this  mortal  frame, 
Are  but  the  ministers  of  love  and  feed  his  sacred  flame." 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  13 1 

He  has  the  right  of  sanctuary  everywhere,  and  love  has  cast 
out  the  fears  of  nature.  If  the  object  of  affection  dies,  it  is 
still  loved  "  as  some  diffusive  power,"  not  less,  but  more,  for 
"so  little  means  so  much."  All  activities  are  inspired  by  it; 
"  all  journeys  end  in  lovers'  meetings,"  he  would  "  make  her 
glorious  by  his  pen  or  famous  by  his  sword,"  for  "  love  rules 
the  court,  the  camp,  the  grove,  for  love  is  God,  and  God  is  love." 
All  else,  save  love  alone,  is  dross,  but  sympathetic  appreciation 
and  his  sultry  tropical  heart  irradiate  the  world,  while  poetic 
license  allows  most  of  all  liberties  in  amatory  literature  and 
archaic  symbolisms  of  hearts  that  melt  and  freeze,  or  heart- 
strings that  make  melody  or  break  in  a  way  physiology  knows 
not  of.  While  he  may  be  "  in  folly  ripe,  in  reason  rotten  " — 
for  love  is  known  by  follies  and  Jove  laughs  at  lovers'  per- 
juries, and  the  whole  world,  both  of  science  and  mythology, 
is  at  his  command — still  love  is  often  so  hard  a  master  that  it 
can  express  itself  only  inter jectionally  with  woe  alack  and  well- 
a-day,  or  sigh  like  a  furnace  or  congeal  with  reserve,  because 
life  is  so  brief  and  love  so  long. 

This  golden  stage  when  life  glisters  and  crepitates,  although 
it  may  fade  like  nuptial  plumage  or  fall  like  ripe  petals  when 
the  fruit  and  seed  begin  to  set,  has  wrought  a  great  work  in 
the  soul  and  infected  it  with  love  of  beauty  everywhere.  It  is 
the  vernal  season  of  the  heart  and  the  greatest  of  all  stimuli 
for  the  imagination.  It  opens  the  world  of  fancy  which  is  su- 
perposed upon  that  of  reality,  and  which  is  the  totalizing  faculty 
that  supplements  the  limitations  of  individuality  and  makes 
the  age  of  love  the  natal  hour  of  esthetic  appreciation.  Art  is 
certainly  in  part,  though  not  wholly,  a  higher  potency  and 
plateau  of  love,  a  different  stage  or  degree  and  a  higher  move- 
ment by  the  same  momentum.  If  appreciation  is  a  less  degree 
of  the  same  power  that  creates,  and  the  perfect  lover  is  always 
a  poet,  then  art  is  not  for  its  own  sake,  but  for  that  of  love, 
which  should  ripen  into  it.  The  author  of  Rembrandt  als 
Erzieher  is  in  essential  accord  with  Vachon,  who  has  made 
the  most  comprehensive  of  all  reports  on  the  present  condition 
of  art,  that  most  of  the  great  creative  minds  have  achieved 
fame,  not  by  representing  impressions  acquired  after  maturity 
had  been  attained  or  those  derived  from  an  environment  un- 
familiar to  them  in  youth,  but  with  themes  they  loved  in  the 


'3^  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

teens  and  early  twenties.  If  so,  this  shows  that  the  deepest 
and  largest  impressions  are  made  during  adolescence,  which 
we  know  from  other  sources  is  most  plastic  and  richest  in 
memory  pictures.  Conversely,  if  enthusiasm  for  nature  is  not 
.then  engendered,  the  soul  remains  an  alien  and  Philistine 
'through  life  to  all  the  higher  raptures  of  art.  Its  holy  spirit 
now  knocks  at  the  door  of  every  heart,  although  its  day  of 
grace  may  be  sinned  away. 

Perhaps  we  shall  never  know  whether  the  first  song  or  rude 
drawing  was  in  the  service  of  love,  but  we  know  that  it  has 
done  and  can  do  great  things  creatively.  The  Taj  Mahal,  per- 
haps the  most  exquisite  of  all  poems  in  marble,  scores  of  fu- 
neral creations  in  music,  poetry,  and  eulogy  of  the  dead  almost 
to  apotheosis,  at  least  one,  and  that  perhaps  the  greatest, 
French  system  of  philosophy,  and  dramas  by  the  score,  have 
been  inspired  by  and  dedicated  to  loved  ones.  Moreover,  the 
world  so  loves  lovers  that  the  description  of  their  experiences, 
real  and  imaginary,  has  been  perhaps  the  most  prolific  of  all 
modern  themes  in  romance  and  literature,  and  certainly  none 
has  such  power  to  unify  to  one  sharp  focus  so  many  diverse 
incidents  and  characters,  extending  over  such  ranges  of  time 
and  especially  space.  As  love  inspires  animals  to  make  bur- 
rows, nests,  and  homes,  without  hands,  so  many  of  the  greatest 
creations  have  been  a  kind  of  metaphysical  bower-building  for 
those  whom  the  artist  loves.  The  eternally  feminine  in  some 
woman  makes  her  his  Beatrice,  leading  him  to  the  highest 
regions  of  thought  for  her  sake  and  for  her  delectation,  as  the 
head  strives  to  overtake  the  heart  which  has  outgrown  it.  In- 
deed, love  is  essentially  creative,  as  well  as  procreative,  and 
the  great  makers  have  probably  nearly  all  been  great  lovers. 

VII.  Ethics  as  a  science,  and  morals  as  a  life,  have  as  their 
chief  purpose  to  bring  man  into  alinement  with  the  laws  of 
love,  whether  we  are  concerned  with  the  minor  morals  of  eti- 
quette or  with  ultimate  sanctions  of  good.  Plato  could  not 
separate  beauty  and  goodness,  and  our  endeavor  is  to  raise  the 
altruism  of  race  to  the  level  of  parenthood.  For  the  new  ethics 
we  can  easily  conceive  a  new  scale  or  hierarchy  of  virtues, 
which,  provisional  as  it  is,  may  be  of  service  as  an  erotometer. 

First,  of  course,  comes  selfishness  normal  to  children,  whose 
bodies  and  minds  must  be  fed  and  whose  individualities  must 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  1 33 

be  developed  to  their  culmination.  Here  belong  much  of  the 
current  utilitarianism  and  the  principle  of  Guyau  of  the  max- 
imalization of  the  ego  to  its  point  of  highest  perfection.  Es- 
sential as  this  is  in  its  nascent  stage,  no  instinct  perhaps  is  more 
prone  to  hypertrophy.  This  may  appear  in  the  tendency,  which 
only  Max  Stirner  in  recent  times  has  had  the  hardihood  to 
formulate.  Its  principle  is :  I  will  get,  be,  do  the  most  possible 
for  myself,  no  matter  how  others  suffer,  provided  only  I  am  not 
found  out  and  made  to  suffer  myself.  It  may  be  naive  epi- 
cureanism with  a  veritable  itch  for  pleasures  of  sense.  Where 
self-knowledge  and  self-reverence  are  no  longer  curbed  by  self- 
criticism,  modesty,  or  sanity,  it  appears  in  morbid  delusions  of 
greatness.  Here  belong  all  the  ethical  precepts  of  those  virtues 
that  are  primarily  self-regarding,  and  in  its  higher  ranges  life 
appears  from  this  standpoint  as  enlightened  selfishness.  The 
root,  however,  of  most  failures  is  that  self-interest  is  not  well 
and  largely  understood,  for  when  it  is,  it  merges  into  higher 
standpoints. 

The  second  stage  is  entered  upon  always  without  this  later 
adequate  knowledge,  and  appears  in  friendship  and  especially 
in  love  of  the  opposite  sex.  The  history  of  friendship,^  which 
in  the  sense  of  Aristotle  and  Cicero  has  no  doubt  been  en- 
croached on  by  modern  love,  shows  how  it  stimulates  honor, 
knowledge,  high  ambition,  and  may  be  one  of  the  great  joys 
of  life.  Homodoxia,  or  opinions  held  in  common;  homonoia, 
sentiments  mutually  shared ;  mastropia,  the  art  of  acquiring 
friends  and  making  one's  self  liked ;  loyalty  and  even  Platonic 
friendship  between  the  sexes,  like  that  of  Waldemar  and  Hen- 
riette,  whose  high  intercourse  of  soul  was  for  a  time  perturbed 
by  the  fear  of  love,  where  each  human  moiety  finds  its  counter- 
part or  helps  the  other  on  to  perfection,  and  which  can  only 
exist  between  the  good — these  are  its  highest  forms.  So  in  the 
mistress  the  lover  sees  another  self,  and  with  her  would  estab- 
lish an  enlarged  selfishness  for  two.  Abel  ^  and  Brinton  ^  have 
pointed  out  that  the  etymologies  of  most  words  signifying  love 

*  See  Dugas  :    L'Amitie  Antique.      Paris,  1894,  p.  454. 

'  Linguistic  Essays.  The  Conception  of  l^ove  in  Some  Ancient  and  Modern 
Languages,  p.  25. 

^  Brinton  :  Essays  of  an  Americanist.  The  Conception  of  Love  in  Some  Ameri- 
can Languages,  p.  410. 


134  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

in  ancient  and  modern  languages  mean  identities,  sameness, 
likeness,  fusion,  mutual  reflection,  want,  desire,  preference,  or 
precious  values.  The  chief  Peruvian  tongue  is  called  "  prob- 
ably the  richest  language  on  the  continent,  not  only  in  separate 
words  denoting  affection,  but  in  modifications  of  these  by  im- 
parting to  them  delicate  shades  of  meaning  through  the  addi- 
tion of  particles,"  for  it  has  "  nearly  six  hundred  combinations 
of  the  word  niunay  =  to  love."  Fundamental  as  this  is,  it  is 
always  protensive  toward  something  higher,  as  appears  even  in 
such  more  or  less  rabulistic  descriptions  of  it  as  by  Michelet, 
Stendhal,  Mantegazza,  and  even  Finck,  perhaps  the  best  of  his 
class. 

Love  of  children  is  a  third  and  higher  stage,  which  may 
extend  down  to  the  unborn,  up  to  the  last  stage  of  adolescence, 
and  on  to  posterity.  The  test  of  the  virtue  of  life  is  to  produce 
and  bring  to  maturity  the  best  children,  who  shall  themselves 
be  most  prolific  in  body  and  soul.  From  this  standpoint  it  is 
trite  to  say  that  there  is  nothing  so  worthy  of  love  and  service 
as  children  for  whom  we  must  live,  and  virtue  now  consists  in 
not  evading  or  laying  too  much  of  this  function  upon  the  nurse, 
school,  or  church,  as  the  cuckoo  lays  its  eggs  in  nests  built  by 
other  birds  and  allows  them  to  incubate  and  feed  its  own 
young. 

The  community  is  a  larger  object  of  service  and  devotion. 
The  state  was  never  so  dependent  as  to-day  upon  those  vestals 
of  charity  who  teach  young  children  and  project  their  own 
lives  and  all  the  love  that  nature  intended  for  the  family  into 
the  young,  who  must  first  of  all  be  loved  in  order  to  be  rightly 
taught.  The  school  is  a  larger  home,  and  the  teacher  should 
be  a  parent  raised  to  a  higher  potence.  Even  in  its  advanced 
stages  education  ought  to  be  "  friends  seeking  happiness  to- 
gether," as  Epicurus  is  said  to  have  defined  it.  The  Greek  boy 
had  to  awaken  by  every  means  in  his  power  the  love  of  some 
mature  man,  who  would  instruct  and  apprentice  him  to  life,  and 
not  to  do  so  was  a  disgrace.  The  teacher  was  inspired  first  by 
a  love  of  his  pupil's  fair  body  and  manners  to  furnish  his  soul. 
The  four  great  schools  in  the  later  history  of  Greece  were  homo- 
geneous, because  based  on  friendship,  and  this  sentiment  only 
could  give  spirit,  untie  the  tongue,  double  pleasure,  halve  pain, 
and  open  the  heart  so  that  teacher  and  taught  could  be  true 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  135 

lovers,  speaking  to  each  other  with  as  little  reserve  as  to  their 
very  selves.  The  teacher  was  inspired  to  do  nothing  unworthy 
of  the  respect  and  idealization  which  he  sought  to  engender. 
He  should  make  the  pupil  not  only  all  that  he  is  himself,  but 
more,  as  the  good  parent  would  make  his  children  what  he  was 
unable  to  become,  and  all  should  teach.  Morals  was  the  chief 
theme,  and  the  teacher's  life  must  be  a  constant  and  inspiring 
object-lesson  in  virtue.  It  was  because  this  relation  was  so 
sacred  to  affection  that  pay  seemed  prostitution.  Phillips  ^ 
has  shown  how  education  is  the  complement  of  procreation  and 
increases  the  reproductive  sacrifice  and  rapture.  Patriotism, 
which  is  ready  to  serve  or  even  to  die  for  one's  country,  is  only 
a  larger  aspect  of  this  stage  of  love  now  dimmed  and  oriented, 
because  the  state  has  drifted  from  its  old  gentile  sense  of  an 
enlarged  family  and  become  an  organized  method  of  securing 
liberty,  happiness,  and  property. 

The  fifth  stage  is  love  of  the  race  or  enthusiasm  for  human- 
ity, the  "grand  etre  "  that  Comte  thought  the  most  worthy  of 
service  and  worship.  Philanthropy,  which  ministers  to  the 
poor  and  neglected  and  would  save  outcasts,  or  go  on  missions 
to  dispense  the  goods  of  religion,  and  which  ought  to  be  stimu- 
lated by  all  monophyletic  theories  of  the  origin  of  man,  is  just 
now  greatly  reenforced  by  a  new  cosmic  sense,  when  expansion 
is  not  merely  a  new  political  dream,  but  includes  the  whole 
world,  worships  heroes  wherever  they  appear,  and  deems  no 
human  interest  alien  to  itself.  The  Hindu  sage,  who  is  tender 
to  the  lowest  forms  of  life,  whether  from  natural  goodness  of 
heart  or  on  transmigration  theories,  St.  Francis,  who  called 
flowers,  worms,  birds,  and  insects  his  brothers  and  sisters,  and 
the  modern  evolutionist,  who  sees  every  species,  man  included, 
as  but  different  branches  of  one  great  family  tree,  illustrate 
how  adequate  love  is  to  a  yet  larger  object,  and  what  a  palpi- 
tating sensorium  the  heart  of  man  is  to  everything  that  lives. 

Altruism  may  go  farther  yet  and  embrace  nature  or  all 
material  existence,  from  every  aspect  of  which  the  love  which 
goes  with  knowledge  is  gradually  casting  out  fear.  Jeffries, 
who  buried  his  face  in  the  grass  and  prayed  to  be  absorbed  in 
the  whole  universe;  the  higher  animism,  which  sees  not  only 


•  The  Teaching  Instinct.     Fed.  Sem.,  March,  1889,  vol.  vi,  pp.  188-246. 


136  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

life,  but  psychic  properties  and  even  personality  in  stars,  stones, 
clouds,  and  sea ;  the  pantheist,  that  conceives  the  visible  universe 
as  simply  an  incarnation,  and  the  man  of  science,  who  would 
jnake  his  brain  the  oracle  even  of  any  department  of  the  grand 
whole  of  existence,  have  reached  a  yet  higher  standpoint 

Perhaps  no  individual  or  race  passes  through  all  these  stages 
in  the  phenomenology  of  love,  for  neither  a  single  personal  nor 
even  one  ethnic  soul  is  large  enough  to  do  justice  to  them  all. 
But  long  before  this  viaticum  is  open,  the  mind  modulates  over 
into  the  field  of  transcendence  and  projaculates  gods,  heavens, 
hells,  and  ideals,  or,  if  more  philosophical,  hypostatizes  ideas 
of  goodness,  truth,  and  beauty.^ 

The  final  stage  is  love  of  being  or  of  all  that  exists,  visible 
and  invisible.  The  ontological  passion  culminates  thus  in  a 
mystic  devotion  to  the  absolute  in  which  self  is  forever  merged 
and  swallowed  up,  and  the  mind  and  life  find  their  supreme 
virtue  in  anticipating  and  accepting  with  joy  their  inevitable 
final  fate. 

Banausic  as  it  would  be  to  insist  that  these  stages  are  final, 
I  can  see  only  in  something  of  this  kind  the  outcome  of 
the  larger  interpretations  which  the  Symposium  first  rudely 
glimpsed,  which  Zeller  and  Schleiermacher  sought  to  bring  into 
conformity  with  modern  knowledge,  and  which  others  ^  since 
have  striven  in  different  ways  to  vindicate  or  to  develop. 

VIII.  Even  knowledge  at  its  best  is  a  form  of  love.  Inter- 
est is  intellectual  love,  and  one  of  the  best  tests  of  education  is 
the  number,  intensity,  and  distribution  of  interests,  while  one  of 
its  best  definitions  is  to  teach  us  to  delight  in  what  we  should. 
Even  philosophy  is  not  the  possession,  but  the  love  and  wooing 
of  wisdom.     C.  S.  Peirce  ^  conceives  "  agapastic  "  knowledge 

^  See  The  New  Psychology,  my  inaugural  address  at  Johns  Hopkins.  An- 
dover  Review,  vol.  iii,  pp.  120-135,  239-438.  Also  my  Aspects  of  German  Cul- 
ture, p.  189. 

*  See  M.  Koch:  Problem  der  Erotik,  1886;  H.  Hille :  Ueber  die  platonische 
Lehre  vom  Eros.  Liegnitz,  1892.  C.  Boettischer  :  Eros  und  Erkenntniss  bei  Plato 
(who  would  coordinate  the  Lysis  and  the  Phasdrus).  Berlin,  1894.  Wachter:  Die 
Liebe  als  korperlichseelische  Kraftiibertragung,  1899.  Wyneken  :  Amor  Intellectus 
Dei.  Eine  religiosphilos.  Studie,  1898.  Santayana  :  Platonic  Love  in  some  Italian 
Poets — V,  in  his  Poetry  and  Religion,  1900. 

'  Evolutionary  Love.  Monist,  January,  1893.  See  also  his  Man's  Glassy 
Essence.     Monist,  October,  1892;  and  his  Law  of  Mind,  Monist,  July,  1892. 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  137 

as  its  highest  type.  By  this  phrase  he  means  immediate  sym- 
pathetic insight  where  the  object  or  idea  has  an  instant  attrac- 
tion for  the  mind  by  sympathy ;  where  the  subject  knows,  recog- 
nizes, and  closes  in  with  its  own,  perhaps  with  an  irresistible 
conviction  like  that  of  the  Stoics,  without  waiting  for  any  criti- 
cal test  or  coordination  with  other  mental  contents.  If  intuitive 
certainty  thus  furnishes  the  mind  with  opinions  not  logically 
harmonized,  this  itself  is  a  spur  to  thought  and  a  surety  against 
stagnation.  The  term  includes  growth  from  within  and  that 
love  of  and  confidence  in  one's  own  productions  which  is  a  part 
of  the  creative  power  of  genius,  and  even  if  its  own  origina- 
tions seem  freaks  or  sports  to  the  systematizer  or  to  current 
opinion,  they  are  but  true  spontaneities  of  the  development  of 
the  race  which  has  its  own  logic  of  mental  growth  and  con- 
tinuity. 

Further,  we  owe  to  Horwicz  ^  the  view  that  organized  truth, 
whether  in  science  or  philosophy,  finds  its  ultimate  criterion  in 
a  sentiment,  viz.,  that  of  conviction.  This  at  bottom  is  esthetic, 
because  the  logical  or  scientific  order  pleases  the  mind  best. 
This  satisfaction  is  not  Avanarius's  most  economic  way  of  think- 
ing the  universe  by  grouping  the  largest  number  of  facts  under 
the  simplest  formula,  but  may  be  partly  due  to  the  feeling  that, 
while  the  universe  might  be  so  vast  as  to  have  no  order  or  char- 
acter assignable  by  the  mind,  it  is  in  fact  not  only  lawful  to 
the  core  but  the  whole  macrocosm  is  only  the  mind  writ  large. 
One  of  man's  supreme  passions  is  to  conceive  the  universe  as 
one,  the  gods  as  one,  and  even  to  postulate  an  ultimate  monism 
to  make  the  "  All  "  a  unitary  fact. 

Again,  for  those  who  deem  the  relation  of  the  individual 
to  the  world  the  supreme  question  of  knowledge,  whether  from 
the  standpoint  of  Shaler  ^  or  of  Royce,^  as  well  as  for  all  who 
are  impelled  to  rise  from  the  manifoldness  of  sense  to  the  unity 
of  reason,  the  platonic  love  motive  is  probably  at  bottom  the 
animating  principle.  The  self  is  a  hint  or  image  of  the  Absolute 


'  Psy.  Analysen.  Erster  Theil,  1872,  p.  376.  Zweiter  Tlieil,  1876,  p.  183. 
Dritter  Theil,  1878,  p.  524. 

'  The  Individual :  A  Study  of  Life  and  Death,  by  N.  S.  Shaler.  New  York, 
1901.     Also  G.  A.  Wyneken,  Amor  Dei  Intellectualis,  Greifswald,  1S98. 

*  The  World  and  the  Individual,  by  Josiah  Royce. 


138  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

or  Divine.  We  and  the  world  exist  just  in  the  degree  in  which 
we  press  to  our  perfect  goal  of  union  with  God.  But  for  this 
passion  the  world  would  be  indifferent  or  dead,  for  the  infinite 
and  eternal  are  as  closely  associated  with  love,  which  first  made 
man  metaphysical  and  transcendent,  as  light  is  associated  with 
heat.  The  conversion  or  turning  from  sense  to  reason  under 
the  stress  of  the  gnostic  passion  is  a  true  euthanasia,  or  rather 
the  apotheosis,  by  absorption  of  the  mind,  which  is  individual, 
in  the  cosmos. 

Especially  in  all  the  sciences  that  deal  with  life,  recent  prog- 
ress has  been,  step  by  step,  the  progressive  recognition  of  Eros. 
All  the  work  of  Darwin,  and  especially  the  place  he  assigns  to 
sexual  selection;  Weismann's  coronation  of  the  supremacy  of 
the  germ  over  the  somatic  cells ;  the  reconstructions  in  botany 
based  on  growing  knowledge  of  methods  of  fertilization;  the 
recapitulation  theory  that  the  individual  repeats  the  history  of 
his  phylum ;  the  derivation  of  society  and  the  state,  from  the 
clan  or  other  origins  always  gentile;  the  growing  recognition 
by  psychology  that,  as  the  will  is  larger  than  the  intellect,  so  the 
instinct  and  feelings  are  at  the  root  of  both  reason  and  will ; 
the  new  discovery  of  the  profound  meaning  of  adolescence; 
gradual  psychic  embryology  and  the  development  of  the  genetic 
versus  the  logical  order  and  standpoint — all  these  show  how  the 
knowledge  of  life  is  at  root  the  knowledge  of  love,  and  that  the 
latter  is  really  the  goal  as  well  as  the  spring  of  mind.  The 
world  has  always  vaguely  understood  how  love  quickens  com- 
prehension and  how  the  heart  fertilizes  the  intellect,  but  the 
full  significance  of  love  as  an  organ  of  apperception  is  new. 
We  do  not  need  to  reason,  prove,  or  demonstrate  in  perfect 
detail,  but  love  identifies  from  afar;  it  grows  or  languishes  on 
tropes,  metaphors,  or  hints  unconsciously  given  and  received. 
When  the  temple  of  science,  which  is  the  greatest  creation  of 
the  human  race  thus  far,  is  near  enough  complete  to  reveal  its 
true  proportions,  no  small  part  of  its  ministry  to  life  will  be 
the  esthetic  joy  of  contemplation.  The  lives  of  great  discov- 
erers show  that  they  were  animated  to  their  work  by  a  passion- 
ate love  of  some  department  of  nature  without  which  no  excel- 
lence is  possible.  Those  who  lack  it  are  the  sophists,  scribes, 
literalists,  and  commentators,  or  minds  that  go  to  seed  in 
method,  technique,  and  mechanical  classification  without  mat- 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  I3'9 

ter.  In  all  these  ways,  therefore,  science  justifies  the  ways  of 
love  to  man. 

In  fine,  from  a  broad  biological  standpoint,  we  conclude  in 
review  that  every  experience  of  body  or  soul  bears  on  heredity, 
and  the  best  life  is  that  which  is  best  for  the  unborn.  Ideal 
conduct  is  that  which  first  develops  the  individual  and  then 
subordinates  it  to  the  larger  interests  of  the  race.  At  few 
points  are  consciousness  and  theory  so  inferior  to  higher  un- 
conscious instinct,  which  is  still  the  chief  regulative  of  all  per- 
taining to  the  transmission  of  life.  Education  culminates  in 
training  for  condition  for  the  function.  This  is  the  highest 
criterion.  Just  so  far  as  we  owe  what  we  are  to  the  long  line 
of  ancestors  from  whom  our  life  is  derived,  so  the  interests  of 
posterity  should  be  the  highest,  most  pervasive,  and  most  con- 
trolling ethical  motive,  and  our  current  instruction  in  morals 
should  be  reconstructed  and  rebased  to  this  end. 

More  specifically,  the  act  of  impregnating  the  ovum  is  the 
most  important  act  of  life.  By  it  the  entire  momentum  of 
growth  is  given  and  upon  it  completeness  of  development  of  the 
offspring  is  conditioned.  To  make  this  intense  and  give  an 
inheritance  that  is  all-sided  and  total,  nature  seems  to  require, 
in  ways  and  for  reasons  which  biology  does  not  yet  fully  under- 
stand, special  pre-nuptial  activities  known  as  courtship,  wooing, 
charming,  falling  in  love,  etc.  These  preliminaries  are  some- 
what analogous  to  secondary  sexual  qualities,  and  of  both  it 
may  be  said  that  the  more  we  know  of  life  the  wider  they  are 
found  to  extend.  They  have  been  described  among  slugs, 
snails,  spiders,  moths,  many  insects,  and  various  species  of  fish, 
and  are  highly  developed  among  birds,  as  the  ostrich,  cow-bird, 
Argus  pheasant,  the  tyrant  and  marsh  birds  which  show  off 
their  charms,  sing,  balz,  tremble,  and  tumble  to  rouse  the 
pairing  instinct  in  the  female  and  also  in  themselves.  So 
among  many  primitive  people  courtship  consists  in  singing, 
dancing,  plays  and  games,  mimic  warfare,  or  in  elaborate  toilet, 
often  with  a  suggestive  generative  pantomime  growing  more 
and  more  fervent  and  solicitative,  which  Ellis  thinks  pro- 
vocative of  a  state  of  tumescence,^  with  a  normal  climax  in 
coition.     Such  dances,  as  he  well  says,  are  the  most  complex 

'  Studies  in  the  Psychology  of  Sex,  vol.  iii,  sec.  i,  1903. 


140  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

and  intense  of  all  forms  of  muscular,  and  he  might  have  added 
of  psychic,  activity.  Every  part  of  the  body  is  involved,  and 
that  almost  at  the  same  time.  There  is  laughter,  shouting, 
jubilation,  ardor,  frenzy,  violence  almost  epileptic,  motor 
drunkenness  and  enormous  output  of  energy  and  orgy,  and 
often  force  itself  becomes  erogenic. 

Among  higher  races  the  psychic  preliminaries  are  more 
and  the  physical  less.  Love  broods,  sentimentalizes,  poetizes, 
and  perhaps  philosophizes.  The  preludes  are  more  manifold 
and  also  more  prolonged.  The  variety  of  stimuli  increases  and 
the  range  of  associations  widens.  Perhaps  this  is  in  some  way 
necessary  for  the  most  effective  propagation  of  the  higher  men- 
tal, moral,  and  esthetic  qualities.  The  religious  instincts  are 
more  involved  and  marriage  is  more  ceremonial,  the  arts  of 
persuasion  are  more  elaborate  and  those  of  reluctance,  modesty, 
and  coyness  more  formal.  Love  has  more  delicious  romance 
and  often  lingers  long  in  the  forecourts  of  its  temple.  To 
ornament,  dance,  and  music,  it  adds  love  courts,  jousts,  more 
developed  dances,  pious  rites  and  services,  till  sometimes  this 
anticipatory  stage  of  imaginative  ideality  may  be  so  intense 
and  prolonged  that  the  realities  of  married  life  suffer  and  pale. 

If  this  fore-school  of  love  be  necessary  to  the  complete  ful- 
filment of  its  object,  we  can  now  appreciate  its  degradations  in 
lazy,  loveless,  overrefined  individuals,  ages,  or  races,  well 
matched  by  theories  no  less  decadent.  The  view  of  Montaigne, 
More,  and  Fere,^  that  the  genesic  impulse  is  at  root  one  of 
evacuation,  and  even  that  of  Moll,  who  urges  that  detumescence 
is  primal,  strikes  hands  with  the  idea  so  current  among  youth 
of  to-day,  especially  if  depraved,  that  the  glands  must  be  dis- 
charged and  their  secretion  eliminated  from  the  system.  This 
vulgar  concept  is  as  unsatisfactory  scientifically  as  it  has  been 
devastating  morally;  it  has  been  not  only  the  excuse  but  the 
incentive  to  immeasurable  vice,  and  has  aided  to  an  enormously 
exaggerated  idea  of  the  difficulties  of  continence.  The  very 
fact,  brought  out  so  clearly  by  Guinard  ^  and  others,  that  cas- 
tration, especially  after  mature  age,  often  does  not  lessen  but 
may  even  increase  the  desire,  is  because  in  man,  the  latter,  being 

'  See  L'Instinct  Sexual.      Paris.  1899. 

*  Dictionnaire  de  Physiol.,  art.  Castration. 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  H' 

more  widely  irradiated,  has  more  stimuli  or  more  modes  of  ex- 
pression so  that  it  readily  becomes  more  and  more  independent 
in  both  sexes  of  any  of  the  various  forms  and  degrees  of  abla- 
tion. The  motive  of  merely  relieving  organic  pressure  tends 
to  degrade  the  act  to  its  very  lowest  possible  level,  seen  in  mas- 
turbation ;  it  also  involves  the  most  degrading  view  of  woman, 
and  ignores  the  fact  of  the  necessity  and  high  developmental 
power  of  control  and  of  maintained  sex  tension. 

So,  too,  chemical  theories  of  sex  like  those  of  Joanny  Roux  ^ 
and  several  American  writers,  who  base  the  instinct  on  proto- 
plasmic hunger,  and  often  fitly  represent  it  as  mediated  in 
man  by  the  degenerate  sense  of  smell,  are  utterly  inadequate  at 
least  for  human  psychology.  Indeed,  in  the  lowest  forms  of 
life,  nutritive  and  sexual  needs  have  only  remote  analogies 
chiefly  attractive  to  symbolists.  Dominant  as  the  function  of 
germ  cells  is,  especially  in  lower  forms,  man  loves  not  only 
with  the  whole  body  and  its  every  organ,  but  with  the  whole 
soul  and  its  every  faculty,  and  human  love  needs  added  rubrics 
above  those  in  the  animal  world.  So,  too,  the  view  that  it 
has  an  exclusive  region  in  the  brain  is  at  best  very  partial  in 
view  of  all  the  evidence.  Even  the  work  of  Moll  and  of  Ellis, 
to  whom  we  owe  most,  courageous  and  indefatigable  as  it  is, 
deals  so  much  with  the  undeveloped  or  perverted  manifesta- 
tions of  this  instinct  that  their  theories,  luminous  and  highly 
suggestive  as  they  are,  seem  so  far  too  somatic,  and  therefore 
partial  and  inadequate,  to  explain  the  higher  and  normal  mani- 
festations of  love.  As  the  popular  mind  tends  to  become  vio- 
lent and  extreme  about  this  subject,  so  men  of  science  still  in- 
cline to  remote,  speculative  views  which,  while  useful  as  pro- 
tests against  narrow  and  crude  ideas,  are  still  inadequate  to 
explain  "  the  greatest  thing  in  the  world."  Possibly  sex  will 
never  be  regulated  solely  in  the  interests  of  reproduction  ac- 
cording to  the  best  attainable  knowledge.  Certainly  the  sects, 
colonies,  and  individuals  who  have  so  far  sought  to  do  so  have 
attained  neither  stirpicultural  results  of  value  nor  knowledge 
that  gives  them  scientific  respectability.  Turgescence  and  its 
provocatives,  discharge  and  its  intense  sensations,  and  flaccidity 
and  all  its  psychic  correlates  of  reaction,  whether  apathetic  or 

*  Psychologic  de  I'lnstinct  Sexuel.     Paris,  1899. 


142  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

violent,  are  the  most  convenient  handles  yet  found  for  the  vast 
masses  of  phenomena  involved,  but  the  greatest  need,  both 
practical  and  scientific,  can  be  met  only  when  higher  and  wider 
irradiations  of  these  three  processes,  especially  the  first,  are 
more  clearly  traced  in  their  relations  to  the  general  conduct  of 
life  and  mind,  to  religion,  art,  and  esthetics,  and  even  to  scien- 
tific activity.  While  it  is  no  part  of  our  purpose  here  to  discuss 
general  theories  of  sex  in  detail,  we  may  at  least  record  a  grow- 
ing and  already  irresistible  conviction  that  great  and  hitherto 
unsuspected  light  is  to  be  shed  upon  the  genetic  psychology  of 
all  these  fields  by  the  new  studies  of  sex  now  so  well  advanced. 
Till  then,  while  we  may  breed  cattle,  we  can  not  breed  men. 

About  this  great  theme,  despite  the  precious  new  glimpses 
and  the  wide  mobilization  toward  the  great  advances  in  knowl- 
edge of  it  that  seem  to  impend,  no  one  can  feel  more  painfully 
than  I  the  inadequacy  of  such  rude  attempts  as  the  above  to 
delineate  a  standpoint  which,  from  the  nature  of  the  case,  can 
not  yet  entirely  transcend  the  realm  of  crude  allegory  and  meta- 
phor. One  might  parody  life  as  a  stream  from  high  mountain 
ranges  which  wring  it  from  the  clouds,  coursing  down  through 
all  the  manifold  ways  in  which  the  water  comes  down  at  Lodore 
to  the  sea  of  eternity.  Adolescence  is  the  chief  rapids  in  this 
river  of  life  which  may  cut  a  deep  canon  and  leave  its  shores 
a  desert.  Educational  methods,  from  those  of  the  statesman 
and  the  religious  founder  to  those  of  the  artist  and  man  of  sci- 
ence, and  even  the  pedagogue,  are  hydrographic  engineering 
which  builds  a  series  of  well-located  and  w^ell-devised  dams  to 
irrigate  wide  arid  areas  or  turn  the  mills  of  life,  or  that  its 
floods  be  stored  up  against  drought  and  need,  so  that  nothing 
is  lost.  Seepage  is  the  waste  of  licensed  vice  in  otherwise  happy 
families  or  prosperous  civilizations.  The  rich  alluvium  of  cus- 
tom and  tradition,  once  rank  with  a  life  now  gone  and  for- 
gotten, is  the  soil  or  mold  from  the  broad  acreage  of  which 
culture  in  all  its  departments  and  the  most  precious  values  of 
life  grow  toward  a  harvest.  Marshes  are  formed  of  the  rich 
body  of  myth  and  custom,  like  the  coal-measures  from  which 
higher  utilities  may  be  extracted.  Alkaline  dead  sea  plains 
of  phallic  detritus  may  be  deposited.  The  village  teacher  is 
like  the  small  farmer  in  Utah,  who  carefully  turns  his  tiny  pipe- 


ADOLESCENT  LOVE  143 

Stem  supply  of  water  from  one  hill  or  row  in  his  garden  to 
another.  Youthful  dissipation  is  the  wreckage  of  a  spring 
freshet  which  wears  away  the  dams,  makes  deep  gullies,  and 
may  restore  the  primitive  desert.  The  progressive  prolonga- 
tion of  old  age  by  all  the  methods  of  modern  hygiene  and  regi- 
men is  a  system  of  dikes,  which  rescues  land  from  the  primitive 
sea  wherein  man  can  take  the  pleasure,  Faust  thought  supreme, 
of  seeing  growth.  This  fable  suggests,  despite  its  incoherence 
and  partiality,  the  practical  implications  of  this  theory  of  sex. 


CHAPTER  XII 

ADOLESCENT   FEELINGS  TOWARD  NATURE   AND   A  NEW  EDUCATION 

IN   SCIENCE 

Nature  a  new  world  at  adolescence,  and  love  of  nature  as  the  basis  of  art,  literature, 
religion,  and  science — The  age  of  symbolism,  allegory — The  old  philosophy  of 
nature  and  the  Latin  feeling — Ages  of  conventionality — Dangers  of  premature 
nomenclature  and  mathematics — Study  of  structure  without  function — Youth 
the  humanistic  stage  of  science — Logical  versus  genetic  order — A  new  renais- 
sance of  liberal  education  in  nature-study — The  present  elimination  of  a  pre- 
cious late  stage  of  psychic  development — Geography  as  an  enemy  of  science — 
Method  of  determining  the  genetic  order — A  few  basic  principles  only  estab- 
lished yet — The  place  of  utilities  and  application  of  science — The  status  of  high 
school  physics  as  one  illustration  of  blindness  to  genetic  laws — How  to  rescue 
it  from  present  decadence — The  stage  of  the  nature  religions  and  their  present 
practical  significance — Adolescent  changes  of  feeling  for  (i)  boundless  space 
and  time,  (2)  the  stars,  (3)  the  sun  and  light  and  darkness,  (4)  the  moon,  (5) 
clouds,  (6)  wind  and  air,  (7)  heat  and  cold,  (8)  sea  and  water,  (g)  rocks  and 
stones,  (10)  flowers,  (11)  trees,  (12)  animals — The  relation  in  all  these  fields 
between  science  and  poetry,  myth  and  religion,  and  educational  utilization  and 
psychogenetic  inferences. 

Of  all  the  changes  normal  at  adolescence,  none  are  more 
comprehensive  and  perhaps  none  are  now  more  typical  of  the 
psychic  transformation  of  this  age  than  those  that  occur  in  the 
attitude  toward  the  various  aspects  of  nature.  Before,  these  are 
naively  learned,  pragmatically  accepted, and  animistically  inter- 
preted, for  life  and  especially  its  sentient  forms  are  best  known 
and  most  interesting  and  so  give  apperceptive  norms  for  all  that 
is  inanimate.  The  domain  of  law  is  limited  and  superstition 
flourishes.  But  when  the  ephebic  sun  dawns  and  the  springs 
of  a  maturer  mental  life  flow,  the  old  world  begins  to  seem 
strange  and  new.  What  things  seem  is  not  all  of  them,  but 
there  is  something  more  behind  and  other  meanings  strive  to 
reveal  themselves.  It  was  from  this  auroral  state  of  mind,  I 
ween,  that  the  term  natiira,  "  the  about  to  be  born,"  arose. 
There  is  a  new  expectancy  that  her  Memnonian  lips  will  open 
and  the  heart  begins  to  hum  the  only  song  of  ancient  Horus, 
144 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  145 

"  Hush,  all  hush,  and  see."  We  have  known  the  countenance, 
but  would  now  know  the  soul  of  the  great  all-mother.  Every- 
thing is  pregnant,  and  things  about  us  seem  to  fairly  cry  out 
for  some  higher  explanation.  Phenomena  are  a  veil  to  a  great 
mystery,  like  a  curtain  to  be  rung  up.  Youth  feels  itself  mov- 
ing about  in  a  world  unrealized.  Perhaps  the  problem  of  the 
great  Autos  rests  on  some  with  a  weight  that  is  oppressive. 
Will  the  sphinx  lips  never  open  and  tell  the  riddle  of  existence, 
or  will  it  destroy  us  and  reck  not  that  we  suffer  and  die?  It  is 
the  age  of  brooding,  and  the  normal  courageous  soul  will  not 
be  baffled  nor  fall  back,  but  will  find  or  make  answers — if  only 
the  echoes  of  its  own  questions. 

The  new  life  is  first  born  in  the  heart,  and  is  more  or  less 
unconscious,  and  among  its  first  spontaneous  creations  are 
metaphors  that  may  fade  and  be  often  recreated,  so  that  lan- 
guage itself  becomes  fossil  poetry.  Allegory  gives  things  a 
dual  meaning ;  symbolism  is  now  first  possible,  and  a  widening 
circle  of  objects  and  events  acquire  a  new  purport;  light,  cloud, 
wave,  fountain,  ivy,  laurel,  palm,  heat,  and  scores  of  objects 
are  no  longer  mere  things  of  sense,  but  are  words  in  the  dic- 
tionary of  psychic  states  and  moral  qualities.  If  myths  remain, 
they  are  given  new  contexts  and  transformed  and  ennobled  by 
higher  uses.  Thus  prose  is  often  now  transmuted  into  poetry. 
In  this  way  the  old  that  had  concealed  now  reveals  the  new, 
if  growth  is  continuous,  and  thus  the  soul  is  nourished  in  ways 
that  often  seem  mystical,  as  many  species  of  fish  subsist  on 
invisible  food.  Thus  every  aspect  and  thing  in  nature  has 
somewhere  and  by  some  race  been  an  object  of  perhaps  supreme 
worship.  The  traces  of  these  old  idolatries  are  still  found  in 
the  oozes  of  sentiment  in  the  depths  of  the  soul,  which,  like  the 
sea-bed  oozes,  are  not  inorganic  but  the  sedimentary  products 
of  extinct  forms  of  life.  In  the  soul,  too  (though  not  in  the 
sea,  for  here  the  analogy  fails),  these  are  not  only  residual  but 
have  a  protoplasmal  promise  and  potency  of  a  larger  and  fuller 
life  for  modern  youth.  Love  and  enthusiasm  for  nature,  if 
it  is  ever  to  arise,  is  now  in  order,  and  the  open  secret  may 
seem  ever  slipping  away,  but  revelation,  although  slow,  is  sure, 
because  it  comes  by  growth  and  does  not  depend  upon  the 
solutions  of  specific  problems.  All  this  is  copiously  illustrated 
in  Chapter  VIII. 
49 


146  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

How  basal  and  all-conditioning  the  love  of  nature  is  for 
all  that  is  best  in  the  soul  of  youth  the  world  has  probably 
never  begun  to  realize.  Biography  shows  how  nearly  all  the 
great  creators  of  physical  science — the  greatest  achievement  of 
man  in  the  world  so  far — have  first  been  passionate  lovers  of 
nature  in  their  chosen  field,  and  that  this  has  been  their  initial 
impulsion.  The  artist  must  first  see  with  the  heart.  Ruskin 
never  wearies  in  preaching  this  lesson;  while  Vachon's  vo- 
luminous report  on  the  state  of  art  in  Europe  by  countries 
essentially  agrees  with  the  unknown  author  of  Rembrandt  als 
Erzieher  in  two  conclusions :  first,  that  the  best  artists  are 
those  who  conserve  most  completely  into  maturity  and  old  age 
the  sentiments  and  ideas  of  youth  at  its  prime ;  and,  secondly, 
that  most  who  attain  the  highest  real  success  are  those  whose 
inspiration  was  given  by  the  environment  in  which  the  most 
susceptible  years  of  youth  w^ere  passed,  and  who  have  succeeded 
in  expressing  most  adequately  and  completely  its  responses  to 
nature.  The  same  holds  in  general  of  the  early  history  of 
every  literature  that  developed  from  an  indigenous  origin,  for 
its  first  monuments  are  of  personified  objects  or  forces  of 
nature.  Again,  religion  sprung  from  nature,  and  to  a  great 
extent  thrives  and  languishes  with  love  or  indifference  to 
nature.  Max  Miiller  counts  some  three  thousand  Aryan  nature 
gods.  After  profuse  polytheistic  deification  of  nature,  mono- 
theism was  aided  by  the  idea  of  one  all-covering  vault  of 
heaven,  which  gave  us  a  uni-verse,  and  pantheism  is  but  the 
culmination  of  the  religion  of  nature.  There  is  no  such  muse 
and  no  such  inspiration.  Our  brain,  her  mouthpiece,  which  she 
created  and  in  which  she  mirrors  herself  in  consciousness,  al- 
though it  can  do  nothing  else  but  interpret  her,  tells  but  a  part 
of  her,  and  she  herself  in  turn  reveals  but  a  part  of  absolute 
being ;  so  there  must  always  be  residual  mystery  and  miracle, 
demanding  myth  hypotheses  and  assumptions,  shading  down 
to  blank  nescience.  Hence  youth  must  always  be  asked — with 
no  whit  less  solemnity  than  the  pulpit  puts  the  solemn  question, 
"  Do  you  love  God  ?  " — Do  you  really  love  nature,  or  will 
you  remain  strangers  and  aliens  to  her  mighty  heart  ?  Taste 
and  see  that  she  is  purest,  truest,  noblest.  We  sprung  from 
her  bosom  and  inherit  vastly  more  than  we  ever  dreamed  of 
her  wisdom,  and  to  her  all  that  is  mortal  of  us  will  return. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  147 

In  affliction  and  calamity,  when  conscious  purpose  and  en- 
deavor fail,  we  can  sink  back  into  her  arms,  and  when  creeds 
and  philosophies  fade  we  know  that  if  "  our  bark  sink,  'tis  to 
her  larger  sea."  She  is  all  law  and  no  chaos,  life  abounds 
wherever  life  is  possible,  good-will  is  there  because  the  best 
and  not  the  worst  survive,  and  youth  is  in  a  peculiar  sense  the 
consummate  flower  of  nature,  more  worthy  than  anything  else 
on  earth,  of  love,  reverence,  and  devoted  service.^ 

.  Zeller  finds  the  germ  of  the  ancient  Roman  religion  in  the 
Latin-Sabine  veneration  of  invisible  spiritual  beings  in  nature ; 
the  solitude  and  gloom  of  the  forest,  the  gurgling  of  springs, 
the  crackling  and  leaping  of  flames,  sky  phenomena  and  the 
seasons — all  these  suggested  three  classes  of  natural  forces, 
heavenly,  terrestrial,  and  subterranean,  which  were  poetically 
personified  as  gods,  instead  of  scientifically  interpreted.  The 
transition  from  these  conceptions  to  matured  ethical  religion 
can  nowhere  be  so  fully  studied  as  among  the  Romans,  the 
most  superstitious  of  all  civilized  races,  whose  fundamental 
characteristic  was  awe  of  unknown  forces  and  constraint  before 
supernatural  influences. - 

The  German  idealistic  philosophy  of  nature  by  Kant, 
Fichte,  Schelling,  and  Hegel  was  haunted  by  this  old  sense  of 
the  divinity  of  nature  and  of  the  pregnancy,  closeness  to  origins, 
many-sidedness,  vitality,  and  infinite  elasticity  of  nmthos, 
which  by  the  Tubingen  school  was  made  no  less  orphic  and 
pervaded  by  a  sense  of  the  spirituality  of  the  world  than  the 
logos  doctrines.  There  was  a  rich  old  feeling  that  nature  was 
God's  body  and  He  its  soul,  that  it  is  all  one  great  apocalypse. 
There  were  impulses  from  the  vernal  woods,  communion  with 
the  anima  mundi  that  "  lives  through  all  life,  and  extends 
through  all  extent,"  and  a  deep  belief  that  the  soul  gathers  in 
wisdom  by  intuition  and  beauty  by  silent  sympathy.  The 
teacher  of  any  science  who  feels  this  will  forever  arouse  en- 
thusiasm, and  he  who  does  not,  works  on  the  surfaces  and 

'  See  M.  A.  Hoyt :  Love  of  Nature  ;  or,  The  Root  of  Teaching  and  Learning  the 
Sciences;  Ped.  Sem.,  vol.  iii,  pp.  61-86.  Biese:  Entwickelung  des  Naturge- 
fiihls  bei  den  Griechen  und  Romern ;  Kiel,  1882,  p.  210.  Im  Mittelalter  u.  in 
der  Neuzeit,  1888,  p.  460.     Also  P.  Lefebre:   La  Religion,  Paris,  1892. 

'  See  my  article  on  Edward  Zeller,  in  Contemporary  Psychologists,  Am.  Jour, 
of  Psy.,  April,  1891,  vol.  iv,  pp.  156-175. 


148  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

not  in  the  depths  of  the  pupil's  soul,  while  he  who  vilipends 
the  sentiment  that  underlies  his  department,  no  matter  how 
learned  or  pedagogically  gifted  he  be,  robs  the  soul  of  far  more 
than  he  gives  it. 

Only  those  who  have  studied  the  history  of  poetry  in  this 
regard  realize  how  remote  from  nature  it  sometimes  becomes 
through  a  whole  period  of  its  development ;  how  conventional 
its  treatment  of  natural  objects;  how  tawdry  its  diction;  how 
inaccurate  its  descriptions;  and  how  slender  its  stock  in  trade 
of  real  knowledge  under  the  combined  influence  of  city  life 
and  utility.  Many  an  otherwise  reputable  English  poet  in  the 
period  somewhat  preceding  Wordsworth  manifested  only  a 
feeble  color  sense,  and  wrote  as  if  all  above  was  blue  and  all 
below  green.  The  ocean  was  simply  vast,  solitary,  awful,  and 
it  had  to  wait  for  Turner,  Byron,  Shelley.  Things  that  could 
be  smelled  and  which  were  fit  for  poetry  hardly  needed  more 
than  the  words  fragrance  and  perfume.  Birds  were  a  feath- 
ered choir;  the  nightingale,  and  perhaps  the  cuckoo,  lark,  raven, 
eagle,  and  peacock,  were  all  the  birds  in  the  poet's  muniment 
chamber.  The  brook  simply  babbled  and  meandered,  and  did 
little  more.  The  night  was  incidentally  invoked  for  the  sake 
of  the  moon,  and  perhaps  of  the  stars.  The  flowery  mead,  with 
now  and  then  a  little  progress  from  the  general  toward  the 
specific,  the  old  or  strong  oak,  whispering  poplar,  and  perhaps 
a  few  other  trees,  quite  sufficed,  and  these  faint  echoes  of  the 
old  pastoral  idyl  were  almost  as  conventionalized  as  Chinese 
art.  Thus  it  was  an  important  and  a  very  difficult  step  to 
break  the  poetic  canons  or  unwritten  traditions  and  really  get 
out  of  doors ;  to  travel,  paint,  read  and  write  fiction ;  and  this 
was  at  first  with  a  real  but  pallid  joy  like  that  of  a  convales- 
cent's first  glimpse  of  spring.^ 

The  modern  pedagogy  of  science  is  threatened  with  a  simi- 
lar alienation  from  the  love  of  nature.  This  is  seen  in  three 
respects:  i.  Technical  nomenclature  which  attaches  classical 
names  to  objects  is  often  thought  the  beginning  of  science. 
It  brings  order  and  makes  classification  possible.  It  is  so  copi- 
ous that  it  fills  dictionaries,  and  so  far  exhausts  ancient  lan- 


^  The  Treatment  of  Nature  and  English  Poetry  in  Literature.     M.  Reynolds. 
Chicago,  1896,  p.  290. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD  NATURE  149 

guages  that  to  know  this  part  of  botany  and  zoology  alone 
would  itself  involve  mastery  of  scores  of  thousands  of  Greek 
and  Latin  words.  This  is  much  more  than  the  average  bache- 
lor of  arts  in  these  tongues  commands,  and  it  is  now  often 
used  as  an  argument  for  classical  study.  This  is,  in  a  sense, 
the  vocabulary  of  some  sciences  and  therefore  it  is  often  made 
to  bear  the  chief  introductory  stress,  so  that  the  youth  who 
would  study  nature  must  first  serve  an  apprenticeship  in  the 
workshop  of  ancient  philosophy  and  etymology.  2.  Mathe- 
matics is  the  language  of  other  sciences  which  become  com- 
plete only  just  so  far  as  their  body  of  truth  can  be  expressed 
in  numbers  and  equations.  Tables  of  constants  and  formulae 
of  calculus  that  show  how  God  himself  geometrizes  have  been 
so  inspiring  that  mathematical  methods  have  often  been  applied 
prematurely  in  fields  not  ripe  for  such  treatment,  so  that  the 
history  not  only  of  science  but  of  speculation  is  strewn  with 
the  wreckage  of  such  abortive  efforts  because  men  have  for- 
gotten Aristotle's  precept,  that  it  is  only  affectation  to  try  to 
treat  a  subject  more  exactly  than  its  nature  permits.  All  this 
has  its  place,  and  its  invaluable  and  imposing  methodology 
and  its  inspiring  ideals  have  given  momentum  to  many  of  the 
most  important  advances.  3.  Morphology,  the  exact  and  com- 
parative study  of  parts  of  organs,  accurate  perception,  memory, 
drawing  of  forms,  the  paralleling  and  homologizing  of  struc- 
tures of  higher  species,  the  anatomizing  of  even  microscopic 
objects,  almost  constitute  a  number  of  sciences  themselves. 

Without  these,  modern  science  could  not  do  its  work  in 
the  world  nor  hardly  exist.  But  we  do  not  realize,  least  of 
all  do  college-makers  of  high  school  text-books,  that  there  is 
a  standpoint  in  the  teens  from  which  this  is  not  even  needful 
alloy  to  give  the  precious  metal  of  truth  currency,  but  simply 
dross  and  tarnish.  Such  formulae  disinfect  the  soul  of  interest 
and  dehumanize  nature.  They  are  just  as  much  and  just  as 
truly  weeds  to  the  boy  as  his  mythopoetic  sentiments  for  nature 
are  to  the  drill-master.  The  pupil  is  farther  from  understand- 
ing the  specialist  professor  than  from  sympathizing  with  Keats, 
who  in  a  toast  proposed  perdition  to  Newton,  who  had  de- 
graded the  rainbow  by  making  it  a  mere  matter  of  prisms,  or 
with  Walt  Whitman  in  the  poem,  where  he  "  had  heard  the 
learned  astronomer  lecture,"  etc.,  till  his  brain  was  so  fatigued 


150  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

by  ideation  and  technique  that  he  had  to  rush  out  to  seek  rest 
and  refuge,  and  reassure  himself  by  lying  on  the  grass  and 
gazing  up  at  the  moon  and  starry  skies.  Humboldt  thought 
love  of  landscapes  and  landscape-painting  had  much  to  do  with 
generating  love  of  geography  and  natural  science,  and  our 
returns  show  how  keen  this  rivalry  between  science  and  senti- 
ment often  is  at  this  stage  of  life.  The  stories  of  Jeffries, 
Deleal,  and  many  others  in  Chapter  VIII,  also  teach  the  same 
open  secret.  One  might  almost  think  that  a  love  of  solitude 
with  nature  was  a  good  index  of  mental  ability,  showing  a 
mind  capable  of  entertaining  itself  and  generating  love  of 
nature,  which  is  the  best  basis  of  love  of  science,  later,  if  only 
the  pedagogue  can  develop  and  not  alienate  and  disenchant. 
The  gnarled  and  dozy  technical  roots  if  they  do  not  act  as 
switchbacks  are  liable  to  transform  a  participator  in  nature, 
fronting  the  essentials  of  life  in  her  presence,  into  an  indifferent 
spectator,  and  to  make  the  child  of  nature's  household  only  a 
guest.  The  spirit  of  botany  is  where  flowers  grow,  geology  in 
the  fields  and  not  in  the  mineralogical  cabinet  with  petrog- 
raphy, and  that  of  astronomy  is  in  the  silence  of  the  open 
night  alone. 

Thus  my  chief  thesis  here  is  that  in  early  adolescence  not 
only  girls,  but  boys,  normally  approach  any  and  every  branch 
of  science  over  the  same  road  which  the  race  traversed  in  a 
prescientific  age.  There  should  be  a  humanistic  propaedeutic 
because  youth  is  in  the  humanist  stage.  Nature  is  sentiment 
before  it  becomes  idea  or  formula  or  utility.  The  chief  among 
many  reasons  why  all  branches  of  science  are  so  disappointing 
to  their  promoters  in  high  school  and  college  is,  that  in  the 
exact  logical,  technical  way  they  are  taught,  they  violate  the 
basal  law  of  psychic  growth,  ignore  the  deep  springs  of  natural 
interest,  and  attempt  to  force  a  precocity  against  which  the 
instincts  of  the  young,  so  much  wiser  and  truer  and  older  than 
their  consciousness,  happily  revolt.  The  statistics  of  progress- 
ive school  decadence  in  science  show  how  the  laws  of  psychic 
growth,  although  too  subtle  for  science  to  see,  are  too  strong  for 
its  best  endeavors  to  overcome.  It  is  the  logical  order  before 
its  time  making  havoc  with  the  genetic  order.  The  little  sci- 
ence taught  is  no  compensation  for  the  ruin  and  desolation 
wrought  in  the  feelings  for  nature  and  nature's  God,  which 
are  about  the  best  things  in  this  best  age  of  the  soul.    Those 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  151 

who,  like  the  present  writer,  would  see  the  sciences  given  the 
foremost  place,  are  most  inconsolable  in  view  of  the  pathos  of 
their  present  educational  status. 

The  precious  last  stages  of  growth  are  ignored  and  elim- 
inated. Race  history  and  the  nature  of  youth  demand  that 
science  should  be  taught  at  first  in  a  large,  all-comprehensive 
way,  not  without  a  distinctly  religious  spirit,  reopening  the 
half-obscured  but  broad  road  by  which  man  passes  from  nature 
to  nature's  God.  We  must  have  an  introduction  to  science  that 
touches  rather  lightly  on  nearly  all  the  great  hypotheses,  fron- 
tier questions,  and  larger  syntheses  over  the  whole  field,  in  a 
way  that  the  modern  specialist  wots  not  of,  that  is  unitary  and 
synthetic  and  non-analytic,  that  commands  and  compares  the 
great  ethnic  mythophemes,  that  is  poetic  and  historical  and 
orienting;  then  we  shall  realize  here  a  higher  meaning  of 
the  two  best  designations  of  education,  now  so  often  degraded 
and  misapplied,  in  the  literary  and  philological  fields  where  they 
were  once  inculcated,  humanistic  and  liberal,  and  usher  in  a 
new  renaissance  by  bringing  youth  and  nature  together  as  they 
belong.  There  is  all  the  more  need  of  this  because,  as  a  later 
chapter  shows,  even  literature  and  language  are  rapidly  ceasing 
to  be  humanistic.  Such  a  course  will  be  an  ally  and  not  a  para- 
site of  science.  It  will  be  as  different  from  our  full-grown 
geographies  as  a  living  serpent,  the  symbol  of  wisdom,  is  from 
a  sausage.  This  subject  as  now  taught  is  one  of  the  chief  ob- 
stacles in  the  true  way  of  approaching  the  study  of  the  cosmos. 
Its  topics  are  disconnected  or  associated  on  the  low  plane  of 
juxtaposition  in  space.  It  ignores  nothing  but  its  own  history. 
As  Turkey  represents  a  past  stage  of  development  once  threat- 
ening to  overrun  the  West,  but  is  now  the  shrunken  sick  man 
of  Europe,  so  school  geography  is  an  amorphous  remnant  of 
the  old  cosmology  from  which  many  sciences  have  split  off. 
This  text-book  maker's  pet  and  pedagogue's  abomination  often 
has  all  the  defects  charged  against  popular  science  without  its 
saving  quality  of  being  made  by  experts,  and  dilutes  and  dif- 
fuses itself  over  the  entire  universe,  from  stars  to  geology, 
crops,  politics,  history,  anthropology,  manufacture,  mining, 
commerce — fields  that  geographical  societies  know  not  of.^ 

Our  knowledge  of  the  true  genetic  order  is  yet  very  imper- 

^  See  my  Love  and  Study  of  Nature.     The  Agriculture  of  Mass.,  1898,  pp.  134- 
158. 


152  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

feet,  but  we  now  see  the  method  by  which  it  is  to  be  developed. 
This  is  (a)  by  studying  children  in  large  numbers,  (6)  by 
combining  from  available  sources  a  composite  picture  of  race 
development  on  analogous  lines.  These  processes  should  be 
largely  independent  of  each  other,  and  then  (c)  comes  the  task 
of  comparison,  using  each  as  the  key  to  the  other,  which  should 
give  a  record  of  development  more  complete  than  either  alone 
could  afford.  The  phyletic  series  will  show  much  full-blown 
that  in  the  child  series  only  buds.  Most  of  the  evolved  prod- 
ucts in  the  former  will  not  be  hard  to  identify  with  the  rudi- 
ments of  the  latter  series.  Next  (d)  we  must  decide  which  of 
the  last  should  be  left  to  the  progressive  atrophy  now  taking 
place,  and  which  need  to  be  more  completely  lived  out  either 
for  their  own  sake  or  to  furnish  the  momentum  of  interest 
necessary  for  achieving  the  next  higher  stage  of  life.  Here  we 
shall  find  that  many  of  the  best  impulsions  in  our  nature  are 
thwarted  so  that  youth  is  arrested  in  many  of  its  choicest  prom- 
ises and  potencies  by  adverse  conditions  of  modern  life,  social, 
industrial,  educational,  and  religious,  and  shall  realize  the 
pathos  and  tragedy  of  aborted  powers  so  that  the  adult  is  some- 
times but  the  torso  of  what  he  would  be  were  the  unsuspected 
possibilities  of  youth  fulfilled.  Instead  of  entering  upon  the 
full,  rich  life  of  the  race  which  is  our  heritage,  which  is  the  only 
meaning  of  the  grand  old  ideal  of  a  humanistic  and  truly 
liberal  education,  and  lingering  as  long  as  possible  in  the  para- 
dise of  unfallen  man,  that  the  individual  may  enlarge  itself  as 
far  as  possible  toward  the  dimensions  of  his  species,  there  is  a 
veritable  rage  for  prematurity,  for  precociously  assuming  adult 
burdens,  airs,  indocilities,  and  callousness.  If  there  is  a  sin 
against  the  Holy  Ghost  it  is  dishonoring  one's  own  or  an- 
other's youth.  Next  comes  (e)  the  task  of  deciding  which  of 
all  the  profuse  buds  of  talent  and  genius  most  need  expression 
in  each  individual;  and  last  (f)  we  must  determine  what  men- 
tal pabulum,  and  how  curriculized  and  how  given,  makes 
it  most  effective  for  our  ends.  Here  many  of  the  garbs 
of  culture  long  since  outgrown  and  discarded  by  mature  sci- 
ence will  be  found  of  inestimable  value.  Science  itself  arose 
by  working  over  and  over  to  ever  more  refined  forms  old 
nature  myths,  and  to  some  extent,  in  a  true  pedagogy,  youth 
must  repeat  the  process. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS   TOWARD   NATURE  153 

Vast  as  is  the  work  that  yet  remains  to  be  done  in  this  field, 
a  few  basal  principles  can  be  already  roughly  outlined.  In 
general  the  child's  reactions  to  nature  are  either  directly  sen- 
sory or  crudely  practical  for  work  and  play. 

I.  Adolescence  marks  the  rise  of  the  first  sentimental  re- 
sponse, the  best  first  expression  of  which  is  myth,  poetry,  or 
the  religions  of  nature.  Familiarity  with  and  love  of  these 
interpretations  should  be  diligently  and  systematically  fostered. 
Their  possibilities  both  as  genetic  introductions  and  later  as 
relays  of  scientific  interest  are  as  great  as  they  are  unrealized, 
and  literary  anthologies  for  reading  courses  should  be  gathered 
into  courses  related  to  each  of  the  great  sciences  where  litera- 
ture exists;  that  it  does  not  in  all  is  both  a  defect  of  letters 
and  a  misfortune  for  youth,  all  the  sadder  because  crude  mythic 
ore  awaiting  synthesis  and  modern  literary  expression  is  so 
accessible  in  the  field  of  every  leading  branch  of  science. 

II.  Next  in  the  genetic  order  comes  popular  science,  also 
well  developed  in  some  and  so  defective  in  other  lines.  Per- 
haps it  will  some  day  be  brought  home  to  every  eminent  inves- 
tigator that  a  new  discovery,  besides  its  technical  record,  in- 
volves the  added  duty  of  concise  and  lucid  popular  statement 
of  it  as  a  tribute  to  youth.  In  the  quality,  amount,  and 
grouping  of  this  material  the  wise  teacher  in  every  branch  will 
have  deep  concern.  Here,  too,  belongs  every  contact  which 
science  can  suggest  with  the  daily  life  of  the  pupil  at  home 
or  school,  at  play  or  resting,  in  dress  and  regimen,  and  here, 
too,  begins  the  need  of  abundant  apparatus,  models,  diagrams, 
collections,  and  all  aids  that  eye  or  hand  can  give  the  mind, 
A  science  building  or  course  without  these  is  a  soulless  corpse. 
The  heroes  and  history  epochs  of  each  branch  add  another 
needed  quality  to  the  still  so  largely  humanistic  stage. 

III.  Then,  and  not  earlier,  come  the  need  of  utilities,  ap- 
plication to  machinery,  hygiene,  commerce,  processes  of  manu- 
facture, the  bread-winning  worth  of  nature  knowledge,  how 
its  forces  are  harnessed  to  serve  man  and  to  produce  values. 
Contrary  to  common  educational  theory  and  practise,  the  prac- 
tical, technological  side  of  science  should  precede  its  purer 
forms.  Here  belong  economic  botany  and  zoology,  the  help- 
fulness of  astronomy,  the  inventions  that  follow  in  the  wake 
of  discovery,  machinery,  and  engineering  novelties  based  on 


154  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

researches — or,  in  a  word,  how  man  has  made  nature  work  for 
him. 

IV.  Last  and  highest  comes  pure  science  freed  from  all 
alloy  of  myth,  genetic  stage  or  utility,  and  cultivated  for  its 
own  sake,  with  no  motive  but  love  of  truth. 

Of  many  illustrations  of  the  current  ignorance  and  neglect 
of  genetic  principles  and  its  sad  results,  I  here  select  but  one. 
Of  all  the  sciences  that  deal  with  the  physical  universe,  physics 
may  now  be  called  one  of  the  chief.  In  antiquity  it  was  the 
science  of  nature  from  which  many  branches  have  sprung.  It 
conditions,  perhaps,  man's  most  fundamental  views  about  his 
world.  In  all  the  history  of  science  its  chapter  is  one  of  the 
most  imposing,  its  recent  growth  astounding,  its  applications 
and  utilities  most  fruitful,  its  promise  for  the  future  brightest, 
and  its  disciplinary  value  unexcelled.  It  is  easier  to  teach  to 
large  numbers  in  the  city  than  the  biological  sciences,  although 
far  less  germane  to  girls  than  to  boys  in  the  middle  teens.  Its 
pedagogic  history,  too,  under  various  names  is  some  two  cen- 
turies old.  As  natural  philosophy  it  has  been  for  nearly  three 
generations  the  chief,  quite  commonly  the  only,  science  taught 
in  secondary  schools.  Despite  all  this,  it  seems  now  from 
some  points  of  view  well  along  in  the  stages  of  educational 
decadence.^  Probably  less  than  eight  per  cent  of  all  the  boy 
pupils  in  our  high  schools  are  now  studying  physics.  This 
progressive  neglect  or  aversion  to  physics  has  gone  on,  despite 
the  best  fostering  care  of  colleges,  its  high  place  among  en- 
trance requirements,  the  great  ability  with  which  it  has  been 
taught  in  the  high  schools  by  aid  of  the  nearly  two  score  new 
texts  which  I  have  collected.  Everything  that  expert  knowl- 
edge, that  the  authority  that  works  from  above  downward,  that 
the  advocates  of  unity  and  enrichment,  that  the  laboratories 
and  methods  could  do,  has  been  attempted,  but  the  same  decline 
of  physics  is  widespread  among  colleges.  Now  as  this  subject 
has  been  given  such  a  prominent  role  as  the  typical  science 
intended  to  lead  to  the  introduction  of  others,  this  status  is 
especially  deplorable  for  the  new  education  in  science,  and  has 
given    the    advocates    of    Latin,    English,    mathematics,    and 

'  See  my  Address  before  the  New  England  Association  of  Physics  Teachers, 
Boston  Proceedings,  May  24,  1902. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS   TOWARD   NATURE  155 

modern  languages — courses  in  all  of  which  have  increased 
greatly  and  all  the  pupils  in  which  far  outnumber  if  not  far 
more  than  double  those  of  physics — grounds  against  the  intro- 
duction of  science  in  the  high  schools,  which  some  of  them 
have  used  with  great  effect.  Something  is  very  wrong.  What 
is  it? 

It  needs  no  special  knowledge  of  psychics,  but  of  something 
outside  and  just  as  real,  to  see  that  the  cause  lies  in  the  neglect 
and  the  violence  done  to  the  nature  and  needs  of  the  youthful 
soul  by  the  present  methods  and  matters. 

1.  Boys  in  their  teens  have  a  veritable  passion  for  the 
stories  of  great  men,  and  the  heroology  of  physics,  which  if 
rightly  applied  might  generate  a  momentum  of  interest  that 
would  even  take  them  through  the  course  as  laid  out,  should 
find  a  place.  Here  again  we  must  see  that,  as  with  mechanical 
so  with  psychic  force,  it  must  be  generated  over  a  large  area 
if  it  is  to  be  applied  intensively  at  a  single  point.  Physics  has 
its  saints  and  martyrs  and  devotees,  its  dramatic  incidents  and 
epochs,  its  struggles  with  superstition,  its  glorious  triumphs; 
and  a  judicious  seasoning,  perhaps,  of  the  whole  course  with 
a  few  references  and  reports,  with  choice  material  from  this 
field,  would  do  much.  Moreover,  the  historic  sense  is  awaken- 
ing in  these  fields,  giving  a  present  sense  of  achievement 
and  progress,  and  nothing  appeals  to  the  young  more  than  to 
feel  vividly  the  sense  of  growth. 

2.  The  half-score  of  text-books  in  physics  I  have  glanced 
over  seem  essentially  quantitative,  require  great  exactness,  and 
are  largely  devoted  to  precise  measurements,  with  too  much 
and  too  early  insistence  on  mathematics.  Teachers  in  this  field 
have  a  sense  that  mathematics  is  the  only  proper  language  of 
this  science.  The  topics  are  no  doubt  admirably  chosen,  their 
sequence  the  best  from  a  logical  standpoint,  and  they  are  such 
models  of  condensation  and  enrichment  that  it  seems  to  the 
organizer  and  to  the  specialist  alike  almost  perversion  that  our 
youth  pass  it  by.  But  boys  of  this  age  want  more  dynamics. 
Like  Maxwell  when  a  youth,  they  are  chiefly  interested  in  the 
"  go  "  of  things.  Recent  statistics  of  boys'  general  reading  in 
our  public  libraries  show  that  they  were  but  little  interested 
in  much  especially  prepared  for  them,  like  the  Youth's  Com- 
panion and  St.  Nicholas,  but  that  the  Scientific  American  and 


156  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

its  Supplement  led  all  the  rest.  The  boys  with  aptitudes  for 
physics  want  to  understand  how  engines,  machinery,  perhaps 
especially  dynamos,  work.  I  have  known  some  greatly  inter- 
ested in  the  Patent  reports;  but  everything  to  really  appeal  to 
them  must  move.  In  Germany  there  are  many  toys  that  might 
be  called  scientific.  Hence,  too,  the  fascination  with  which,  in 
my  school  days,  we  delighted  in  lectures  and  demonstra- 
tions with  very  crude  and  often  home-made  illustrative  appa- 
ratus, which  a  clever  teacher  devised  and  set  up  for  us.  This 
exactness  which  involved  applying  mathematics  came  very  late 
in  the  history  of  physics.  Even  Tyndall,  and  more  yet  before 
his  day,  knew  little  of  this  and  never  used  it  in  classes,  but 
were  most  inspiring  teachers  who  powerfully  evoked  thought 
and  were  not  affected  by  the  modern  rage  to  apply  mathematics 
to  the  boy's  brain  processes,  even  by  marking  his  examinations 
and  recitations. 

3.  I  must  confess  myself  a  convert  to  the  dire  heresy  that 
in  this  field,  and  in  some  others,  very  much  thoroughness  and 
perfection  violates  the  laws  of  youthful  nature  and  of  growth. 
The  normal  boy  in  the  teens  is  essentially  in  the  popular  science 
age.  He  wants  and  needs  great  wholes,  facts  in  profusion, 
but  few  formulae.  He  would  go  far  to  see  scores  and  hundreds 
of  demonstrative  experiments  made  in  physics,  and  would  like 
to  repeat  them  in  his  own  imperfect  and  perhaps  even  clumsy 
way  without  being  bothered  by  equations.  He  is  often  a  walk- 
ing interrogation-point  about  ether,  atoms.  X-rays,  nature  of 
electricity,  motors  of  many  kinds,  with  a  native  gravity  of  his 
mind  toward  those  frontier  questions  where  even  the  great 
masters  know  as  little  as  he.  He  is  in  the  questioning  age, 
but  wants  only  answers  that  are  vague,  brief,  but  above  all 
suggestive;  and  in  all  this  he  is  true  to  the  great  law  that  the 
development  of  the  individual  in  any  line  of  culture  tends  to 
repeat  the  history  of  the  race  in  that  field. 

4.  Last,  and  perhaps  most  important  of  all  for  our  purpose 
to-day,  the  high  school  boy  is  in  the  stage  of  beginning  to  be 
a  utilitarian.  The  age  of  pure  science  has  not  come  for  him, 
but  applications,  though  not  logically  first,  precede  in  the  order 
of  growth  and  interest  the  knowledge  of  laws,  forms,  and 
abstractions.  He  would  know  how  the  trolley,  how  wired  and 
wireless  telegraphy  work,  and  the  steam  engine,  the  applica- 


ADOLESCENT   FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  157 

tions  of  mechanics  in  the  intricate  mechanisms,  almost  any  of 
even  the  smaller  straps  and  buckles  in  the  complex  harnesses 
science  has  put  upon  natural  force,  charm  him.  Physics  in 
the  field,  the  street,  the  shop,  the  factory,  the  great  triumphs 
of  engineering  skill,  civil,  mining,  mechanical,  inventions  in 
their  embryo  stage,  processes,  aerial  navigation,  power  devel- 
oped from  waves,  vortexes,  molecules,  atoms,  all  these  things 
which  make  man's  reaction  to  nature  a  wonder  book,  should  be 
open  to  him ;  and,  in  frequent  conversations  and  copious  infor- 
mation, we  should  arouse  his  imagination,  for  this  is  the  organ 
of  the  heart  and  opens  up  the  way  for  reason.  The  boyhood 
of  the  great  makers  of  physics  and  astronomy,  who  have  found 
out  and  opened  a  natural  way  for  their  own  genius,  is  a  lesson 
which  most  teachers  of  physics,  I  fear,  have  not  enough  profited 
by.  The  subject-matter  of  their  curriculum  is  too  condensed, 
too  highly  peptonized  for  healthful  assimilation;  and  we  are 
too  prone  to  forget  that  we  can  only  accelerate  nature's  way, 
but  never  short-circuit  it  without  violence. 

The  influence  of  the  college  professors  of  physics  and  their 
text-books  has  in  the  last  decade  or  two  been  a  stimulus  of 
very  great  value  in  elevating  standards,  but  this  work  now,  in 
my  opinion,  has  been  overdone,  and  the  time  has  come  when 
high-school  teachers  should  assert  their  independence  and  make 
adjustments  to  a  stage  of  youthful  interest,  of  which  the  col- 
lege professor  knows  little.  High-school  physics  has  problems 
all  its  own  to  which  its  representatives  should  address  them- 
selves with  courage,  resolution,  and  above  all  with  independ- 
ence, or  else  the  present  decadent  tendencies,  more  due  to 
college  control  through  the  undue  influence  of  examinations 
and  standards  than  to  them,  will  continue,  and  with  it  the  sci- 
entific movement,  of  which  it  is  in  a  sense  a  pioneer,  will  suffer 
still  more. 

Toy  museums,  exhibitions,  and  even  congresses  in  Europe, 
are  very  instructive  here.  Bugs  that  flutter  and  creep,  birds 
that  fly,  peck,  and  sing;  monkeys,  soldiers,  boats,  dolls,  bal- 
loons, engines  that  move,  are  often,  especially  in  Germany, 
masterpieces  of  mechanical^ simpliiication  and  cheapness  illustrat- 
ing fundamental  principles.  Many  of  these  things  could  be 
made  as  manual  training  adjuncts,  and  the  best  boys'  books, 
like  Cassell,  Baker,  Beard,  Routledge,  Peper,  and  also  books 


158  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

on  magic,  like  Hoffman  and  Hopkins,  would  be  helpful  in 
teaching  problems  of  the  lever,  balance,  wedge,  pulley,  pump, 
monochord,  whistle,  prisms,  small  lenses  easily  ground  by  boys, 
magic  lanterns,  kaleidoscope,  telegraph,  etc.,  which  the  normal 
boy  would  approach  with  a  full  head-pressure  of  interest. 
Glass  work,  the  equipment  of  which  with  a  little  stock  of  tubes, 
blowpipes,  bellows,  tools,  and  annealing  oven,  occupies  no 
more  space  than  a  sewing  machine,  including  the  making  of 
thermometers,  all  this  gives  a  manual  discipline  for  hand 
and  eye  comparable  to  learning  the  piano.  Tops  of  many  kinds 
are  an  open  sesame  into  the  very  heart  of  science  and  suggest 
and  illustrate  some  of  the  profoundest  principles  from  ions  and 
electrons  to  stellar  systems.  Box  kites  that  penetrate  the  clouds 
and  the  secrets  of  humidity,  temperature,  velocity,  pressure, 
perhaps  with  photographic  attachments,  rest  on  a  soil  of 
strong  native  interest.  Where  work  that  the  boy  has  made 
with  his  own  hands  goes,  there  his  interest  follows.  An  inner 
eye  opens,  skill  with  fingers  is  harnessed  to  the  development 
of  cerebral  neurons,  and  we  work  in  the  depths  and  not  in 
the  shadows  of  the  soul.  In  Europe  photography  is  often 
curriculized,  and  in  Vienna  the  magnificent  imperial  school 
devoted  to  it  is  visited.  At  the  Besangon  school  of  horology, 
vibrations,  springs,  synchronization,  etc..  are  taught,  and  at  the 
famous  Ecole  du  Livre,  where  everything  pertaining  to  book- 
making  is  learned,  pupils  are  taught  many  principles  of  physics. 
Each  one  of  these  topics  has  a  choice  little  literature,  as  does 
rubber  work  and  soldering.  Suffering  as  school  physics  is 
from  lack  of  concreteness,  application,  and  appeals  to  the  motor 
element,  and  still  more  maimed  as  manual  training  is  for  lack 
of  intellectual  ingredients,  the  present  divorce  of  the  two  is  a 
strange  and  surely  transient  anomaly. 

The  humanistic  stage  and  aspect  of  science  has  been  pro- 
gressively ignored.  If  the  old  nature  religions  had  persisted, 
or  if  it  could  be  now  recognized  that  childhood  and  youth  still 
tend  to  live  through  them  in  a  way  that  both  the  higher  relig- 
ions that  worship  man  and  the  mechanism  of  science  intim- 
idate and  repress  to  the  great  loss  of  both,  all  would  be  very 
different.  To  me  the  faint  beginnings  that  are  now  being 
made  to  recover  some  of  our  losses  here,  appeal  as  a  new  enthu- 
siasm of  humanity,  as  a  restoration  from  a  dire  fall  that  has 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD  NATURE  159 

been  so  gradual  that  we  do  not  realize  it,  and  so  all-sided  that 
the  very  standards  of  comparison  are  all  in  various  stages  of 
decay.  The  Renaissance  recreated  Europe  by  restoring  a  rela- 
tively recent  age  and  stage  of  man's  development.  History 
seeks  to  conserve  for  present  uses  the  lessons  of  the  past.  Prot- 
estant culture  seeks  to  go  back  to  Scripture  and  restore  by  the 
spade  and  textual  criticism  the  consciousness  of  Jesus  and  the 
nascent  stages  of  the  new  life  that  came  into  and  transformed 
the  world  through  Him  and  His  early  followers.  Now  that 
education  would  guide  and  improve  all  earlier  and  later  stages 
of  development,  it  must  no  longer  limit  its  lesson  to  the  short 
period  of  authentic  history,  but  profit  by  and  even  incite  by 
new  motives  every  new  method  of  retracing  ever  earlier  stages 
of  the  soul's  evolution.  Happily,  it  is  now  beginning  to  shape 
a  larger  and  all-comprehensive  humanism  and  renaissance  full 
of  new  promise  for  the  future  of  the  race. 

In  what  follows  I  can  only  very  briefly  glance  at  some  of 
the  great  fields  of  natuie  interest,  following  a  general  evolu- 
tionary order  rather  than  that  of  psychogenetic  zest,  which  is  so 
far  less  determined,  and  having  regard  chiefly  to  adolescence 
only. 

I.  One  of  the  new  psychic  developments  of  this  age  is  a 
great  and  sometimes  sudden  extension  of  interest  in  space  and 
time.  Childhood  cares  little  for  what  is  remote  in  either  order 
unless  associated  with  some  personal  object.  Inversely  as  the 
squares  of  the  distances  is  one  of  its  most  characteristic  laws 
of  interest,  for  it  lives  chiefly  in  the  present.  But  it  would 
almost  seem  from  our  returns  that  every  well-endowed  youth, 
before  or  very  soon  after  the  age  of  twenty,  has  an  infinity 
neurosis  concerning  space  and  time,  which  is  more  or  less  spe- 
cific and  is  often  at  first  perhaps  chiefly  automatic  and 
instinctive,  but  unique  and  heretofore  little  known.  While  it 
fascinates,  it  soothes  and  quiets.  Some  become  specialists  in 
sky-gazing  and  dreaming  and  think  along,  visiting  worlds  full 
of  wonders,  or  the  arch  above  may  seem  a  wall  which  shuts 
out  the  soul  as  though  it  never  could  get  through,  or  it  may 
become  a  shuddering  menace  of  extinction  and  annihilation, 
while  some  are  so  updrawn  that  the  heavens  and  the  soul  seem 
to  belong  to  each  other.  Some  have  distinct  agoraphobia  at 
the  thought  of  spatial  infinity,  and  steady  themselves  by  think- 


l6o  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

ing  that  the  stellar  worlds  are  oases  scattered  at  distances  that 
are  not  really  too  great  to  be  a  little  neighborly,  while  the  claus- 
trophobiac  type  of  mind  is  relieved  to  find  open  spaces  in  a  star 
map,  so  that  escape  is  not  cut  off,  or  are  glad  to  hear  of  ether 
instead  of  a  void,  for  it  seems  a  way  of  exit  or  makes  getting 
to  heaven  easier.  Some  muse  on  whether  there  can  really  be 
either  a  mathematical  or  a  gravity  center  in  the  universe  and 
associate  these  thoughts  with  constant  falling  and  a  sinking 
feeling.  Some  think  the  universe  laminated  in  a  Dantesque 
way  or  growing  a  layer  at  a  time.  Others  feel  that  space  opens 
to  infinity  easiest  toward  some  one  point  of  compass,  usually 
eastward,  or  at  a  certain  angle  of  elevation  where  the  world 
came  from  or  where  God  is  still  creating  worlds.  Others 
think  out  in  one  direction  until  they  are  fatigued  or  repelled, 
and  then  in  the  opposite.  Some  have  a  persistent  longing  or 
drawing  toward  the  east,  south,  or  west,  or  right  up  to  the 
sky,  where  they  would  float  on  forever.  Some  fancy  limits, 
then  transcend  them,  and  count  off  and  must  measure  time  and 
space  by  each  other.  Some  pity  the  loneliness  of  the  earth, 
the  solar  system,  or  the  stars  so  far  from  each  other,  with  no 
communication. 

Some  reflect  that  void  space  might  be  either  light  or  dark 
and  it  would  make  no  difference.  The  lapse  of  time  is  so 
doom-like  going  on  to  the  end.  Some  must  stop  the  tick  of  the 
clock  or  turn  it  back.  Some  are  "  frozen  stiff  "  and  gasp  at 
these  attacks,  and  all  the  snugness  and  comfort  of  life  seem 
gone.  What  can  God  do  with  all  this  space  and  time?  Some 
are  faint,  others  angry,  to  hear  talk  suggesting  their  creepy 
"  spells."  Does  it  get  lighter,  darker,  emptier,  hotter,  or  colder 
away  out  there?  Is  it  spherical  or  oblate,  etc.  ?  To  many  these 
thoughts  are  immediately  associated  with  ideas  of  the  soul's 
future,  while  to  others  it  is  all  more  abstract  and  mathematical. 
Not  one  of  our  returns  even  suggested  the  subjectivity  of  time 
and  space,  except  where  there  had  been  specific  instruction  in 
philosophy.^ 

'  F.,  17.  At  thirteen  began  to  realize  eternity  and  think  on  the  end  of  time, 
space,  and  the  world.  This  brought  a  feeling  of  weakness  and  palpitation  and 
made  her  serious  and  thoughtful.  She  developed  a  ritual  of  Bible  verses,  hymns, 
etc.,  for  such  occasions. 

M.,  23.  Thought  space  might  be  dotted  all  over  with  stars,  and  if  it  was  infinite 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  i6i 

We  glimpse  here  perhaps  the  motives  of  the  Yogi  cult  of 
absorption  in  the  absokite  or  universal,  and  of  the  worship  of 
Varuna,  or  Uranus,  of  which  diffusing  smoke  and  incense  was 

and  the  light  of  them  all  could  reach  us,  that  no  matter  how  far  apart  they  were 
the  sky  would  seem  a  solid  floor  of  light,  and  wondered  if  he  went  to  the  farthest 
star  they  would  still  seem  uniformly  thick  on  all  sides.  (Cf.  Eternity,  by  W.  M. 
Bryant,  pp.  36-37,  for  a  somewhat  sindilar  reverie.) 

F.,  27.  Thinks  of  infinite  space  as  intensely  alive,  tingling  and  vibrating  with 
activity.  Worlds  and  stars  are  dross  or  precipitations,  and  souls  are  finer  extracts 
of  their  cosmic  life  far  more  intense  than  theirs.  Matter  is  the  same,  only  lower 
and  more  degraded. 

M.,  27.  Thinks  all  people  worry  about  infinite  time  and  space  sometimes,  and 
that  it  is  well  to  have  it  early  and  in  a  chicken-pox  form  so  as  not  to  be  befuddled 
by  Kant.  Space  is  round  with  the  earth  at  the  center,  and  the  thought  of  forever 
falling  affects  his  heart. 

M.,  25.  When  1  gaze  at  the  sky  and  think  of  the  immensities  and  infinitudes,  I 
feel  like  a  microbe  and  could  no  more  have  the  conceit  to  say  their  esse  is  pcrcipi 
(though  I  could  do  this  with  ease  and  pleasure  in  my  room  at  college)  than  I  could 
conceive  a  protozoan  saying  this  universe  consists  of  me.  Very  likely  the  gods  or 
real  beings  out  there  could  not  see  us  with  a  microscope  if  the  sun  itself  was  a  lens 
made  on  purpose.     If  they  can,  they  must  laugh. 

M.,  24.  If  space  is  really  infinite  and  populated  with  stars  all  through,  I  could 
not  see  how  there  could  be  any  common  center,  or  any  absolute  gravity,  or  abso- 
lute motion.  Again,  if  every  movement  of  every  being  started  vibrations  that  irra- 
diate outward  forever,  the  acts  of  my  boyhood  must  now  be  present  by  continuity 
of  vibration  at  some  far-off  point,  and  thus  everything  that  ever  happened  is  some- 
where present  forever  in  irradiating  spheres,  and  thus  if  there  be  a  universal  senso- 
rium  everything  is  forever  present  to  it. 

F. ,  25.  I  am  a  strong  believer  in  cremation,  because  I  like  the  idea  of  having 
the  body  given  a  speedy  gaseous  diffusion  as  wide  as  possible.  The  poetic  idea  of 
products  of  my  body  coloring  a  sunset  ever  so  little  appeals  to  me ;  besides.  I  had 
rather  be  gas  and  vapor  than  clay  and  earth  which  ordinary  inhumation  suggests, 
because  the  former  seems  somehow  more  akin  to  spirit,  as  the  latter  does  to 
matter. 

M.,  20.  When  I  get  hypnotized  by  gazing  at  the  sky  and  stars,  I  think  my  pre- 
dominant feeling  is  a  desire  to  explore,  to  float  up  and  travel  all  around  and  visit 
many  stars  and  get  to  the  limit  and  look  off  into  empty  starless  space  in  some  sort 
of  a  wild  Jules  Verne  trip,  and  I  often  fancy  schemes  of  rapid  interstellar  transit  in 
my  idle  sky-dreamings. 

M.,  21.  After  much  thought,  once  reached  this  notion,  that  starting  with  a  row 
of  small  figure  nines  reaching  to  the  farthest  star  and  back  and  then  looping  through 
all  the  other  stars  and  back,  then  letting  each  unit  represented  in  this  immense 
number  stand  for  all  the  smallest  particles  in  the  universe,  and  letting  each  of  these 
particles  stand  for  a  decillion  miles,  he  reflected  that  when  he  had  traveled  all  these 
miles  beyond  the  farthest  star  he  would  have  only  just  started  through  infinite 
space.  Later  he  thought  each  unit  might  stand  for  all  the  distance  light  could 
travel  in  all  these  years,  and  then  that  each  particle  in  the  universe  should  be  placed 
at  the  end  of  the  distance  light  could  travel  in  them  all,  etc. 
50 


1 62  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

the  symbol,  and  from  which  the  various  theories  of  pantheistic 
anatheosis  were  unfolded.  But  there  is  no  suggestion  of  get- 
ting beyond  or  outside  of  time  and  space.  Now  the  mind  is 
expanded  and  finds  repose  in  the  nebulse  hypothesis,  as  formerly 
the  quietism  of  the  heart  was  attained  in  Nirvana.  The  modern 
dreamer  wants  to  be  pulverized  or  reduced  back  to  his  stoichio- 
logical  bases,  like  Jeffries  perhaps,  by  fire  burial,  as  the  panthe- 
istic soul  which  felt  itself  as  intensive  as  space  is  extensive,  and 
would  relapse  to  the  void  out  of  which  it  was  formed.  To 
those  who  aspire  to  be  "  sunk  in  the  changeless  calm  "  of  an 
impersonal  deity,  the  only  truly  nihilistic  atheism  is  to  deny 
the  void,  but  the  infinite  void  is  real,  and  to  affirm  its  over- 
whelming positive  character  is  the  supreme  affirmation  of 
faith.  Modern  psychology  knows  no  hint  of  an  explanation 
why  the  adolescent  soul  seeks  perhaps  to  cool  passion,  as  it 
is  still  taught  to  do  in  India  by  the  cult  of  sitting  cross-legged 
and  saying  "  om  " ;  or  why  it  gravitates  so  strongly  at  this 
age  to  think  sub  specie  atertinatis,  or  to  fall  into  this  "  lair  " 
of  Eckhart,  unless  there  really  be  some  "  impulse  of  return," 
as  Proclus  and  Plotinus  said,  by  contemplation  toward  the 
etherism  from  which  all  things  emanated  and  into  which  they 
will  be  reabsorbed.  It  would  almost  seem  that  pantheistic,  like 
other  religious  impulses,  culminated  in  youth  in  which  the  best 
blood  of  its  highest  types  flows.  It  is  not  critically  formulated 
or  entirely  conscious,  but  the  appetency  for  uncreated  and  un- 
determined being,  for  a  Godhood  above  God,  for  bottoming  on 
some  most  real  being  or  substance  as  if  the  summit  of  the  scale 
of  existence  was  attained  with  the  highest  degree  of  abstrac- 
tion, is  perhaps  the  supreme  expression  of  the  religion  of  pure 
intellect,  which  must  forever  be  a  very  different  thing  in  its 
nature  and  needs  from  the  religion  of  the  heart  which  can  never 
love  a  being  defined  by  negation,  can  not  worship  an  unmoved 
mover,  and  is  not  intoxicated  with  abstract  unity.  Or  is  it  all 
because  the  work  of  reason  itself  is  not  complete  until  it  has 
postulated  something  ultra  rational  or  brought  itself  squarely 
up  against  barriers  which  thought  can  never  cross,  and  thus 
in  a  sense  shown  forth  its  own  transcendent  nature  even  by 
affirming  the  dissolution  of  personality  in  a  universal  and  un- 
conditioned menstruum,  pausing  before  a  veil  which  only  the 
heart  can  penetrate  ? 


ADOLESCENT   FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  163 

The  new  ephebic  sympathy  with  nature  in  these  days  of 
evolution  and  cosmic  gas  passes  far  more  rapidly  than  formerly 
into  an  Oriental  sense  of  a  one  and  all,  which  is  a  unity  back 
of  all  difference,  conceived  as  a  point  of  departure  from  which 
we  were  formed  out  of  the  void,  and  into  which,  when  the 
tides  that  drew  us  forth  ebb  again,  we  shall  be  resolved  or 
absorbed.  As  by  the  old  doctrine  of  representative  perception 
the  heart  perceives  objects  because  it  is  of  the  same  kind,  since 
like  knows  like,  so  it  is  felt  that  the  soul  is  of  the  same  nature 
as  all,  and  can  therefore  know  all.  These  sentiments  are  in 
fact  not  yet  pantheism,  because  there  is  no  conception  of  a  soul 
of  the  world,  and  indeed  there  is  at  first  neither  dualism  nor 
monism.  It  is  not  a  system,  but  a  feeling  of  kinship  which  is 
a  kind  of  insight  and  which  may  later  develop  comprehension. 
At  first  it  is  an  utterly  naive  and  unreflecting  sympathetic  grop- 
mg  or  orientation  with  regard  to  origin  and  end  of  both  self 
and  the  world,  a  sense  of  our  continuity  with  life,  earth,  sun, 
and  sky.  It  is  true  that  this  way  lies  pantheism,  which  Paulsen 
calls  the  secret  faith  of  science  to-day,  in  which  perhaps  all 
natural  religions  culminate.  It  is  the  sentiment  which  the 
Stoics  interpreted  materialistically,  making  their  theology  a 
part  of  physics ;  optimistically,  because  they  thought  the  world 
and  its  soul  the  most  perfect;  and  ethically,  by  defining  duty 
as  the  contemplation  and  imitation  of  nature  or  the  universe — 
but  in  its  native  youthful  form  it  is  most  benign. 

Thus,  neither  the  narrowness  of  creed  nor  the  bigotry  of 
systems  should  lead  us  to  forget  that  theologies  and  even  phi- 
losophies pass,  while  folklore  and  poetry,  that  spring  from  and 
lie  nearer  the  heart,  remain,  and  that  the  weak  points  of  the 
former  often  constitute  their  chief  use.  A  shallow  orthodoxy 
may  condemn  these  youthful  stirrings  of  soul,  but  they  are  not 
only  not  inconsistent  with  the  highest  religious  or  even  Chris- 
tian belief  and  life,  but  profoundly  strengthen  it,  so  that  their 
absence  is  a  very  serious  loss.  This  experience  makes  purgation 
and  is  a  precious  baptism  for  which  the  now  much  vaunted 
epistemology  is  no  adequate  substitute ;  it  gives  a  deep,  abiding 
sense  of  reality  instead  of  the  hollowness  which  academic 
teaching  so  often  leaves  about  the  heart.  It  instils  feelings 
that  "  there  lives  and  moves  a  soul  in  all  things,  and  that  soul 
is  God  ";  that  "  the  rolling  year  is  full  of  God;  forth  in  the 


1 64  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

spring  his  beauty  walks" ;  that  "in  Him  we  live,  and  move,  and 
have  our  being."  It  gives  a  kind  of  spiritual  exaltation,  so 
that  every  aspect  of  the  cosmos  may  awaken  the  spirit  of 
poetry,  of  which  one  of  the  best  definitions  is  contact  between 
the  soul  and  nature.  This  sudden  psychic  expansion  toward 
the  infinite  is  almost  the  acme,  and  these  phenomena  the  high- 
water  mark  of  genius,  which  needs  to  see  little  in  order  to 
know  so  much,  and  which  is  temperamental  and  characteristic 
in  the  modern  environment  of  true  science  in  which  it  is  "  bliss 
to  be  alive  and  to  be  young  is  heaven."  This  is  nature  living, 
as  it  can  truly  only  in  our  lives.  It  touches  perhaps  the  very 
highest  point  yet  attained  in  human  evolution,  where  our 
source  and  destiny  bend  together  to  a  cycle,  and  where  we 
can  with  equal  ease  and  equal  edification  interpret  the  highest 
things  in  the  scale  of  development  by  the  lowest,  or  the  lowest 
by  the  highest. 

II.  Little  children  watch  the  stars  pop  out  like  bubbles,  or 
take  their  places,  "  say  present,"  think  them  diamonds,  gold 
studs,  brass  nail-heads  to  keep  up  the  sky,  lamp's  eyes,  sparks, 
glass  buttons.  They  love  each  other's  company,  and  the  happy 
celestial  family,  mothered  by  the  moon  or  fathered  by  the  sun, 
talk  of  us  or  of  God.  At  about  the  age  of  ten,  twinkling  seems 
to  attract  special  attention.  It  is  explained  as  winking  at  each 
other  in  sign  language,  or  at  us,  and  children  wink  back ;  it  is 
the  breaking  of  bubbles,  vibrations  when  they  hit  each  other  and 
shake,  shooting  out  sparkles,  rotation  showing  alternate  light 
and  dark  sides,  saying  good  evening,  and  they  call  back  this 
greeting;  it  is  dancing  or  else  their  smiles  or  tears.  They 
often  pick  a  certain  star  as  "  my  star,"  wait  for  and  salute  it, 
and  are  sad  or  feel  guilty  if  it  does  not  appear.  It  is  talked  to, 
told  secrets,  used  to  wish  by,  and  invested  with  peculiar  power 
to  make  wishes  come  true,  etc.,  will  take  the  soul  in  personal 
charge  at  death  ;  some  move  the  bed  or  adjust  curtains  so  it  will 
shine  on  them  when  they  go  to  sleep.  Sometimes  they  are  indi- 
vidualized as  souls  of  parents,  dead  friends,  great  men,  and 
many  amuse  themselves  by  tracing  angles,  circles,  animals, 
persons,  buildings,  apparel.     They  cluster  for  sociability,  etc. 

At  adolescence  sentiment  regarding  them  is  greatly  deep- 
ened. There  are  sometimes  longings  for  some  token  of  re- 
sponse, melting  tenderness,  partly  love  and  partly  worship. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  165 

Some  reveries  are  dependent  upon  stars  and  seem  to  free  the 
mind  from  the  body  and  send  it  off  on  charming  excursions. 
Spontaneous  prayers  to  stars  are  not  infrequent.  Maidens  are 
sometimes  greatly  steadied  by  silent  communion  with  the  stars 
and  lifted  above  trouble,  because  from  their  eternal  standpoint 
earthly  pleasure  and  pain  seem  evanescent.  They  bring  calm- 
ness, purity,  control.  Occasionally  young  women  become  pas- 
sionate star  lovers.^  The  Milky  Way  is  a  heavenly  river  "  with 
a  broad,  peaceful,  stony  bed."  It  is  often  conceived  as  flowing 
both  ways,  perhaps  from  the  north  pole,  which  was  once 
nearer  to  it  than  now ;  or  it  is  a  fiery  current,  the  storehouse 
of  lightning,  or  its  stream  is  the  source  of  rain  and  flows 
alternately  up  and  down. 

We  have  here  the  ontogenic  correlate  of  astrology  and 
many  an  ancient  myth  of  stars  and  planetary  influences.  In- 
terest in  stellar  revolutions  comes  later  and  its  phyletic  side 
seems  far  stronger,  this  stage  probably  having  been  suppressed 
by  the  percolations  of  the  influences  of  modern  astronomy 
which  are  extirpating  pre-Copernican  ideas,  great,  long-persis- 
tent, and  pervasive  as  they  have  been.  The  value  of  their  edu- 
cational reconstructions  may  be  an  open  question.  I  can  here 
only  indicate  them  in  a  note.^ 


'  A  young  mother  still  holds  unspoken  communion  with  stars  and  is  helped  by 
it  in  many  ways.  They  lifted  her  thoughts  far  above  all  trouble.  They  were 
eternal,  and  from  their  standpoint  all  pleasure  and  pain  seemed  evanescent.  They 
were  constant,  unchanging,  and  so  mild  and  pure  that  to  contemplate  them  kept 
her  calm,  pure  in  thought,  sweet  in  temper,  and  brought  self-control  and  a  deep 
peace.  For  another,  although  reared  in  Puritan  New  England  and  still  an  active 
church  member,  the  being  called  God  had  little  interest  or  reality,  as  a  child,  less 
than  Santa  Claus,  and  was  prayed  to  only  perfunctorily  and  not  as  a  power  in  her 
life.  But  the  stars  were  passionately  loved  and  could  grant  prayers.  Because  they 
had  such  power  to  arouse  deep  longings,  they  must  have  power  to  satisfy  them,  till 
matters  of  conscience  were  habitually  and  instinctively  taken  to  them.  Faith  in 
the  love  of  mother  or  sister  is  not  more  perfect  than  was  girlish  belief  in  the  re- 
sponsive love  of  the  stars,  that  drew  so  mysteriously  yet  strongly.  What  is 
prayed  them  for  is  still  granted,  and  the  awe  and  love  still  increases  and  they  are 
looked  to  for  right  desires. 

^  An  endless  number  of  man's  sacred  ideas  are  based  on  a  supreme  reverence 
for  the  revolution  of  the  universe  about  the  earth's  axis  and  for  the  power  that 
causes  this  motion,  a  belief  which  since  Copernicus  we  know  to  be  false.  The 
idea  of  this  vast  and  constant  revolution  of  the  heavens  around  the  earth  must, 
from  the  time  the  human  mind  first  took  cognizance  of  it,  have  exerted  an  enormous 
fascination  and  influence  upon  the  reflective  and  devout  mind.      An  axletree  or 


l66  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Perhaps  the  most  significant  immediate  effect  of  science 
here  is  to  put  the  stars  afar  off.  The  youth  reads  in  his  text- 
book that  if  the  sun  were  two  feet  in  diameter,  the  earth  would 
be  the  size  of  a  pea  two  hundred  and  twenty  feet  away,  and  the 
nearest  star  would  be  eight  thousand  miles  away.  He  reads 
of  one  hundred  million  stars  visible  through  the  three-foot 
glass  of  a  telescope,  or  of  the  twenty-two  thousand  million, 
estimated,  when  a  lens  is  made  which  can  see  those  of  the 
twentieth  magnitude — the  Lick  glass  reaching  only  the  six- 
teenth; of  the  small  size  of  our  sun  compared  with  Sirius 
about  five  hundred  times  greater,  and  others  estimated  to  be 
a  million  times  larger;  of  all  the  stages  of  stellar  life  from 


pole  was  early  assumed,  and  some  creative  myths,  like  the  Japanese,  represent  this 
spear-axis  as  churning  the  world  out  of  the  primeval  sea.  Hence  we  have  a  vast 
cycletic  or  kinetic  mythology  of  cosmic  machinery  in  motion. 

When  the  awe-struck  mind  sought  for  the  power  that  caused  this  rotation,  it 
would  naturally  be  placed  at  the  highest  pivotal  point,  so  that  the  polar  deity  may 
be,  as  John  O'Neill  (The  Night  of  the  Gods,  2  vols.,  1893)  urges  with  great  learn- 
ing, "the  oldest  and  supremest  of  the  cosmic  gods  of  all  the  early  northern  regions." 
Here  is  the  eye  of  heaven,  and  here  the  omphalos  myths  are  located.  Here,  espe- 
cially, the  seven  stars  of  Ursa  Major  turn  and  have  given  its  holiness  to  the  number 
seven.  The  Atlas  myths  and  those  of  the  pillars  of  heaven  often  survive  in  obelisks, 
towers,  and  steeples,  which  still  perpetuate  primitive  man's  idea  of  the  mainstay 
of  the  universe.  Here,  too,  belong  the  universe  tree  and  the  bridges  to  another 
world,  the  dance  of  the  stars,  the  wheel  of  the  law,  the  prayer  wheel,  the  fire  wheel, 
the  wheel  of  fortune,  the  one  holy  mountain  as  a  cone  piercing  heaven — all  these 
are  traced  from  the  original  idea  of  a  pole. 

The  swastika  (The  Fundamental  Principles  of  Old  and  New  World  Civilization, 
by  Zelia  Nuttall,  Papers  of  Peabody  Museum,  vol.  ii,  1901)  was  first  used  in  the 
circumpolar  regions,  and  was  a  record  of  the  four  positions  of  the  nocturnal  and 
annual  circuits  of  the  Bear  and  Dipper  about  the  pole-star.  It  was  first  a  year  sign, 
then  a  symbol  of  the  four  quarters  of  the  year  and  of  the  quadruplicate  division, 
and  of  "a  stable  central  power  whose  rule  extended  in  four  directions  and  con- 
trolled the  entire  heavens."  In  India,  Egypt,  Babylonia,  and  Assyria,  cities  and 
states  were  divided  into  four  quarters  with  four  tribes  under  a  central  chief,  and  thus 
society  was  harmonized  under  the  ideal  of  a  religious  democracy.  The  pyramid, 
which  originally  had  four  stories  and  was  cruciform,  and  many  sacred  structures, 
commemorate  cosmical  and  territorial  organization  into  four  parts.  The  four  quar- 
ters, the  sacred  middle,  and  above  and  below,  represent  a  yet  more  extended  con- 
ception of  seven  directions  in  space,  as  in  Egypt  there  were  seven  classes.  .Start- 
ing from  this  common  basis  of  fourfold  division,  a  great  variety  of  constitutions 
were  independently  invented  by  statesmen  and  philosophers  who  devised  many 
cycles  combined  of  numbers  and  signs  to  regulate  time  and  communal  life  in  imita- 
tion of  the  order  and  harmony  of  heavenly  motion  and  under  one  supreme  ruler, 
the  earthly  representative  of  Polaris.     The  origin  of  these  schemes  is  generally 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  167 

nebulae,  through  all  stages  of  incandescence  and  cooling,  to 
cinders ;  of  vast  bodies  of  equal  size  revolving  about  each  other 
in  immense  periods;  how  of  all  this  number  scarcely  eight 
hundred  thousand  are  yet  even  catalogued ;  of  the  stratifications 
and  general  configurations  of  the  stars  in  the  Milky  Way,  in 
which  our  system  is  and  from  which  we  look  out  to  it  as  from 
a  center  toward  the  edges  of  a  lens-shaped  group  of  stars  com- 
prising all  within  the  ken  of  astronomy. 

Of  all  the  sciences,  astronomy  is  the  oldest.  Its  theme  is 
the  largest.  It  deals  with  the  greatest  masses  of  matter  and  the 
longest  stretches  of  time  and  space.  As  Emerson  said,  if  the 
heavens  were  visible  only  one  night  in  a  thousand  years  the 


ascribed  to  a  northern  race  who  had  discovered  fire-making  and  evolved  a  cult  and 
ritual  suggested  by  it.  They  were  persecuted  for  both  their  religious  and  demo- 
cratic views,  and  this  would  be  an  incentive  to  seek  refuges  and  found  colonies. 
This  they  did  in  the  New  World,  transporting  their  ideas  at  widely  separated  criti- 
cal periods  of  their  own  history.  Hence  the  close  similarity  between  the  art  of  the 
Andes  and  that  of  the  Mediterranean,  especially  in  plan  and  numerical  schemes. 
Thus  America  became  an  isolated  area  of  preservation  for  archaic  forms  of  govern- 
ment, cultivated  industry  drawn  at  different  epochs  from  various  centers  of  Old 
World  culture,  and  transmitted  but  with  increasing  native  elements.  The  one 
basis  that  underlay  all  was  the  recognition  of  fixed  laws  governing  the  universe,  and 
this  was  given  by  long  observation  of  Polaris  and  northern  stars.  Thus  we  recog- 
nize anew  how  the  entire  intellectual,  moral,  and  religious  evolution  of  the  race  has 
resulted  in  fixed  laws.  From  the  time  when  our  world  began  to  rotate,  the  fact  of 
one  fixed  point  in  space  that  never  changed  has  had  a  mystic  and  irresistible  influ- 
ence, raising  the  mind  of  man  from  darkness  and  confusion,  and  issuing  in  the  idea 
of  one  central  power,  and  from  this  the  idea  of  an  invisible  and  supreme  Deity  arose 
in  the  higher  scale  of  spiritual  development.  Perhaps  the  Master  Architect  of  the 
world  designed  this,  still  suggested  by  the  sacred  sign  of  the  cross  which  is  set  for 
a  sign  in  heaven ;  while  the  shaft,  pole,  or  chark,  which  brought  down  fire,  sug- 
gested a  primitive  mode  of  worship. 

"  The  earliest  year  used  by  the  first  agricultural  races  was  one  of  two  seasons 
measured  by  Pleiades,  beginning  with  the  festival  of  the  stars  and  the  commemora- 
tion of  dead  ancestors  celebrated  in  November  "  (The  Ruling  Races  of  Prehis- 
toric Times  in  India,  Southwestern  Asia,  and  Southern  Europe ;  Westminster, 
1894.  See  Essay  IV).  Then  came  the  year  of  three  seasons,  the  first  official  meas- 
ure of  time  by  the  barley-growing  races  who  always  began  their  year  at  the  autumnal 
equinox.  "These  early  astronomers  substituted  for  the  reckoning  of  time  by  the 
Pleiades  one  founded  on  the  supposed  friction  of  the  pole,  which  they  thought  to 
be  proven  by  the. apparent  motion  of  the  stars  around  it."  The  heat  thus  gener- 
ated by  the  ever-turning  fire  drill  was  bounded  by  the  four  stars,  which  marked 
the  four  quarters  of  the  heavens:  viz.,  Sirius,  which  rose  with  the  beginning  rains 
of  India  at  the  summer  solstice  ;  the  Great  Bear;  Argo  in  the  south;  and  Corvus 
in  the  west.     These  latter  constellations  traced  their  birth  to  Sirius. 


1 68  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

sights  of  that  night  would  be  awaited  with  the  greatest  ex- 
pectation, and  those  of  that  generation  ahve  to  see  it  would 
count  themselves  happy.  Its  decline  in  both  high  schools  and 
colleges  is  purely  because  it  is  no  longer  so  taught  as  to  meet 
youthful  needs.  Even  when  its  first  stages  consisted  largely 
in  tracing  constellations  it  used  to  be  taught  in  a  religious  and 
almost  devotional  way.  One  of  these  old  observatories  bore, 
cut  in  stone  over  the  entrance,  the  legend,  "  The  heavens  de- 
clare the  glory  of  God,"  and  over  another  stood  "The  undevout 
astronomer  is  mad."  In  looking  over  elementary  text-books 
of  our  day,  we  find  the  greatest  difference  between  those  which 
treat  the  subject  in  a  technical,  mathematical  way,  and  those 
which  are  more  like  popular  reading  books  because  they  appeal 
to  deep,  primary  sentiments  of  awe,  wonder,  reverence,  and 
curiosity.  The  former  method  dwells  chiefly  upon  celestial 
motions  and  makes  more  or  less  use  of  mathematics  as  its  lan- 
guage. The  revolution  of  the  earth  is  often  the  starting-point, 
and  I  know  of  a  high-school  class  who  spent  six  precious  weeks 
of  individual  competition  in  trying  to  determine  the  noon-mark 
most  accurately.  Prediction  of  eclipses,  subtler  motions  and 
their  determinations,  explanations  of  equinox,  aberration,  and 
nutation,  determinations  of  the  eccentricity  of  orbits,  the  dif- 
ferent seasonal  distances  of  the  moon,  etc.,  follow.  Under  this 
method  carried  to  extreme,  interest  vanishes  almost  in  direct 
proportion  to  difficulties  and  the  end  is  disenchantment. 

Under  the  other  method,  interest  is  first  generated  over 
a  large  field.  The  history  of  astronomy  from  astrology  down 
is  made  interesting.  Kepler,  Galileo,  Tycho  Brahe,  and  the 
heroology  and  biography  in  which  this  science  so  abounds  and 
which  gives  it  such  high  value  as  culture  history,  are  given 
prominence.  Telescopes  with  something  of  their  history,  and 
the  casting  and  finishing  of  great  lenses,  are  made  as  inter- 
esting as  Schiller's  Song  of  the  Bell.  Clocks  and  chronoscopes 
down  to  those  that  measure  ten-thousandths  of  a  second  are 
described,  along  with  gratings  and  other  apparatus.  Cos- 
mogony and  the  nebular  theory,  as  a  part  of  evolution,  have  a 
place,  and  something  is  told  about  ether  and  the  development  of 
the  stellar  world  with  the  historical  stages,  now  exemplified 
in  different  parts  of  space.  Practical  astronomy  is  given  a 
place  and  its  effects  traced  in  navigation,  the  discovery  of 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD  NATURE  1 69 

America,  and  the  changes  from  the  geocentric  to  the  heho- 
centric  view  of  things.  GHmpses  of  the  most  recent  discoveries 
and  observations  are  included,  such  as  the  revolutions  deter- 
mined in  some  of  the  fixed  stars ;  photographs  of  the  heavens ; 
the  process  by  w^hich  many  thousands  of  the  million  stars  now 
estimated  to  be  visible  through  a  forty-inch  glass  have  been 
named  or  identified,  comets,  meteors — all  with  very  copious 
pictures  in  text-books. 

III.  Not  only  is  man  a  child  of  the  sun,  body  and  soul,  but 
every  dawning  day  rescues  us  from  blindness  in  the  great  dark 
and  recreates  the  mind  as  it  wakes  from  the  void  of  sleep.  The 
soul  is  instinctively  heliotropic  and  worships  its  Creator.  The 
phenomenon  of  dawn  to  a  soul  refreshed  by  sleep  kindles  such 
a  wealth  of  variegated  imagery  that  it  seems  a  calamity  that 
modern  childhood  and  youth  are  so  withdrawn  from  its  influ- 
ence. To  bright  young  children,  in  our  returns,  the  sun  is 
often  completely  personified  as  getting  out  of  bed,  pulled  or 
pushed  upward  by  some  alien  power  or  person,  rising  like  a 
balloon  or  on  wings,  shot  up  by  a  cannon,  as  being  God's  open- 
ing eye,  God  himself  or  his  lamp,  a  hole  in  the  sky,  etc.  Chil- 
dren a  little  older  conceive  the  sun  as  making  an  effort  to  lift 
itself,  to  get  free  from  the  horizon,  disentangle  itself  from  the 
trees,  break  loose  from  the  sea,  as  angry  at  the  clouds  and 
pushing  them  away  or  breaking  through  as  a  victor  in  a  contest 
with  them  or  with  darkness.  It  seems  most  triumphant  in  the 
early  hour  when  its  movement  is  vertically  upward  against 
gravity.  To  children  also,  as  to  primitive  man,  the  sun,  like 
the  moon,  is  a  wanderer  at  its  own  free  will.  It  floats  or  rolls 
along  wherever  it  wishes ;  rises  when  it  feels  disposed  to  do 
so ;  and  goes  now  fast,  now  slow.  There  is  no  idea  of  a  fixed 
orbit,  time,  or  rate.  Some  draw  the  breath  with  relief  when  the 
sun  really  gets  clear  of  the  horizon.  If  wakeful,  they  often 
fear  morning  will  never  come,  or  feel  in  bondage  until  light 
sets  them  free. 

To  the  awakening  imagination  in  adolescence  it  is  but  an 
easy  and  natural  next  step  to  Phaeton,  with  the  rays  as  lines 
and  the  clouds  as  horses,  the  labors  of  Hercules,  the  birth  of 
Aurora,  Ajax's  prayer  for  light,  or  a  single  touch  of  fancy 
gives  the  sun  of  Heraclitus  daily  secreted  out  of  the  body  of 
the  world,  leaving  its  mass  a  little  darker,  colder,  or  more 


170  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

corpse-like  throughout.  All  the  phototonic  influences  which 
pervade  animate  nature  are  here  at  their  very  best.  It  is  no 
longer  imposing,  sensuous  scenery  only,  but  there  is  a  feeling 
of  victory,  of  triumph  of  the  powers  of  good  over  those  of  evil, 
and  so  of  worship,  as  in  the  famous  antique  statue  of  the  Greek 
youth's  prayer  eastward  to  the  dawn  whence  comes  all  our  light 
and  wisdom.  It  is  all,  too,  a  pregnant  symbol  of  the  age  when 
the  good,  beautiful,  and  true  really  dawn  in  the  soul. 

So  of  solar  rays  our  data  show  how  they  stimulate  juve- 
nile fancies.  They  are  described  as  "  bars  between  me  and  an- 
other world  " ;  "  ladders  for  fairies  to  dance  on  and  go  to  and 
from  heaven  on ;"  "  a  wreath  of  rays  around  the  round  happy 
face  of  the  sun ;"  "  the  sun's  long  arms  reaching  out  to  embrace 
and  warm  us ;"  they  "  pierce  all  crevices  and  pry  out  darkness 
as  you  pry  out  a  stone  with  a  lever."  Many  make  a  dust  to  see 
the  particles  float  in  a  ray,  blow  them,  or  try  perhaps  to  follow 
one.  The  rays  plunge  into  the  sea  to  loosen  or  open  a  way 
from  the  sun,  who  sinks  into  it  as  they  do ;  they  spout  out  on 
all  sides  like  jets  of  a  fiery  fountain ;  isolated  rays  are  lone- 
some; are  often  feared  if  it  is  not  known  at  once  where  they 
enter  the  trees  or  house,  and  with  some  this  quest  becomes  a 
neurosis ;  clouds  are  very  bold  that  do  not  fear  them ;  the  dark 
is  many  times  as  big  but  knows  enough  to  fly  at  their  approach. 
One  thinks  the  floating  motes  separate  particles  of  sunshine 
dancing;  they  and  the  rays  die  when  the  sun  does;  reflected 
rays  are  impertinent  and  rebellious ;  threads  or  ropes  to  hold 
the  sun;  tubes  to  suck  up  water;  paths  or  ladders  to  the  sky; 
strokes  of  an  artist's  brush;  spears,  daggers,  with  power  to 
make  us  good  or  to  punish  us  if  we  are  bad ;  full  of  gold  dust ; 
the  sun  is  unselfish  to  send  them  out  so  freely,  vain  to  mirror 
himself  in  the  water,  or  cruel  to  break  the  rays  at  its  sur- 
face, etc. 

All  this  shows  that  the  soul  of  childhood  and  youth  is  a 
rank  sprouting-bed  for  far  more  than  poetry,  mythology,  or 
etymologies  combined  have  yet  exploited.  In  the  past,  if 
Max  MiJller  and  Cox  are  right,  the  darts  of  the  far-shooting 
Apollo,  the  arrows  of  Philoctetes  and  Ulysses,  and  not  only 
many  magic  shafts  but  perhaps  the  swords  of  Theseus,  Perseus, 
and  Siegfried,  Arthur's  Excalibur,  Orlando's  Durandal.  the 
Volsung's  good  blade  Gram,  etc.,  are  only  anthropomorphized 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  i;i 

rays  of  the  sun.  But  these  are  all  tropes  of  an  age  of  war. 
There  are  also  triumphs  of  love,  pity,  and  science  yet  to  be 
wrought  out  in  new  artistic  and  humanistic  forms  if  we  are  to 
unfold  all  the  best  latent  possibilities  of  the  young,  and  fully 
accept,  feel,  and  yield  to  the  inspiration  of  their  needs  as  our 
muse. 

Some  blinded  animals  sleep  for  lack  of  stimulus  to  keep 
awake,  and  as  blind  children  are  indisposed  to  action  in  part 
for  the  same  reason,  bright  lights  quicken  the  mentation  of 
idiots.  For  small  children,  a  succession  of  dark  days  tends  to 
sloth,  somnolence,  irritability,  or  dyspepsia.  Some  are  un- 
toned  in  dark  corners,  and  groups  of  children  are  often  so 
sensitive  that  a  cloud  passing  over  the  sun  causes  a  notice- 
able depression  of  spirits,  activity,  or  both.  They  falter  in 
their  play,  are  less  merry,  hesitate,  pause,  and  neurotic  children 
often  shiver  and  catch  their  breath.  As  the  degree  of  its 
illumination  diminishes,  they  speak  more  softly,  whisper,  or 
are  silent,  grow  less  energetic  in  their  movements,  their  spirits 
sink,  the  quality  and  quantity  of  work  in  school  declines,  their 
standards  and  ideals  droop,  they  are  slow  and  inattentive,  all 
tasks  seem  harder,  the  appetite  is  enfeebled  and  freaky,  pugnac- 
ity increases,  they  are  very  easily  discouraged,  huddle,  clasp 
hands,  cling  about  each  other  or  adults,  suffer  from  enmii,  are 
prone  to  collapse  attitudes,  are  lonesome,  homesick,  etc.,  but 
when  the  sun  breaks  out,  especially  on  new  snow,  their  ex- 
hilaration, noise,  activity,  and  joy  are  boundless. 

Here,  too,  adolescence  brings  a  marked  change  to  children. 
Early  nightfall  is  the  withdrawal  of  stimulus,  physical  inac- 
tivity, and  rest.  They  enjoy  the  panorama  of  a  fine  sunset 
or  are  subdued  and  sad  that  the  day  is  done.  But  to  youth 
twilight  means  far  more.  As  sense  is  dulled  and  the  body  less 
active,  reflection  awakes  and  declares  its  independence  of  sur- 
roundings. Of  all  the  day  it  is  the  calm,  pensive  hour  for 
retrospection  and  protension.  Friends  and  kinsmen  gather  and 
social  instincts  unfold.  The  hour  of  closing  day,  if  the  adoles- 
cent soul  is  directly  exposed  to  its  influences,  opens  up  a  new 
life  of  sentiment  and  mysticism.  As  sense  is  dimmed,  soul 
comes  forth.  There  is  a  deeper,  sacred,  symbolic  meaning  to 
it  all.  Conscience  awakes,  if  not  in  the  form  of  reproach,  in 
aspirations  for  a  new  and  better  life.    The  peace  and  purity  of 


172  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

the  evening  sky  is  reflected  in  the  moral  nature.  The  isolation 
of  gathering  twilight  brings  solitude;  the  soul  is  alone  with 
itself,  face  to  face  with  duty  and  ideals.  There  are  new  long- 
ings for  a  larger,  higher  life,  a  desire  for  more  self-knowledge 
and  self-expression.  A  sunset  is  a  sermon,  and  "  betwixt  the 
gloaming  and  the  mirk  "  is  the  time  for  music,  favorite  hymns, 
because  heaven  and  God  seem  near,  as  well  as  for  philosophic 
thought  and  reflection.  It  is  the  hour,  too,  for  reviewing  the 
day,  for  moralizing,  dreamily  though  it  be,  and  for  resolutions 
for  the  future,  for  ambitious  plans  for  adulthood,  castle  build- 
ing, and  reverie,  often  the  best  expression  in  the  young  of 
spontaneous  psychic  growth.  In  the  great  hush  and  peace  the 
imagination  is  kindled.  Much  is  thought  and  talked  of  that 
would  be  impossible  by  garish  day.  That  is  for  plain,  lucid 
prose,  but  now  is  the  time  for  reading  or  even  writing  poetry, 
the  time  when  so  many,  in  our  returns,  invoke  their  Muse. 
Some  would  compose  new  music ;  sing  something  wildly  weird 
and  sad ;  tell  sweet  thoughts,  if  only  to  themselves  or  an  imagi- 
nary companion ;  let  the  mind  wander  away  and  away,  shunning 
every  noise  and  intrusion  in  an  abandon  of  delicious  depression, 
some  of  which  is  perhaps  an  after-effect  of  the  crude  childish 
fears  which  now  in  large  measure  and  rather  suddenly  fade. 
Pedagogy,  especially  that  of  religion  and  art,  has  here  a  great 
opportunity  and  perhaps  will  one  day  rise  to  its  duty  and  con- 
struct a  vesper  service  that,  while  not  without  shelter  and  com- 
fort exposing  the  soul  to  all  the  sensuous  phenomena  of  slowly 
gathering  night,  will  devise  adequate  expression  for  the  in- 
stincts that  now  turn  the  soul  inward;  make  it  feel  the  need 
of  protection  and  trust ;  preform  it  to  walk  by  faith  and  not  by 
sight;  strengthen  the  feeling  of  dependence;  anticipate  the 
evening  of  life  and  the  great  sleep  that  wakes  not.  This  is  the 
way  the  soul  should  descend  into  the  dark  valley,  "  like  one 
who  wraps  the  drapery  of  his  couch  about  him  and  lies  down 
to  pleasant  dreams."  This  is  the  hour  of  sentiment  and  should 
be  sacred  to  its  culture. 

The  solar  heroes  exposed  in  their  infancy  on  eastern  hills, 
golden-haired,  strongest  at  noon  with  strange  fits  of  gloom, 
subject  for  a  time  to  alien  and  baser  powers,  have  now  sunk 
to  their  death  in  a  triumphant  transformation  scene  implying  a 
resurrection.      Night   "  drinks   the  blood  of  the   sun   as   he 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  173 

slaughtered  sank  " ;  "  the  pale  wandering  ghosts  that  beat  the 
gates  of  heaven  all  night  "  are  creeping  forth.  Darkness 
"  draweth  night's  thin  net,"  "  blackens  bush  and  tree,"  falls 
"  fold  on  fold  dulling  the  western  gold."  The  west  breaks 
into  bars  of  color,  or  perhaps  there  remains  "  a  lifeless  cloud 
like  a  dead  angel  lying  in  a  shroud  with  lilies  on  her  breast." 
The  trees  "  turn  old  and  gray  "  as  the  shadows  drape  them. 
Hesper  "  rises  over  the  orbs  of  the  sun,"  which  has  fallen  de- 
feated into  "  ominous  dim  space,"  leaving  only  "  the  stern 
blue  crypt  of  night."  Thus  poets  try  to  conserve  somewhat  of 
what  youth  feels  in  metaphoric  phrases  not  stereotyped  to 
myth.  Twilight  has  created  moods  and  sentiments  all  its  own, 
and  has  done  much  to  shape  the  soul  and  inspired  much  poetry. 
This  sweet  disphoria  is  the  normal  counterpart  of  the  euphoria 
of  dawn. 

When  darkness  becomes  complete  the  waking  child  be- 
comes helpless.  It  can  neither  resist  nor  fly.  Perhaps  old  night 
fears  of  animals  or  ghosts  tense  the  nerves,  and  in  those  who 
are  nervous  phobias  develop,  for  the  old  night  of  ignorance, 
mother  of  fears,  still  rules  infant  neurones.  But  now  the  fires 
and  lamps  are  suddenly  lit,  and  the  eye  and  brain  snatched  back 
from  these  tensions  or  from  somnolence,  the  most  exact  bio- 
logic expression  of  darkness,  and  we  have  the  interesting 
phenomenon  of  "  candle-light  fever."  Children  wake  up  as  to  a 
new  morn  in  petto,  are  wild,  noisy,  frolicsome,  and  abandoned. 
This,  I  suggest,  may  be  the  reverberation  in  modern  souls  of 
the  joy  that  in  some  prehistoric  times  hailed  the  Prometheus 
art  of  controlling  fire  and  defying  night.  This  developed  even- 
ing and  made  man's  habits  seminocturnal,  but  the  gift  has 
cost  us  the  boon  of  sunrise,  has  brought  the  sadness  of  study 
and  wisdom,  and  has  robbed  us  of  the  optimistic  upward 
striving  hours  of  dawn.  With  the  adolescent  it  is  no  longer  a 
matter  of  retinal  excitement,  but  at  first  comes  a  stormy  period 
of  defying  night,  a  passion  for  seeing  its  side  of  life  and  na- 
ture. This  perhaps  is  helpful  as  establishing  a  diathesis  of 
intense  activity  which  more  and  more  tends  to  be  psychic 
rather  than  somatic.  Culture  and  mind  drill  owe  very  much 
to  the  development  of  evening.  Many  first  learn  to  think  when 
the  distractions  of  the  day  are  gone,  and  many  can  do  this  best 
at  no  other  time. 


174  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Finally,  if  Cleanthes's  hymn  to  the  sun  as  the  source  of  all 
life  could  make  Goethe  a  sun  worshiper  for  life,  how  great 
must  have  been  its  impression  when  paganism  was  in  its  zenith ! 
To  Aristotle  the  sun  was  divine  also  because  it  had  the  power 
of  self-motion.  From  the  same  psychic  soil  and  from  the  same 
seed  of  wondrous  awe  has  since  come  the  zest  that  animates  the 
work  of  the  solar  observatories  of  Potsdam  and  Meudon,  and 
the  sun  is  no  less  supreme  to  modern  science  than  to  Plato  and 
Socrates.  The  processional  from  the  infant  concept  of  a  fire 
ball  to  that  of  solar  physics  and  chemistry  is  as  continuous  and 
natural  as  it  is  majestic.  This  measure  of  paganism  in  youth 
makes  the  better  astronomer  later.  The  younger  Herschel 
thought  the  willow-leaf  maculations  seen  through  his  telescope 
to  be  living  organisms,  hundreds  of  miles  in  length  though  they 
must  be,  and  defying  intense  heat.  Like  bold  hypotheses  for 
the  adult,  so  myth  and  poetry  for  the  young  supplement  and 
feed  the  roots  of  science  and  are  not  opposed  save  in  narrow 
souls.  Perhaps  crass  weeds  of  ignorance  must  flourish  in  their 
season  to  make  a  rich  mold  for  better  growth  later;  or,  to 
change  the  figure,  as  the  rough  glacial  age  smoothed  and  trit- 
urated the  earth's  surface  and  is  perhaps  still  doing  a  being's 
work  though  it  has  retreated  to  a  polar  ice  cap,  so  the  best 
thoughts  of  the  best  men  of  old  are  often  relegated  to  ever 
earlier  childhood. 

The  practical  and  the  scientific  outcome  here  again  is  that, 
if  it  is  well  that  the  child  should  reproduce  ancient  industries, 
by  the  same  token  he  should,  if  his  development  is  to  be  com- 
plete, here  also  revive  the  ancient  sentiments  and  view-points 
of  the  race,  more  or  less  as  the  tadpole  must  develop  a  tail 
only  to  be  absorbed  by  the  growing  legs,  the  development  of 
which  it  was  necessary  both  to  stimulate  and  to  feed.  If  youth 
ever  really  reads  at  all  the  literature  that  the  sun,  dawn,  twi- 
light, and  night  have  inspired,  he  must  find  the  object-lesson 
in  his  own  experience  by  frequent  and  perhaps  systematic  ex- 
posure to  these  influences,  or  else  he  is  learning  words  with  no 
meaning,  masterpieces  which  are  senseless  conventionalities, 
for  his  heart  rings  hollow  while  his  memory  only  is  stuffed.^ 

'See  on  all  this  section  my  study  with  Dr.  T.  L.  Smith:  Reactions  to  Light 
and  Darkness ;  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  January,  1903,  pp.  21-83.  Also  I.  Gaule, 
Einfluss  des  Nacht,  Centralbl.  f.  Psychol.,  April  28,  1900. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  175 

IV.  The  moon  is  our  nearest  celestial  neighbor,  only  some 
ten  earth's  circumferences  away,  and  here  astronomy  began. 
It  perhaps  first  and  chiefly  lifted  men's  thoughts  to  the 
sky,  releasing  them  from  mundane  affairs,  and  is  their  first 
halting-place  in  the  quest  of  the  infinite.  No  celestial  object 
excites  such  interest  in  youth  as  the  moon.  The  ideas  of 
young  children  have  been  collated  as  to  its  size,  distance,  the 
material  out  of  which  it  is  made,  how  it  got  up  into  the  sky, 
why  it  does  not  fall,  how  the  form  of  its  different  quarters  is 
explained,  where  it  stays  when  it  is  absent,  what  is  seen  or 
imagined  in  it — the  nursery  folklore  which  pervades  all  juve- 
nile ideas  and  conceptions  about  it.^ 

They  often  talk  to  the  moon,  say  "  Shine  on,  I  want  you," 
"  Blessed  moon,"  sing  to  it,  offer  it  toys.  If  they  are  bad,  they 
tell  it  to  go  away ;  ask  it  for  a  kiss,  to  be  their  playmate ;  think 
of  its  celestial  companionship  with  clouds,  stars,  sun,  who  are 
perhaps  its  relatives ;  think  it  the  face  of  Jesus  looking  out  of 
heaven;  imagine  it  to  be  Moses,  Santa  Claus;  courtesy  to  it 
for  luck ;  imagine  people  in  the  moon  and  fairies,  those  without 
head  or  all  head,  angels,  musicians,  lighthouse-keepers,  souls 
of  the  dead,  babies,  crooked  people,  penal  colonies  of  Sabbath- 
breakers.  They  often  detect  faces  of  God,  a  veiled  lady,  a  man, 
perhaps  her  husband,  perhaps  of  just  dead  parents  or  play- 
mates, and  trace  out  eyes,  beard,  etc. ;  see  fire,  smoke,  the  cow 
and  dog  of  nursery  rhyme,  and  are  often  abandoned  and  mildly 
intoxicated  in  its  light.  They  speculate  how  it  moves,  whether 
by  rolling  or  sliding  steadily  or  by  jerks;  whether  it  rises  from 
behind  the  woods,  or  the  sea,  etc.  They  often  think  it  an  ex- 
ternal conscience  which  either  smiles,  grows  bright,  or  comes 
to  them  and  increases  in  size  when  they  are  good,  and  is  dim, 
hidden,  small,  far  away,  if  they  are  bad.     It  sees  them,  and  in 


^  Five  hundred  and  fifty-five  children,  well  distributed  as  to  age,  answered  the 
question  how  the  man  got  in  the  moon  (How  the  Man  Got  in  the  Moon,  by  Miriam 
B.  Levy;  Ped.  Sem.,  October,  i8g5,  vol.  iii,  pp.  317-318),  in  nineteen  different 
ways.  From  seven  to  ten,  and  especially  from  eight  to  nine,  the  question  was  taken 
in  all  seriousness,  and  he  was  said  to  have  flown  in,  jumped  in,  gone  in  a  balloon, 
by  tower,  went  there  when  he  died,  got  there  by  electricity,  to  be  God,  angel,  etc. 
But  from  twelve  to  fourteen,  when  the  census  ends,  there  is  either  a  marked  blank- 
ness  of  mind  on  the  whole  subject  or  else  disbelief  that  there  is  a  man  there,  or,  in 
a  less  number  of  cases,  an  attempt  to  give  a  scientific  explanation. 


176  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

its  presence  they  shrink  from  naughty  acts.  It  can  see  and 
tell  us  what  our  friends  are  doing  at  a  distance.^ 

In  early  adolescence,  however,  the  moon  rises  to  great 
prominence  in  its  influence  upon  sentiment.  Infantile  con- 
ceptions fade,  and  it  becomes  an  object  of  a  new  interest  and 
comes  into  the  most  sympathetic  rapport  with  the  religious  and 
sentimental  life  of  the  soul,  where  it  has  a  role  hitherto,  as  I 
think,  entirely  unsuspected.  From  443  returns  it  is  plain  that 
it  is  now  profoundly  associated  with  the  moral,  poetic,  and  re- 
ligious life.  Even  before  this  stage  of  development  it  is  often 
pitied  when  it  is  thought  to  be  pale,  or  wearied  from  long  shin- 
ing, or  wandering,  or  sick,  because  the  sun  refuses  the  light  it 
craves.  Pubescents  gaze,  languish,  and  become  sentimental. 
Girls  in  the  teens,  whose  windows  open  to  the  sky,  often  draw 
their  blinds  that  the  moon  may  not  see  them  undress,  although 
a  few  love  exposure  to  it.  The  sight  of  it  thrills  man)  a  maiden 
W'ith  pleasure  or  occasionally  with  sadness.  Some  involunta- 
rily clench  the  hands  and  grow  tense ;  others  feel  unworthy  and 
are  humiliated.  Many  a  maiden  sits,  watches  the  moon,  and 
spins  fancies,  how  it  is  the  oldest  and  largest  star ;  that  perhaps 
her  dead  mother  is  there ;  longs  to  visit  it  till  a  lump  rises  in  the 
throat ;  it  is  so  soothing,  sympathetic,  tender ;  its  light  is  mild 
and  soft,  and  it  must  love  everybody  and  everything.  It  rests 
them,  makes  them  good,  and  perhaps  homesick  for  it.  Others 
feel  only  awe,  and  want  to  be  still  and  alone  with  every  moon, 
or  stretch  out  their  arms  to  it.  Many  a  phrase,  quotation,  and 
often  prayer  is  spontaneously  repeated. 

It  now  chiefly  suggests  love.  Some  maidens  literally  tell 
the  moon  their  troubles  and  ask  many  things,  and  often  find 
encouragement.  Many  young  women  can  never  endure  to 
look  at  or  think  of  the  moon  if  away  from  home.  They  are 
made  homesick  and  intolerably  sad  because  it  seems  cold  and 
friendless,  or  perhaps  they  wish  to  go  off  by  themselves  and 
cry.  They  sit  and  watch  it  and  think,  feel  a  strange  fascina- 
tion, and  can  not  take  their  eyes  off  from  it.  Others  are  in- 
spired to  walk,  to  ride,  see  some  one,  be  out  with  their  girl  or 


^  The  Moon  in  Childhood  and  Folklore,  by  J.  W.  Slaughter ;  Amer.  Jour,  of 
Psychology,  xiii,  pp.  294-318.  Also,  Note  on  Moon  Fancies,  by  G.  S.  H.  j  Amer. 
Jour,  of  Psychology,  January,  1903,  p.  88. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS   TOWARD  NATURE  177 

beau ;  to  go  to  bed  when  the  moon  is  at  its  best  seems  Hke  wast- 
ing opportunity  to  do  something.  Some  are  ashamed  or  afraid 
to  have  the  moon  see  them  misbehave,  or  perhaps  study  its  face 
to  see  if  they  can  detect  a  smile  or  a  frown.  Thus  in  many 
ways  the  soul  at  this  age  reverberates  with  the  echo  of  the 
many-sounding  sea  and  the  shore  where  terrestrial  life  first 
arose  from  it.  The  tides  still  rule  us  with  a  monthly  as  well  as 
a  daily  rhythm,  and  lunacy  or  moon-madness  is  both  more 
and  more  aggravated  during  its  periods,  which  affect  nutrition, 
growth,  sleep,  health,  disease,  suicide,  etc.  The  young  often 
develop  toward  it  some  of  the  same  sentiments  of  love,  de- 
pendence, and  reverence,  which  in  infancy  were  directed 
toward  the  mother's  face,  and  which  in  normal  mature  life 
may  be  all  the  more  effectively  turned  toward  God  or  less 
concrete  forms  of  goodness,  truth,  and  beauty,  because  they 
have  been  developed  by  the  moon,  which  is  one  of  the  important 
generators  of  religious  feeling,  and  which  has  been  the  object 
of  supreme  worship  to  so  many  races,  both  savage  and  civilized, 
for  even  the  Greeks  thought  the  moon  a  proper  object  of  divine 
worship.^ 

When  we  turn  from  the  moon  of  the  heart  to  the  moon 
of  science,  the  contrast  seems  at  first  painful.  We  learn  that 
it  is  a  burnt-out  cinder  with  no  water,  although  Schmidt's 
map,  seven  feet  in  diameter,  and  even  Webb's,  show  among 
the  four  hundred  named  objects  on  the  lunar  surface  many 
regions  still  called  by  the  old  names — seas,  lakes,  bays,  marshes. 


^  This  direction  of  man's  animistic  propensity  has  not  only  nourished  religion 
but  science,  and  has  been  strangely  persistent  among  wise  men.  Pythagoras 
thought  the  moon  peopled  with  larger  animals  and  trees  than  the  earth.  Many 
have  since  thought  it  a  mirror  in  which  they  could  read  what  was  taking  place  on 
earth.  Flammarion  found  over  a  hundred  imaginary  voyages  to  the  moon.  Louis 
XIV  proposed  a  10,000  foot  telescope  to  show  the  animals  in  the  moon.  Al- 
though its  air  can  not  exceed  one-one-hundred-and-fiftieth  of  ours  in  barometric 
pressure,  it  has  lately  been  seriously  urged  that  moon  men  might  be  habituated 
to  extreme  rarefaction,  that  our  air  would  drown  them,  and  to  argue  that  it  has 
no  inhabitants  would  be  the  reasoning  of  a  fish.  A  lady  who  asked  Arago  what 
was  on  the  side  of  the  moon  we  never  see,  what  about  its  inhabitants,  its  eflfects 
on  the  weather  and  on  love,  on  being  answered  that  he  did  not  know,  turned  away 
exclaiming,  "  What  then  is  the  use  of  being  so  learned?"  The  Berlin  Academy, 
knowing  that  careful  records  show  that  the  moon  had  no  effect  on  the  weather,  sup- 
pressed the  predictions  in  its  official  almanac,  but  its  sale,  on  which  so  much  of  the 
society's  income  depended,  was  so  reduced  that  they  were  restored. 
51 


178  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

etc.  There  are,  therefore,  no  clouds,  no  plant  or  animr.l  life, 
and  during  the  long  lunar  day,  equal  to  fourteen  of  ours,  its 
temperature  passes  from  at  least  200  degrees  below  zero 
up  to  that  of  boiling  water  and  even  far  above.  Although 
the  best  telescopes  bring  it  within  less  than  a  hundred  miles, 
and  few  terrestrial  countries  are  mapped  so  fully  and  truly  as 
the  surface  always  turned  toward  us,  and  on  which  the  earth- 
shine  is  from  thirteen  times  as  large  a  surface,  it  is  nothing 
after  all  but  a  traveling  corpse  of  a  world  which  no  doubt  once 
had  life  on  it  but  is  now  a  silent  prophecy  of  what  our  planet 
will  sometime  come  to.  G.  H.  Darwin  tells  us  the  earth-moon 
system  began  at  least  fifty-four  million  years  ago,  when  the 
earth  was  revolving  so  fast  that  a  day  was  from  only  two  to 
four  hours  long,  that  tidal  friction  is  still  separating  the  moon 
and  earth,  and  that  in  a  calculable  time,  some  millions  of  years 
hence,  the  rotation  of  the  latter  will  be  so  retarded  that  we 
shall  have  a  day  of  nine  hundred  and  sixty  hours.  The  great 
selenographers,  like  Beer,  Maedler,  Neison,  began  when  young 
with  profound  sentimental  interest  in  the  moon.  Has  their 
love  kept  pace  with  their  growing  knowledge  of  it,  or  is  the 
intellectual  zest  of  their  maturity  only  its  transformation  ?  Do 
we  prefer  such  modern  knowledge  as  is  above  sampled  to  the 
old  romantic  zest,  and  what  is  their  relation  to  each  other? 
If  we  wish  to  make  selenic  experts,  should  we  first  expose 
them  to  the  maximum  of  poetic  inebriation  before  extermina- 
ting it  by  knowledge?  In  these  profound  questions  we  face 
again  the  vast  problem  of  myth  and  science.  To  tell  the  moon- 
struck maiden  that  she  is  gazing  at  a  globe  of  cold  lava  is  a 
shock  akin  to  that  which  the  Greeks  felt  when  told  by  Anytus 
that  Socrates  held  the  moon  to  be  a  stone.  Although  the  great 
hebamist  denied  this  heresy  and  declared  that  all  men  knew  the 
moon  was  a  god,  this  was  no  doubt  one  motive  to  his  con- 
demnation. 

Interest  in  things  celestial  is  perhaps  as  good  a  mark  as 
any  for  distinguishing  between  the  highest  brute  and  the  lowest 
human  mind.  Our  race  became  men  when  they  looked  up,  and 
perhaps  reason  and  scientific  thought  began  in  musing  on  the 
causes  of  day,  night,  seasons,  storms,  etc.,  in  the  heavens. 
Moon-zest  seems  earliest.  Day  and  sun  were  matters  of  course, 
while  the  moon  came  and  went,  changed  form,  and  was  visi- 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  179 

ble  in  the  quiet,  reverie  part  of  the  day.  Schultze  ^  thinks 
moon,  sun,  moving  planets,  the  fixed  stars  studding  the  vault 
of  night,  and  all  rotating  on  the  pole  as  an  axis  about  our  cen- 
tral earth,  and  last  the  blue  sky  itself,  is  the  order  in  which 
these  five  passed  one  after  another  as  culture  developed 
through  the  four  stages  of  manism,  when  each  was  regarded 
as  only  the  sensuous  object  it  seemed;  animism,  when  a  soul 
was  given  it;  polytheism,  when  each  was  divine;  and  finally 
each  in  the  above  order  came  to  be  thought  only  an  instrument 
or  symbol  of  one  power  back  of  and  including  them,  and  only 
at  this  last  stage  did  monotheism  and  the  adoration  of  the 
All-Father  arise.  Each  successive  stage  emancipated  from  a 
lower  idolatry.  As  each  successively  emerged  from  the  neuter, 
thing,  or  it  stage  and  became  masculine,  the  lower  and  sup- 
planted object  lapsed,  as  primitive  languages  show,  to  the 
feminine  gender.  However  this  be,  the  spectacle  of  the 
heavens  must  have  had  much  to  do  in  evoking  mind,  wherever 
mind  exists  in  the  universe,  by  its  endless  fascinations. 

V.  It  is  hardly  too  strong  a  statement  to  say  that  there 
is  nothing  whatever  that  the  plastic,  polymorphic  fancy  of  chil- 
dren does  not  see  in  the  clouds.  Not  only  is  everything  on 
earth  mirrored  and  transfigured  there  and  everything  read,  re- 
flected and  pictured,  but  the  factual  and  literary  world  is  far 
transcended,  and  many  things  with  no  earthly  counterpart  are 
revealed  to  the  imagination  of  which  they  are  perhaps  the  chief 
school,  inspirer,  and  in  no  small  degree  the  creator.  If  instead 
of  living  at  the  bottom  of  a  deep  sea  of  air  with  such  changing 
phenomena  taking  place  above  us,  so  in  contrast  with  the  fixity 
of  earth,  we  can  conceive  human  life  possible  on,  e.  g.,  the 
cloudless  moon,  the  soul  would  have  been  a  very  different  and 
far  more  prosaic  thing.  Not  only  is  everything  seen  in  cloud- 
land,  but  every  known  emotion  and  every  sentiment  is  strongly 
played  on  by  its  scenery.  Its  vast  repertory  of  effects  has  done 
much  to  make  the  life  of  feeling  deep,  rich,  and  variegated. 
The  "  moods  of  heaven's  deep  heart  "  are  reflected  in  our  own. 
They  have  inspired  so  much  in  myth  and  poetry  that  without 
cloud-psychoses  both  would  suffer  great  loss.  We  should  have 
had  no  vision  of  Ezekiel  or  John,  should  have  lost  most  of  the 

^  Psychologic  der  Xaturvolker,  Leipzig,  1900,  p.  318  et  seq. 


l8o  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

best  of  the  old  Aryan  myths,  and  the  Vedas  and  Bible  prophe- 
cies would  be  impoverished ;  we  would  have  had  no  Niobe, 
Nephele,  swan  maidens,  golden  fleece,  Valkyries,  harpies,  no, 
or  a  very  different  Odin,  Walhalla,  Jove,  Hermes,  Polyphe- 
mus, Phryxos,  Helle,  Phaiakian  ships,  great  roc,  houris,  no 
Greek  or  old  Hindu  heaven,  no  sphinx,  Apollo,  etc.  The  child's 
imagery  about  clouds  is  not  only  rankly  profuse,  but  sometimes 
of  uncontrolled  or  almost  delusional  intensity.  Many  think 
they  see  real  angels,  saints,  faces  of  God,  friends,  landscapes, 
seascapes,  shipwrecks,  fairy  islands,  castles.  Queen  Mab's  shin- 
ing tent,  volcanoes,  chariots  and  horses,  monsters,  battles,  car- 
avans, swords,  banners,  patterns  and  tapestry  of  supreme  tint 
and  texture,  hands,  fish,  Santa  Glaus,  Indians,  dead  people 
lying  in  state.  Dido,  Judgment-day  scenes,  cities,  Christ  on  his 
sparkling  throne,  geographical  scenes,  conflagrations,  views  in 
heaven,  animals,  which  are  often  as  numerous  as  Bible  scenes, 
flowers  and  trees,  and  things  too  grand,  beautiful,  and  fearful 
for  earth.  Distances  are  greatly  underestimated,  so  that  every- 
thing is  near  and  the  effects  are  immediate  and  almost  reflex. 
They  often  want  to  go  to,  touch,  roll,  plunge  into  their  downy 
substance,  lie  in,  sail  off  with  them,  follow  the  persons,  or  take 
part  in  the  scenes  they  see  in  them.^  Some  find  themselves  un- 
consciously so  absorbed  in  watching  the  transformations  that 
they  involuntarily  sigh  or  cry  out  with  pain  when  the  pictures 
change  or  fade.  Some  form  settled  habits  of  watching  them, 
not  for  fancy,  but  merely  for  the  joy  of  color  and  form. 

With  adolescence  all  this  undergoes  a  characteristic  change 
for  those  sensitized  to  clouds.  Instead  of  wanting  to  soar  away 
to,  float  with,  embrace  or  be  embraced  by  them,  their  lovely 
shapes  inspire  youth  with  a  vague  longing  for  greater  beauty 
than  earth  affords.  Transient  as  they  are,  they  stir  suggestion 
in  his  soul  of  something  nobler  and  purer  than  has  been,  and 
arouse  moral  and  esthetic  aspiration.  Not  physical  contact  or 
levitation,  but  inner  exaltation,  a  hunger  of  soul  for  a  larger 
and  more  glorious  life,  is  now  the  normal  reaction.  Ideal  con- 
structions are  suggested  beyond  the  immediate  presentation  of 
sense.     The  thrills  are  of  ethical  expansion.     The  mind  is  led 

'  See  my  paper  with  J.  E.  W.  Wallin  :    How  Children  and  Youth  Think  and 
Feel  about  Clouds;   Ped.  Sem.,  vol.  ix,  pp.  450-506. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS   TOWARD  NATURE  loi 

to  regions  of  ineffable  tranquillity  and  of  light  unsullied  till 
earth  seems  dull,  gloomy,  solitary.  There  is  no  real  illusion, 
less  fear,  but  far  more  often  lingering,  but  perhaps  sweet,  de- 
pression. Youth  does  not  picture  weather  people  or  perhaps 
not  even  angels  or  God  just  behind  the  clouds,  veiled  by  them 
from  the  sight  of  men  as  they  do  their  work,  and  the  heaven 
they  suggest  is  no  longer  literal  or  just  beyond  or  in  the  clouds, 
for  all  the  space  ideas  are  vastated.  Behindness  is  metamor- 
phosed into  symbolism.  Even  the  colors  that  inundate  and 
intoxicate  the  brain  in  such  vast  variety  typify  life.  The  color 
sense,  nowhere  so  satisfied  as  in  some  cloudscapes,  besides  its 
sensuous  beauty,  has  some  mystic  meaning,  or  at  least  suggests 
some  problem  though  it  can  not  be  solved  or  even  formulated. 
The  illusion  is  gone,  but  the  fancy  persists,  and  the  feeling 
far  more.  The  celestial  picture  gallery  speaks  to  the  heart 
more  than  to  sense.  Through  the  teens  and  early  twenties  the 
fantasies  will  fade  and  perhaps  almost  vanish,  so  that  the  effect 
is  immediately  upon  the  mood  with  diminishing  constructive 
imagery.  The  transiency  of  these  ghostly  silhouettes  suggests 
that  man  and  all  things,  even  the  earth  itself,  will  melt  away 
and  vanish.  Words  themselves  can  not  so  mirror  every  emo- 
tion or  mood  from  joy  or  brightness  to  depression  and  melan- 
choly. They  symbolize  everything  in  life,  and  perhaps  nothing 
can  so  elevate  and  expand  the  feelings.  If  the  natural  cloud 
tropism  of  this  age  is  indulged,  Ruskin,  who  more  forcibly  than 
any  one  else  has  insisted  that  otherwise  the  imagination  is 
dwarfed  and  sentiments  crippled  by  disuse,  thinks  that  genius 
often  finds  here  the  inspiration  for  its  masterpieces.  Thus  in 
an  added  sense,  "  to  the  solid  ground  of  Nature  trusts  the 
mind  that  builds  for  aye." 

Nephelopsychoses,  if  such  a  word  may  be  coined,  are  dis- 
tinctly more  prominent  and  numerous  among  girls  than  boys, 
and  as  the  female  organism  is  more  conservative  this  of  itself 
suggests  rapport  with  phylogeny.  They  take  a  deeper  hold  on 
the  soul  at  adolescence,  and  the  feelings,  which  are  so  pro- 
foundly stirred  by  them,  are  older  than  the  intellect  and  are  the 
form  in  which  new  momenta  of  heredity  are  expressed,  and  this 
again  suggests  race  experience.  Perhaps  we  can  now,  in  view 
of  new  data  from  child  study,  compare,  although  with  much 
vagueness  and  uncertainty,  the  two.    In  the  early  history  of  the 


i82  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

race  clouds  were  observed  more  intensively  and  protensively 
because  they  were  thought  to  reveal  the  feelings  of  the  divine 
powers  toward  men  and  to  forecast  future  events.  Cloud-gaz- 
ing was  very  likely  a  very  serious  and  anxious  business.  Abo- 
riginal people  lived  in  the  country,  and  its  monotony  and  the 
absence  of  social  excitement  inclined  to  attentive  scrutiny  of 
the  ever  metamorphosing  landscape  above,  while  pastoral  and 
agricultural  life,  because  more  dependent  on  the  weather,  in- 
creased interest  in  them  as  weather-bearers.  With  the  modern 
child  they  form  a  far  smaller  part  of  the  environment ;  he  is  so 
well  sheltered  that  weather  is  less  important ;  because  younger 
at  the  same  stage  his  constructive  faculties  are  less  developed, 
and  so  his  concepts  are  less  elaborated  and  the  faculties  in- 
volved are  slowly  lapsing  to  vestigial  rudiments.  Because  liv- 
ing in  an  age  when  traditions  on  the  subject  are  less  evolved 
and  dominant,  his  mind  is  freer,  its  creations  more  varied  and 
fleeting,  life  about  him  is  more  interesting  and  distracting  from 
the  heavens,  and  he  sometimes  actually  grows  myopic  in  mind 
because  he  renounces  looking  upward,  which  is  etymologically 
the  most  characteristic  act  of  man,  anthropos.  Powers  that 
once  entified  and  personated  objects  are  atrophied,  or  if  youth 
becomes  a  cloud-gazer  it  is  for  pastime  and  not  seriously  or  for 
business.  Youth  now  knows  and  feels  that  clouds  are  always 
mere  phenomena  and  appearance  with  nothing  noumenal,  and 
however  ignorant  he  may  be,  all  his  nephelopsychoses  are  under 
the  dominance  of  knowledge  enough  of  condensation  and 
vaporization  to  kill  this  factor  of  mystery  forever  and  his 
reaction  is  purely  emotional. 

Children  wonder,  fear,  and  admire  impressive  cloud-scenes. 
But  youth  feels  nameless  longings,  awe,  reverence,  or  is  home- 
sick for  a  great  love  and  melted  to  tenderness,  and  rises  from 
the  thought  of  something  behind  the  clouds  to  that  of  a  power 
behind  nature.  The  pleasure  and  pain  and  all  the  other  senti- 
ments suggested  are  often  disproportionately  great  compared 
with  the  strength  of  the  stimulus,  and  that  suggests  inherited 
psychic  vestiges  from  a  far  past.  The  child's  images  are  the 
foreground  of  the  soul  and  are  of  some  hundred  different  spe- 
cies and  varities  in  our  less  than  four  hundred  persons,  with 
but  few  stable  and  uniform  reactions.  With  youth  the  cloud 
language  is  addressed  to  the  heart  and  its  responses  are  no  less 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  183 

varied  and  voluminous.  The  child  observes  in  its  hasty  and 
cursory  way  and  reacts  by  pictures  that  a  painter  might  attempt 
to  portray.  Youth,  too,  observes  but  more  absent-mindedly  and 
in  reverie,  and  its  reactions  only  the  poet's  pen,  not  the  painter's 
brush,  could  seek  to  represent.  One  would  conserve  the  visual 
glory  by  depicting  it ;  the  other  would  perpetuate  the  sentiment 
inspired  by  inditing.  In  the  child  the  intensity  of  the  emo- 
tions of  fear  and  painful  reaction  are  most  disproportionate  to 
the  cause,  and  in  youth  suggest  inherited  vestiges  from  an  age 
when  man  was  at  the  mercy  of  uncontrolled  forces  in  nature. 
In  the  youth,  joy,  with  perhaps  often  the  rapture  of  woe,  is 
incited  by  effects  more  felt  than  seen,  suggesting  a  pre- 
potency of  the  subjective  over  the  objective  that  dates  to  a  later 
age  when  love  was  well  on  with  its  great  work  of  casting  out 
fear  and  was  beginning  to  give  nature  a  new  language  but 
had  not  yet  found  its  own  by  focusing  its  wide-ranging  sec- 
ondary psychic  qualities  on  a  chosen  mate.  The  religious 
reactions  are  so  prominent  that  religion  itself  and  the  senti- 
ments on  which  it  rests  would  be  very  different  without  them. 
They  lift  thoughts  and  perhaps  prayers  upward,  and  give  a 
sense  of  reality  to  tenuous  and  heavenly  things.  At  no  moment 
does  the  world  above  seem  so  overwhelmingly  and  intensely 
real  as  when  thunder  rolls  overhead.  Very  often  special  cloud 
experiences  are  indelible,  and  religious  imagery  and  faith  are 
sometimes  given  a  great  reality  and  material  support.^ 

We  also  here  find  the  old  contrast  between  sentiment  and 
science.  The  feelings  are  not  edified  by  learning  that  clouds  are 

^  A  girl  of  seventeen  one  evening  at  the  seashore  saw  a  cloud  as  if  all  the  rivers 
in  the  world  were  hung  up  to  dry  like  ribbons  ;  could  not  bear  to  have  it  fade, 
and  wanted  to  paint  it.  Another,  when  thirteen,  saw  a  cloud  at  sunset  beautifully 
tinted  and  the  shape  of  an  angel's  wing,  which  brought  to  mind  a  young  friend 
who  had  just  died,  and  she  had  to  weep.  A  girl  of  nineteen,  waiting  for  a  train, 
saw  a  cloud  like  a  lava  river  with  a  distant  volcano,  which  changed  to  a  sea  of  ice 
and  then  became  a  silver  path  leading  from  earth  to  heaven,  which  seemed  like  the 
strait  and  narrow  way  which  led  to  life  eternal,  and  it  was  felt  might  be  a  special 
warning  to  her.  A  girl  of  nineteen  saw  Jesus  slowly  ascending,  glad  but  glorious, 
and  wished  to  rise  with  him.  One  saw  the  resurrection  enacted  and  watched  with 
awe  to  see  it  again.  Another  came  to  believe  in  heaven  from  seeing  Christ  with 
saints  in  white.  Communion  with  clouds  sometimes  consoles  in  affliction  ;  encour- 
ages high  purpose  and  resolve  ;  threatens  or  intimidates  wrong;  answers  questions  ; 
reveals  secrets ;  tells  fortunes ;  teaches  aspiration  and  idealism,  and  even  belief  in 
the  reality  of  souls  and  immortality. 


1 84  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

aqueous  vapor  or  by  memorizing  their  names  or  studying  their 
laws  in  meteorology.  Here,  too,  there  is  a  light  that  goes  out 
in  the  heart  when  the  light  of  science  is  kindled  in  the  mind, 
and  we  have  many  records  of  children  who  resist  the  first  new 
adult  knowledge  with  a  vehemence  that  suggests  the  long  war- 
fare between  science  and  religion,  as  rain  comes  to  be  under- 
stood as  precipitation  and  not  leakage  from  a  sea  above  the 
firmament,  or  the  opening  of  heavenly  windows.  But  here, 
too,  imagination  is  the  propaideutic,  and  myth  and  poetry 
the  Vorfnicht  of  science,  making  the  mental  soil  friable  and 
fertile. 

VI.  Young  children  invent  many  mental  images  concern- 
ing the  wind.  It  sleeps  and  wakes,  whistles,  whispers,  pipes, 
roars,  frets,  sings,  howls,  sobs,  gasps,  sighs,  screams.  It  is 
very  often  personified  and  talked  to.  It  sometimes  seems  to 
make  exclamations  like  ah !  whew !  so !  look  out !  hark !  go 
away!  and  is  often  talked  back  to,  etc.;  is  a  giant;  lives  in 
the  mountains  of  clouds;  frolics,  scolds,  caresses,  strews 
light  about,  etc.  In  its  roar  they  hear  music,  battles,  laugh- 
ter, anguish,  as  did  primitive  man,  and  as  metaphor  and 
poetry  still  describe.  It  is  a  friend  of  trees,  which  perhaps 
start  it,  or  quarrels  with  clouds,  or  it  may  be  a  waving 
figure.  In  the  teens  most  of  these  images  fall  off,  but  the 
wind  often  has  the  most  intimate  rapport  with  moods.  Its 
whistling  and  piping  may  bring  intolerable  ennui  and  unrest, 
or,  again,  it  lulls  to  sleep,  and  murmurs  interjections  if  not 
even  words.  Strong  wind  suggests  what  God  can  do  and  often 
seems  to  indicate  and  measure  the  degree  of  his  anger.  The 
powers  of  the  air,  which  the  ancient  Hebrews  and  so  many 
other  races  have  invested  with  mystery  and  awe,  suggest 
gentle  spiritual  presences.  Zephyr  and  Boreas  are  perhaps 
faintly  personified;  they  bring  and  take  messages  of  love, 
come  from  heaven  or  are  God's  breath.  It  perhaps  first  of  all 
taught  men  the  tremendous  lesson  of  the  reality  and  causal 
efficiency  of  something  unseen,  so  that  not  only  in  our  own  but 
in  many  languages,  etymologies  of  words  suggesting  soul  and 
spirit  mean  simply  wind.  Psycho-physical  researches  have 
shown  the  strong  effect  of  humidity,  altitude,  and  barometric 
pressure  unaided  by  noise,  and  sudden  change  in  affecting 
moods,  and  our  returns  give  abundant  evidence  that  there  are 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD  NATURE  185 

at  least  many  anemic  souls  over  which  most  of  all  in  adolescent 
years  ^olus  makes  his  dominion  felt. 

The  wind  now  often  seems  to  express  sentiments  about  our 
acts  and  thoughts.  It  is  friendly  or  at  enmity,  perhaps  there 
are  ghosts  or  witches  in  it.  Instead  of  cuddling  away  or  fidget- 
ing like  the  child,  many  youths  are  made  mentally  restless,  and 
the  suggestive  power  of  a  high  wind  seems  vastly  increased. 
Some  fancy  themselves  at  sea  with  all  the  symptoms  of  sea- 
sickness; others  imagine  possible  and  impossible  disasters, 
many  kinds  of  animals,  battles,  machinery,  cars,  thunder,  every 
mood  of  the  ocean,  pathetic  scenes.  Sometimes  these  are  in 
vivid  imagery.  The  ^olian  Pan  pipe  has  wondrous  power 
over  the  soul  and  comes  so  close  that  its  every  change  of  pitch 
or  loudness  is  followed  by  psychic  changes  of  stress  or  tension. 
This  wind-song  needed  only  to  be  fretted  with  tonality  and  har- 
nessed with  scales  to  create  music,  the  power  both  to  compose 
and  feel  which  it  has  helped  so  much.  Interesting,  too,  is  the 
fact  of  anemophobia.  From  feeling  the  incessant  changes  in 
intensity  and  direction  which  are  as  close  as  our  pulses,  but 
which  follow  no  known  law  and  awaiting  with  nervous  or 
bated  breath  its  "  what-next,"  this  bandmaster  of  the  many- 
membered  orchestra  of  nature-music  plays  on  the  whole  gamut 
of  our  emotional  life,  and  overwrought  souls  are  still  ^olus 
caves  from  which  may  yet  be  loosed  imaginary  winds  that 
threaten  to  sweep  away  earth,  sea,  and  heavens.^  Thus,  what 
in  children  is  nerve-stress  from  high  barometric  pressure,  tends 
in  youth  to  anxieties. 

Like  the  race,  the  child  knows  wind  long  before  it  sus- 
pects the  existence  of  the  atmosphere  as  an  all-encompassing, 
shoreless,  island-less  sea  on  the  very  bottom  of  which  we  have 
to  crawl  out  our  lives.  In  regard  to  this  mechanical  mixture  of 
gases,  full  of  odors,  motes,  smokes,  a  heat-trap  for  the  solar 
rays,  and  so  a  blanket  to  give  the  earth  a  warm  and  more 
equable  temperature,  abounding  in  germs  even  almost  to  the 
pole,  so  that  it  has  its  own  biology,  exerting  vast  pressure  with- 
out and  within  the  body,  so  that  we  live  by  and  on  it,  creating 
in  neurotic  temperaments  claustrophobic  and  globus  symptoms - 

1  My  "Fears";  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  vol.  viii,  p.  171. 
*  Fears,  p.  162. 


l86  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

the  element  by  which  all  life  is  sustained,  the  form  in  which  all 
things  have  existed,  to  which  they  are  re-resolvable,  its  skyey 
color  being  cosmic  dust,  the  rich  body  of  facts  and  of  still  richer 
symbols  is  now  in  order.  The  simple  laws  of  dew  point,  pre- 
cipitation, boiling  points,  other  nodes  in  the  thermic  scale, 
and  other  rudiments  of  meteorology  should  be  taught  by  those 
broad  enough,  while  drilling  in  isotherms  and  isobars,  currents, 
apparatus,  weather  forecasts,  etc.,  not  to  ignore  the  state  of 
mind  that  needs  also  to  muse  on  the  ether  of  the  empyrean  of 
Hippocrates  or  Dante  to  be  breathed  only  in  mountain  life, 
where  it  gave  inspiration  because  it  was  the  medium  in  which 
the  gods  lived.  Teachers  who  can  draw  at  need  upon  the  his- 
toric stages  of  development  here,  not  omitting  poetry  or  the 
modern  theories  of  ether  while  the  mind  of  the  boy  in  his  teens 
can  be  so  easily  taught  the  stimulating  and  expanding  little 
which  only  the  wisest  know,  and  perhaps  get  his  first  ravishing 
glimpse  of  the  frontier  of  human  knowledge,  lead  his  mind 
captive  at  will. 

VII.  The  thermal  scale  as  now  explored  by  science  ranges 
from  near  the  absolute  zero  of  460  below,  where  energy  seems 
to  die  and  chemical  action  ceases,  up  to  circa  15,000  above, 
where  most  solid  substances  volatilize.  In  his  own  body,  man 
can  vary  but  some  ten  degrees  and  live  and  his  environment 
and  that  of  all  animal  existence  has  for  the  most  part  a  range 
of  hardly  more  than  100°  F.  Although  placed  far  nearer  the 
lower  than  the  upper  limit  of  controllable  heat,  he  is  nearly 
four  times  nearer  the  pain  limit  of  heat  than  of  cold.  These 
sensations  early  orient  the  child,  which  like  all  beings,  whether 
by  tropism  or  sense  tends  to  the  thermal  optimum  most  favor- 
able for  the  most  intense  vitality.  One  of  the  most  fascinating 
activities  of  the  child's  mind  is  found  in  the  instructive  curios- 
ity and  the  creative  reactions  up  and  down  the  thermometric 
scale.^ 

Jack  Frost  seems  to  be  the  child's  thermal  correlate  of 
Loki,  the  heat  sprite  of  Teutonic  mythology.  He  appears  to 
fill  a  real  need  of  the  childish  soul  and  is  vastly  more  plastic 
and  less  conventionalized  than  Santa  Claus.    He  lives  in  snow- 


*  See  my  study  with  C.  E.  Browne:  Children's  Ideas  of  Fire,  Heat,  Frost  and 
Cold;  Ped.  Sem.,  March,  1903,  vol.  x,  pp.  27-85. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  187 

banks,  icebergs,  caves,  with  God,  in  the  earth,  sky,  air,  in  the 
sun ;  is  an  icicle,  a  snow-man,  a  snowflake ;  is  invisible  because 
he  is  so  small,  of  mountainous  bulk,  six  inches  high,  like  an  elf, 
Puck,  a  fairy,  a  brownie,  a  dwarf,  an  owl,  a  bug,  a  pigeon, 
a  painter  of  the  windows  with  pictures  of  trees,  fields,  animals, 
flowers,  ferns  and  leaves,  woods,  caves,  seas,  and  many  of  the 
forms  such  as  fancy  sees  in  the  fire,  clouds,  or  moon ;  makes 
them  bad  or  good  according  to  the  children's  conduct;  etches 
them  in  or  '*  breathes  on  things  to  make  them  white  and  stiff ;" 
nips  grass  and  flowers;  pinches  noses,  fingers,  toes,  cheeks; 
carries  a  bag  of  complexion  powder;  howls  in  the  wind,  on 
which  he  rides  drawn  by  rabbits,  or  flies  on  the  backs  of  birds ; 
can  go  through  closed  doors  and  windows ;  is  a  "  cold  devil ;" 
is  old,  young ;  icicles  are  his  whiskers ;  his  hair  and  beard  are 
white  or  powdered  with  snow ;  he  opens  nuts  with  an  ice 
sword;  wanders  by  night  like  a  lost  soul;  sleeps  by  day;  all 
he  touches  cracks;  he  controls  the  weather;  is  spiteful  or 
roguish,  wicked  or  kind ;  and  is  far  more  prominent  in  the  life 
of  girls  than  in  that  of  boys. 

Much  of  this  is,  of  course,  due  to  suggestion,  but  it  is  al- 
most impossible  not  to  believe  that  much  is  spontaneous  and 
original  in  the  fecund  fancy  of  children.  Why  he  is  more  com- 
monly conceived  than  a  heat  sprite  is  probably  not  because 
there  is  no  "  cold  sun  "  or  central  source  of  cold  and  the  soul 
needs  something  concrete  and  so  makes  it,  for  the  child  mind 
does  not  conceive  the  sun  as  the  one  source  and  center  of  heat. 
Is  it  because  there  is  no  "  cold  fire  "  or  chemical  phenomena 
from  which  cold  radiates  like  heat  from  the  hearth,  and  that 
the  mind  therefore  tends  to  create  a  nidus  for  the  polar  opposite 
of  heat  by  some  kind  of  unconscious  process  like  that  invoked 
by  philologists  to  explain  so  much,  e.  g.,  their  principle  of  anal- 
ogy? Perhaps  the  view  most  immediately  suggested  by  our 
returns  is  that  Jack  Frost  comes  as  near  or  nearer  than  any- 
thing else  to  be  an  independent  modern  creation  of  the  child 
mind.  Like  every  mythological  personation,  it  was  helped  on 
by  many  facts  and  suggestions  from  many  sources  and  is  not 
a  creation  ex  nihilo  any  more  than  were  those  of  antiquity  or 
savagery.  Yet  here  perhaps  we  have  the  best  key  within  our 
very  doors  for  unlocking  the  mysteries  of  racial  myth-making. 
•True,  its  products  here  are  very  crude,  rank,  extremely  diverse, 


l88  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

and  undomesticatecl  by  literature  or  art.  Here,  for  once,  chil- 
dren in  our  over-illuminated  age  and  land  escaped  the  peda- 
gogic grafters  and  put  forth  a  fresh,  vigorous,  wild  shoot  that 
is  indigenous  and  expresses  their  own  soul  and  does  not 
merely  reflect  what  adults  have  put  into  it.  Better  yet,  each 
makes  his  own  Jack  Frost,  and  he  is  still  plastic,  unconvention- 
alized,  ununiformitized,  and  unstandardized. 

The  charm  of  fire-gazing  is  a  great  school  of  the  plastic 
imagination.  The  excitant  is  far  more  mobile  than  clouds,  and 
still  more  so  than  frost  forms  on  the  window  pane.  If  the  very 
Eigenlicht  of  the  retina  starts  the  photistic  forms  that  Galton 
and  many  others  have  described,  how  much  more  than  anything 
else  in  the  physical  world  the  incessant  changes  of  fire  are  cal- 
culated to  arouse  suggestion,  and  the  series  of  vivid  pictures  it 
presents  to  set  up  manifold  trains  of  spontaneous  reverie  that 
hold  the  soul  under  a  spell  that  is  rudely  broken,  like  sudden 
awakening,  if  the  embers  fall  or  some  outer  interruption  brings 
us  back  to  ourselves  and  to  the  present.  Here  children  see 
animals'  faces,  sky  and  sea  scenes,  clouds  and  ships,  flowers, 
pixies,  brownies,  fairies,  dwarfs,  monsters,  soldiers  and  battles, 
demons  and  angels,  eyes,  blood,  landscapes,  illustrations  of 
stories,  gods  and  devils,  hell  and  heaven,  dances,  church 
service,  chimeras,  a  hut  becomes  a  palace,  air  castles,  caves  and 
mines  of  precious  metals  and  diamonds,  volcanoes,  everything 
in  action  and  rapidly  changing  and  flitting  fears  that  crea- 
tures may  break  out  or  beauties  vanish.  The  child  hears  the 
noises  of  every  animal  and  insect ;  the  fire  creatures  laugh,  cry, 
sing,  roar,  moan,  are  angry,  unhappy ;  leaves  rustle  and  waves 
beat  audibly ;  they  or  the  very  wood  or  coal  scream  in  agony 
till  we  pity  them,  or  are  talkative  to  each  other;  the  whips 
crack ;  the  guns  go  off  in  volleys ;  the  hyenas  and  wolves  growl ; 
and  children  are  rapt  and  absorbed  almost  to  the  point  of  hyp- 
nosis, while  many  of  these  experiences  are  so  vivid  that  they 
are  recalled  long  after.  Smoke,  too,  is  dirty  steam,  baby  clouds, 
fairy  robes,  soap-suds,  the  breath  of  the  fire  or  of  the  animals 
in  it,  scorched  or  roasted  air,  live  ghosts  or  birds.  Ashes  are 
death,  cold  and  corpse-like,  no  longer  light  and  alive,  but  dead 
and  dark,  wood  or  coal  with  the  light  and  heat  taken  out  of 
them ;  the  clothes  the  baby  brands  are  put  to  bed  in  when  the 
fire  is  raked,  cold  fire,  softened  wood,  the  stuff  we  are  all  made 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  189 

of  and  what  we  shall  all  return  to  at  last,  and  hence  shivery 
and  dreary.  So  with  flushed  face  and  spellbound  mind,  the 
world  and  life  are  all  reflected  in  the  soul,  its  moral  lessons 
taught  in  this  primal  philosophy  of  the  chimney  corner,  and  the 
soul  oriented  to  the  beginning  and  end  of  all  things.  Happy 
the  family  and  even  the  schoolroom  that  can  still  thus  expose 
the  youthful  soul  to  these  lessons,  and  without  the  open,  blaz- 
ing fireplace,  which  needs  the  story  hour,  no  story  can  be 
quite  complete. 

Disequilibrated  children  go  further  and  develop  phobias  in 
both  and  a  mania  in  one  direction.  Among  the  fears  often 
flitting,  and  sometimes  morbid,  are  that  it  will  get  hotter  or 
colder  till  everything  will  burn  or  freeze,  while  the  passion  for 
burning  things,  universal  in  infants,  if  not  repressed  by  reason 
may  later  issue  in  pyromania  with  its  complicated  motivations. 

In  the  souls  of  early  races,  which  are  only  those  of  children 
magnified,  the  culture  period  begins  with  the  domestication  of 
fire,  or  subjecting  Agni,  or  the  yet  wilder  Loki,  to  the  rule 
of  Hestia.  It  made  the  hearth  the  center  of  domestic  life,  and 
in  temples  was  kept  by  perpetual  ministrations  as  a  sign  of 
immortality.  The  Parsees  punished  its  defilement  by  death. 
When  rekindled  every  fifty-two  years  in  the  Aztec  mountains, 
it  meant  a  renewed  covenant  with  the  gods  that  their  devas- 
tating anger  should  not  flame  forth  to  man's  destruction,  shear- 
ing the  forest  hair  of  the  earth  and  making  havoc.  Many  a 
myth  of  its  origin,  many  a  form  of  fire  burial,  and  many  a 
type  of  baptism  by  fire  show  that  this  brother  of  the  wind  and 
sea  has  been  both  more  friendly  and  more  cruel  to  man  than 
any  of  the  elements.  It  is  no  wonder  he  is  more  profoundly 
pyrotactic  than  he  knows,  dominated  unconsciously  even  in  his 
migrations  by  it.  Through  it  man  communicates  with  the 
gods  in  sacrifice.  It  is  a  symbol  of  purification  and  even  spirit- 
ualization  and  etherization.  The  smoke  of  altars  is  incense 
inhaled  by  divine  nostrils.  Its  tongue  of  flame  lapped  the  burnt- 
offering  and  was  the  emblem  of  the  gift  of  the  Holy  Spirit. 
Without  thermal  experience  life  would  be  robbed  of  much 
thought,  and  metaphor,  and  science,  and  morals  would  lack 
many  reenforcements ;  there  would  be  no  hells  of  heat  or  cold, 
and  life  would  be  monotonous,  if  not  indeed  as  impossible  as 
are  two  dimensional   beings.      Even   sympathy,    from   which 


190  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

morals  arose,  almost  began  with  warm-blooded  animals  which 
brooded  eggs  and  incubated  their  young,  which  thus  passed 
more  rapidly  through  the  dangerous  period  of  immaturity,  and 
which,  because  they  were  warm-blooded,  needed  to  cluster  to- 
gether and  thus  developed  racial  instincts  and  the  need  of 
mutual  help  and  companionship.^ 

If  one  were  to  attempt  a  bold,  comprehensive,  systematic 
construction  of  a  theory  of  the  world  based  on  what  Bastian 
calls  natural  thinking,  made  up  of  thoughts  nearest  to  sense, 
conforming  to  Avanarius's  law  of  easiest  and  most  economical 
mentation  and  including  a  pedagogy,  a  cult,  and  a  most  natu- 
ral because  most  naive  religion,  perhaps  he  might  well  attempt 
to  do  so  by  developing  and  coordinating  the  suggestions,  now 
scattered  and  ineffective,  of  this  theme.  Heraclitus,  the  obscure 
thinker  of  Ephesus,  whose  fragments  since  Lasalle  have  been 
composed  and  rearranged  like  sibylline  leaves  in  many  ways 
and  made  to  teach  many  things,  represents,  some  think,  the 
highest  product  of  indigenous  Greek  thought  before  the  So- 
cratic  period  started  on  the  alien,  politically  motivated,  quest 
of  ineluctable  foundation  on  which  to  rebase  the  crumbling 
state.  Beywater,  Schuster,  Bernays,  Patrick,  and,  above  all, 
Teichmiiller,  have  re-revealed  some  of  the  grand  features  of 
his  system,  as  geologists  suggest  the  vague  outlines  of  vast 
mountains  now  worn  away,  from  the  hints  of  many  clinal  and 
anticlinal  strata.  Both  modern  science  and  genetic  psychology 
supply  new  hints  as  to  what  is  partly  lost  and  partly  might 
have  been,  or  indeed  may  yet  be  when  the  scientific  imagination 
supplements  facts  by  heroic  hypotheses,  as  Plato  supplemented 
his  positive  teachings  by  the  great  myths  which  still  so  appeal 
to  the  heart  and  in  later  theological  ages  had  more  influence 
than  even  his  doctrines. 

As  the  sun  was  daily  secreted  out  of  the  earth,  leaving  it 
a  little  colder  and  darker,  but  reabsorbed  at  night,  so  the  soul 
is  a  fiery  particle  secreted  out  of  nature  and  returning  to  it 
at  death ;  its  activity  a  "  degree  of  burning,"  glowing,  kin- 
dling, its  culture  a  second  sun  arising  from  unconsciousness  as 

'  A.  Sutherland:  Origin  and  Growth  of  the  Moral  Instinct;  London,  1898; 
chaps,  iii  to  v,  and  also  x.  See  also  the  sugjgestion  that  if  man  were  to  become 
extinct,  birds  have  most  potentiality  of  taking  their  place  at  the  head  of  the 
animal  kingdom. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  19  * 

the  physical  sun  from  the  earth.  All  things  may  follow  the 
"  way  down  "  ("  the  death  of  fire  is  to  become  air,  that  of  air 
to  become  water,  that  of  water  to  become  earth,"  or  that  of 
steam  to  become  water,  and  of  water  to  become  ice),  or  the 
way  up  in  successive  eons  with  reversion  at  some  epochal  era ; 
so  the  light  of  reason  may  "  burn  high  or  burn  low,"  as  sense 
and  matter  prevail  and  we  become  sarcous,  or  as  spirit  and 
wisdom  predominate  we  may  be  slowly  transmuted,  first  into 
great  men,  then  into  deity,  "  or  die  the  fiery  death,"  for  there  is 
no  rupture  of  continuity  and  we  are  homoousia  with  both  ex- 
tremes. Then  perhaps  we  may  again  one  day  say  with  Herac- 
litus,  "  If  one  wander  through  all  ways  he  will  not  reach  the 
limits  of  the  soul,  in  so  great  depths  does  it  hide,"  which  Tren- 
delenburg interprets  to  mean  that  the  soul  has  unlimited  power 
to  know  all  because  it  is  of  the  same  nature  as  all  things. 

This  philosopheme  took  the  next  step  beyond  the  myths, 
and  its  pedagogic  relations  to  our  thermodynamic  world  are 
strikingly  suggestive  of  those  of  youth  to  maturity.  To  eval- 
uate each  of  these  stages  as  prelusion  and  preparation  is  a 
great  and  real  task  that  genetic  psychology  has  yet  before  it. 
Till  it  is  solved  there  will  be  waste  and  loss  in  teaching,  and 
what  is  worse,  waste  and  loss  in  the  pupil's  life, 

VIII.  Man's  body  affords  abundant  proof  of  his  pelagic 
origin.  After  the  vertebrae  appear  in  the  human  embryo,  it 
can  not  be  determined  for  some  time  whether  it  is  to  be  a 
fish,  reptile,  or  quadruped.  At  one  stage  the  human  brain,  as 
De  Varigny  first  pointed  out,  is  like  that  of  a  fish,  but  if  it  is 
to  be  that  of  a  man,  the  development  goes  on.  His  heart  is  first 
two-chambered,  like  a  fish's.  Man  has  gills,  which  are  later 
slowly  metamorphosed  into  lungs  and  a  double  circulation  es- 
tablished. In  human  monsters  the  gill-clefts  are  sometimes 
not  closed  in  the  neck,  and  in  many  children  their  traces  can  be 
seen  as  lighter  spots.  As  the  embryo  grows,  one  of  these  slits 
is  transformed  into  the  thymus  and  probably  into  the  thyroid 
gland.  Dohrn  thinks  man's  mouth  was  developed  by  the 
fusion  of  a  pair  of  them  and  the  olfactory  organs  from  another 
pair ;  that  the  eye  muscles  are  remnants  of  gill  muscles ;  and 
most  agree  that  the  middle  and  outer  ear,  the  Eustachian  tube 
and  tympanum,  and  perhaps  even  the  external  ear  which  occa- 
sionally crops  out  in  the  neck,  are  derived  from  them. 


192  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

If  this  be  so,  it  is  plain  that  at  that  stage  it  is  important 
that  the  gill-sHts  be  well  developed,  lest  otherwise  all  these  or- 
gans which  arise  from  them  be  imperfect — a  fact  which  is  also 
a  parable  of  very  high  and  wide  signification  in  the  field  of 
education.  At  the  gill-slit  period  of  human  life,  man  is  at  the 
stage  of  his  very  ancient  progenitors,  who  once  lived  a  pelagic 
life  when  there  was  nothing  but  water  over  the  earth's  surface. 
There  is,  of  course,  no  reason  to  think  that  if  removed  from 
the  mother's  body  at  this  stage  the  very  young  man  could 
swim  away  like  a  fish,  if  placed  in  water,  as  do  the  embryos 
of  the  mountain  salamander  atra,  if  cut  out  from  the  mother  at 
the  tadpole  stage,  although  if  brought  forth  at  full  term  they 
drown  when  placed  in  water.  If  the  soul  is  as  old  as  the  body, 
we  should  expect  to  find  some  pelagic  vestiges  in  it,  although 
they  be  more  or  less  effaced  in  childhood  or  reduced  like  the 
remnant  of  the  nictitating  membrane  of  the  eye  of  the  fish 
found  in  man.    Let  us  glance  at  the  evidence. 

1.  Men  and  children  have  some  psychomotor  phenomena  which, 
to  say  the  least,  admit  of  interpretation  as  atavisms  of  the  old  aquatic 
life.  Mumford  ^  found  that  if  a  babe  a  few  days  old  was  held  face 
downward  with  only  hands  and  feet  touching  the  floor,  it  made  pecul- 
iar paddling  or  swimming  movements  which  would  have  propelled 
it  through  the  water.  The  elbows  open  and  the  palm  is  pushed  in  a 
slow,  rhythmic  flexion  and  extension,  in  series  of  two  or  three  move- 
ments at  a  time,  interrupted  by  pauses,  and  very  like  those  of  loco- 
motion seen  in  aquaria.  These  movements  he  interpreted  as  vestiges 
of  watery  life. 

2.  In  children  and  even  adults  among  many  automatisms  we  find 
swaying  from  side  to  side,  or  forward  and  backward,  not  infrequent.' 
This  suggests  the  slow  oscillatory  movements  used  by  fish  in  swim- 
ming or  maintaining  their  position  in  currents  of  water.  In  extreme 
cases  these  movements  are  very  pronounced,  prolonged,  and  may  even 
become  imperative  and  exhaust  the  energy  of  the  body.  I  knew  a 
weak-minded  girl  in  an  asylum  who  rocked  all  day  despite  efforts  to 
restrain  her,  and  died  apparently  from  exhaustion  thus  caused.  The 
cradle  and  especially  the  rocking-chair  may  become  almost  a  psycho- 
sis. This  is  often  unconscious,  as  during  study.  We  see  it  in  the 
rocking  or  back-and-forth  movements  of  many  large  animals  confined 
in  cages,  in  nearly  all  of  the  cat  family,  bears,  elephants,  etc.,  and 
sometimes  in  smaller  vertebrates.     The  fact  that  these  automatisms 

'  Brain,  1897. 

*  See  Lindley,  Automatism,  op.  cit. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  193 

are  generall)'  increased  by  fatigue  favors  the  aquatic  theory  of  their 
origin,  because  fatigue  is  a  temporary  remission  of  control  by  the 
higher  and  later  centers,  and  is  a  reversion  to  lower  and  more  primi- 
tive conditions.  We  may  assume  with  Bolton  ^  that  "  all  automatic  as 
well  as  expressive  movements  are  weakened  repetitions  of  those  that 
were  once  of  use." 

3.  Tapping  with  a  wrist  movement  or  with  the  fingers,  nodding, 
sometimes  intensified  in  chorea  and  paralysis  agitans,  and  the  habit 
of  trotting  with  the  foot  or  leg,  are  thought  by  Bolton  to  be  perhaps 
also  thus  explained.  Fish,  of  course,  make  larger  movements  of  the 
tail  and  body  and  finer  ones  with  the  fins,  but  while  we  do  not  know 
the  origin  of  these  latter  movements,  this  explanation  must  be  re- 
garded as  perhaps  even  more  hypothetical  for  these  than  for  the  other 
movements,  all  of  which  are  yet  far  from  actual  demonstration  as 
pelagic  survivals. 

4.  Many  movements  and  experiences,  traces  of  which  long  persist 
in  memory,  with  perhaps  some  morphological  basis  may  be  transmit- 
ted for  many  generations  without  reappearing  because  their  proper 
stimulus  is  lacking  or  because  repressed  by  higher  centers.  But  in 
disease  or  sleep  which  functionally  remove  the  latter,  these  old  mem- 
ories or  functions  may  be  set  free.  If  the  higher  and  newer  centers 
are  destroyed,  events  long  forgotten  sometimes  reappear.  The  decay 
of  memory  begins  with  the  new  and  less  organized,  and  passes  to  the 
old,  so  that  we  sometimes  have  glimpses  of  a  far-off  paleopsychic 
basis  or  substrate.  In  sleep,  which  is  a  kind  of  decapitation  of  higher 
functions,  ancient  ancestral  experiences  crop  out.  Very  common 
among  these,  as  dream  statistics  show,  are  floating,  hovering,  gliding, 
with  utter  independence  of  gravity ;  we  swing  high  or  low  with  the 
same  freedom  that  we  move  horizontally,  and  these  nightmares  are 
almost  always  associated  with  a  differentiated  respiratory  rhythm.  We 
gasp,  or  breathe  deep  and  long.  One  of  the  present  writer's  most  per- 
sistent dream  experiences  was  that,  by  holding  the  breath  and  con- 
trolling it  in  a  peculiar  way,  he  could  rise  from  the  ground  and  float 
through  the  air  by  slight  movements  of  the  limbs  and  body.  So  urgent 
and  repeated  was  this  experience  that  he  has  many  times  awaked  with 
a  sense  projected  for  some  moments  into  waking  life  that  he  could 
now  demonstrate  to  his  friends  the  astounding  trick  of  levitation  over 
houses  and  fields  at  will.  Similar  experiences  occur  in  many  a  dream 
census,  when  the  subject  swoops  up  and  down,  glides  over  hills  and 
valleys,  or  can  leap  enormous  distances.  Now,  as  lungs  have  taken 
the  place  of  swim-bladders,  these  unique  hovering  experiences  of 
sleep  suggest  that  here  traces  of  a  function  have  survived  their  known 
structure.  Our  ancestors  floated  and  swam  far  longer  than  they  have 
had  legs,  and  why  may  the  psyche  not  retain  traces  of  this  as  the  body 
does  its  rudimentary  organs?     It  may  be  that  these  are  some  of  the 


*  Hydro-Psychoses;   Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  January,  1899,  vol.  x,  pp.  171-227. 
52 


194  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

oldest  strata  or  elements  of  our  psychic  life,  a  reminiscent  echo  of  the 
sea  which  was  our  primeval  home  and  mother. 

5.  The  statistics  of  suicide  show  that  women  choose  this  method 
much  more  often  than  men,  and  that  at  some  periods  and  in  some  lands 
they  choose  it  in  preference  to  any  and  perhaps  even  all  other  methods. 
This  is  one  expression  of  a  profound  psychic  difference  between  the 
sexes.  Woman's  body  and  soul  is  phyletically  older  and  more  primi- 
tive, while  man  is  more  modern,  variable,  and  less  conservative. 
Women  are  always  more  inclined  to  preserve  old  customs  and  ways 
of  thinking.  Women  prefer  passive  methods;  to  give  themselves  up 
to  the  power  of  elemental  forces,  as  gravity,  when  they  throw  them- 
selves from  heights  or  take  poison,  in  which  methods  of  suicide  they 
surpass  man.  Ellis  thinks  drowning  is  becoming  more  frequent,  and 
that  therein  women  are  becoming  more  womanly.  Now,  if  we  sup- 
pose that  fatigue  or  racial  exhaustion  or  decay  removes  permanently 
or  temporarily  the  control  of  higher  centers,  and  that  this  allows  a 
revival  of  the  old  love  for  and  power  of  aquatic  conditions,  we  have 
a  suggestion  for  the  explanation  of  the  "  drawing  power  "  of  water. 
The  fear  of  it  came  later,  as  adjustment  to  land  conditions  made  it 
more  dangerous.  This  is  normally  overbalanced,  as  in  the  case  of 
Comte,  who  in  a  fit  of  madness  plunged  into  the  water.  The  ac- 
quired love  of  swimming  is  a  later  philophobic  adjustment.  The  spe- 
cific gravity  of  water  resists  but  does  not  check  movement,  and  tends 
to  slow  everything  down  toward  passive  movements.  Prose,  poetry, 
and  myth  have  described  these  fascinations  and  peopled  sea  and  stream 
with  mythic  creatures,  both  terrifying  and  captivating.' 

The  problem,  whether  there  is  any  paleopsychic  race  element,  is 
as  inevitable  as  it  is  unanswerable.  For  one  I  am  convinced  that 
there  is  as  much  evidence  of  a  specific  "  drawing  power  "  or  love  of 
water  as  there  now  is,  since  the  abandonment  of  a  specific  hydro- 
phobia, of  a  special  aversion  to  it.  Some  can  hardly  bathe  without  an 
almost  imperative  impulse  to  plunge  in  forever,  as  if  to  go  back  to 
an  old  love.  "  Take  me  into  your  arms,  O  sea,  away  from  the  care 
and  pain  of  life;  I  have  always  loved  you  more  than  the  hard  and 
bruising  earth.  Let  me  float  and  toss  and  wave  in  your  embrace,  and 
finally  melt  into  the  wild,  wide  ocean,"  is  a  sentiment  not  without 
some  kinship  to  the  religious  motive  of  pantheistic  absorption. 

6.  Children  are  phyletically  even  older  than  women,  and  after 
the  first  shock  and  fright  most  of  them  take  the  greatest  delight  in 
water.  The  shore  where  these  forms  first  emerged  and  became  am- 
phibian, to  which  many  land  forms  return  to  lay  eggs  or  rear  their 
young,  is  no  less  than  a  passion  to  children.  As  Khne  has  shown, 
it  accounts  for  a  large  proportion  of  all  truancies.  To  paddle,  splash, 
swim,  and  sun  sometimes  constitutes  almost  a  hydroneurosis,  and  chil- 
dren pine  all  winter  and  live  only  for  the  next  summer  at  the  sea. 

^  A  Study  of  Fears  ;  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  January,  1897,  vol.  viii,  pp.  147-249. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  195 

It  is  a  grievous  loss  if  they  are  near  water  and  can  not  go  in,  and 
lazy  children  walk  great  distances  to  swim,  and  sometimes  go  in  many 
times  a  day.  In  some  cases  frequent  danger,  almost  to  the  point  of 
drowning,  can  not  wean  them.  Cold  does  not  deter ;  the  very  touch 
of  water  on  the  skin  is  rapture  and  exhilaration.  If  not  a  pond  or 
river  or  brook,  a  puddle  or  gutter  is  sought,  and  played  in  even  in 
severe  storms.  If  boys  can  not  swim,  they  raft  and  sail  and  fish  ; 
dabbling  and  sozzling  in  pails,  pans,  and  cisterns,  or  splashing  through 
the  mud,  frisking  or  capering  through  the  rain  with  headgear  and 
perhaps  clothes  off,  is  high  glee.  Alas  for  the  child  who  has  not  access 
to  a  beach  !  and  nowhere  in  the  world  perhaps  are  children  so  happy 
or  in  their  element  as  when  there,  if  under  favorable  conditions.  It 
would  seem  as  if  some  children  loved  to  be  wet  for  the  mere  sake 
of  it.  Sometimes  the  impulse  to  plunge  in  is  so  strong  that  they  do  so 
with  clothes  on.  Others  older  or  less  active  can  sit  by  the  hour,  see- 
ing and  hearing  the  movements  of  water  in  sea  or  stream.  The  best 
demonstration  of  the  fact  of  this  hydrophilia  is  the  amount  of  cold,  of 
first  horror,  often  intensified  by  fancy  and  even  superstition,  real  or 
imagined  danger,  and  the  occasional  association  with  smother-feel- 
ing that  it  will  overcome.  The  joy  of  going  barefoot  is  never  so  in- 
tense as  when  it  is  possible  to  wade,  and  the  boy  of  twelve  who  de- 
clared that  he  loved  water  like  a  fish,  and  knew  no  boy  who  did  not 
and  was  a  different  being  when  away  from  it,  was  typical. 

7.  Many  forms  of  animal  life  which  have  had  long  experience  on 
the  land,  have  yielded  to  the  attraction  of  the  sea  and  have  become 
backsliders  to  marine  habits,  and  their  quadrupedal  organization  has 
slowly  lapsed  to  fish-like  traits.  So  completely  have  they  forsaken 
the  land  that  they  are  often  called  fishes.  They  still  breathe  with 
lungs,  and  must  periodically  come  to  the  surface.  Their  heart  is  four- 
chambered,  like  quadrupeds ;  they  bring  forth  living  young,  and  do  not 
lay  eggs  like  fish;  they  are  mammals,  and  suckle  their  offspring;  they 
have  rudimentary  teeth,  legs,  and  pelvis,  that  do  not  mature  or  have 
been  metamorphosed  into  analogy  with  fins  and  tail.  The  whale  is, 
of  course,  the  best-known  type,  and  must  have  lived  a  long  time  on 
land;  but  the  traces  of  its  terrestrial  life  have  been  largely  effaced. 
Here,  too,  belong  porpoises,  dolphins,  seals,  walruses,  while  the  polar 
bear,  sea-otter,  penguin,  the  sea-lion,  beaver,  duck-billed  platypus, 
web-footed  opossum,  dugong,  manatee,  oceanic  turtle,  sea-snake, 
and  many  others,  have  retrogressed  in  various  degrees  from  the  land 
type.  Limbs  are  lost  or  are  being  modified  into  paddles  or  flippers,  and 
the  chief  changes  have  always  been  in  the  least  typical  structures, 
and  thus  less  strongly  inherited.  The  whale  has  acquired  his  blubber 
for  heat;  the  skin,  claws,  teeth,  eyes,  shape  of  head,  are  modified. 
The  lungs  are  often  enlarged  as  the  animal  acquires  the  power  of  re- 
maining under  water.  Reversion  increases  size  by  reducing  the  energy 
required  in  locomotion  and  in  securing  food ;  while  the  loss  of  the  pel- 
vis enables  the  young  to  be  born  larger  and  more  mature,  and  with 
less  injury  to  the  parent. 


196  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

To  the  simple  animisms  of  children  water  lives,  sings, 
laughs,  moans,  beckons,  and  often  talks  in  words  and  phrases 
of  which  Bolton  collected  many.  It  is  roused  to  truculenc3 
and  anger  by  storms  and  rocks,  is  treacherous  and  wily.  They 
prattle  their  secrets  to  it,  scold  and  offer  it  gifts,  imperson- 
ate springs,  fountains,  streams,  and  individual  waves,  and  their 
credulity  in  all  the  water  people  from  nixies,  kelpies,  and  mer- 
maids to  fabulous  monsters,  and  in  fairy  submarine  castles, 
cities,  gem-bestrewn  grots,  knows  little  bounds,  as  the  litera- 
ture on  the  subject  copiously  shows. 

Youth  works  a  sea  change  and  the  hydropsychoses  strike 
inward.  The  curve  of  runaways  to  go  to  sea  rises  steeply,  and 
a  sailor's  life  now  makes  its  strongest  appeal.  The  sea  sug- 
gests eternity,  as  it  invites  thoughts  to  the  horizon,  and  is 
eloquent  of  things  which  they  "  can  ne'er  express  but  can  not 
all  conceal."  To  be  near  and  hear  its  polyphonous  voice  com- 
forts, soothes,  rests,  relaxes,  and  its  many  aspects  mirror  inner 
moods.  It  draws  away  and  away,  and  one  would  sail  on  and 
on  perhaps  to  the  moon  and  stars  and,  with  Flaubert,  revolt 
at  science  that  has  set  limits  to  old  ocean's  stream  that  in  Ho- 
meric days  not  only  flowed  round  all  but  joined  the  sky  itself. 
A  friend  has  collected,  from  youthful  preferences,  over  two 
hundred  hymns  that  teach  the  great  lessons  of  religion  by 
aquatic  tropes.  Some,  like  the  Zufiis  when  they  saw  it  for  the 
first  time,  must  pray  to  or  beside  it.  In  place  of  the  childish  pas- 
sion for  playing  in  and  with  it,  and  beside  the  bathing  craze, 
arises  a  love  of  gazing  and  meditating  alone.  Not  only  does 
the  curve  of  boating  take  a  sharp  upward  curve,  but  it  seems 
instinct  with  a  mighty  and  quasi  divine  power,  and  the  tides, 
floods,  currents,  waves,  storms,  shallows,  depths,  and  glassy 
transparency  of  the  sea  mirror  and  even  make  moods.  The 
soul  would  be  as  boundless,  pure,  profound,  persevering,  as 
it,  depth  answering  depth,  and  as  the  voices  of  extinct  gener- 
ations are  heard  for  the  first  time,  feels  itself  as  old  and  as 
full  of  buried  treasures  and  secrets,  or  it  is  truculent,  treach- 
erous, wily,  pacing  the  shingly  beach  to  and  fro,  or  falling 
back  with  baffled  rage,  or  at  its  priest-like  task  of  absolution. 
Thus  feeling  ebbs  and  flows,  and  the  current  of  spontaneous 
thought  must  go  on  forever.  As  if  the  rudimentary  aquatic 
organs  in  the  body  had  psychic  resonances  and  sympathies 


ADOLESCENT   FEELINGS   TOWARD   NATURE  197 

with  it,  the  sea,  the  mother  of  Hfe,  wakens  the  soul  to  new 
appreciation  of  all  that  it  has  meant  in  literature,  myth,  and 
rites.  Love  is  "  born  of  the  deep  and  comes  up  with  the  sun 
from  the  sea,"  billows  *'  break  like  a  bursting  heart  and  die 
in  foam  " ;  like  a  shell  the  soul  ever  whispers  and  murmurs 
of  the  main  what  of  horror  or  charm  fills  its  depths  since  old 
Silenus  and  the  Tritons  settled  back  into  them.  In  the  normal 
soul  there  is  now  an  outcrop  of  the  same  psychic  strata  which 
once  created  and  gave  life  and  sacredness  to  lustrations,  bap- 
tisms, oracles,  water  deities,  philosophemes  like  those  of  Thales, 
who  made  water  the  source  of  all  things,  or  of  Heraclitus,  who 
saw  in  vapor,  water,  and  ice  the  key  to  the  universe  which  was 
constantly  fluxing  up  or  dow-n  the  long  way  of  rarefication  and 
condensation  between  ether  and  rock.  So,  too,  the  stream  is 
in  a  hundred  ways  the  type  of  life.  The  soul  is  hydrotropic, 
and  this  is  the  sacred  hour  of  opportunity  for  bringing  these 
dim  and  dumb  molimena  of  the  soul  to  their  issue,  for  wedding 
the  individual  promptings  to  the  best  that  literature,  art,  his- 
tory, of  the  races  have  to  offer  in  a  way  that  makes  teaching  at 
its  best  such  a  high  and  sacred  calling.  Empiricist  as  I  am  in 
insisting  that  everything  possible  should  be  traced  to  a  source 
in  individual  experience,  I  can  not  read  these  youthful  ebulli- 
tions without  inclining  to  believe  in  residual  traces  that  hark 
back  through  ages,  and  that  the  soul  is  still  marked  like  our 
body  by  vestiges  of  pelagic  life.  Here,  too,  if  it  is  dangerous 
to  believe,  it  is  no  less  so  to  disbelieve.^ 

IX.  It  would  seem  that  nothing  could  be  farther  from 
human  sympathy  than  rocks,  stones,  and  minerals  of  the 
earth's  lithosphere.  Yet  hard,  cold,  and  dark  as  they  are,  they 
have  played  a  very  important  role  in  shaping  and  expressing 
the  human  soul.  Many,  when  they  think  of  matter,  image 
rock  or  earth  of  various  kinds,  and  we  owe  to  it  much  of  our 
impressions  of  solidity,  while  even  the  idea  of  substance  in  many 
minds  is  in  close  rapport  with  impressions  derived  from  this 
source,  so  utterly  irrelevant  to  modern  mineralogy  and  geology. 
Menhirs,  dolmens,  cairns,  barrows,  cromlechs,  topes,  swastika 
of  many  kinds,  Druid  circles  like  Stonehenge,  altars,  hearths, 

^  Ueber  den  Einfluss  der  See  auf  die  englische  Literatur.      Drei  Studien.     Th. 
A.  Fischer.     Gotha,  1892. 


198  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

lintels,  bethels,  and  the  traditions  and  customs  spun  about  the 
Woden  stone,  through  a  hole  in  which  hands  were  placed  when 
fidelity  was  sworn;  the  stone  of  St,  Fillan,  where,  up  to  1798, 
the  sick  were  healed ;  the  holy  stones  of  Ireland,  against  which 
maidens  leaned  to  see  their  future  husbands;  rocking  stones; 
shrine  pillars ;  stones  of  witness,  like  that  at  Mizpah ;  the  black 
stone  schippeda  at  Emesa;  wishing  stones;  stones  of  unction, 
libation,  taboo,  bloody  rites,  of  judgment,  of  impregnation; 
king  stones ;  sentinel  stones ;  the  famous  Blarney  stone ;  monu- 
ment worship  in  India ;  the  bounding  stone,  symbol  of  Mer- 
cury; pentile  stones  in  France;  stones  of  mystic  shape,  mark- 
ings, and  charms;  touchstones;  natural  magnets;  lodestone 
mountains,  ffidipus  myths  in  many  forms — all  these  suggest 
something  analogous  to  a  stone  age  for  psychology,  which  has 
almost  nothing  in  common  with  the  industrial  Stone  age  of  the 
anthropologist.  Savages  often  think  their  sacred  stones  move 
about  at  night.  In  many  parts  of  Palestine,  especially  the 
eastern,  the  archeologist  finds  almost  no  other  remains  of  the 
ancient  Hebrew  or  pre-Hebrew  cults.^ 

Very  strong  and  wide-spread  is  the  primitive  belief,  perhaps 
most  clearly  seen  in  Tahiti,  that  stones,  especially  if  peculiar 
in  any  way,  have  souls  that  go  to  the  gods  if  they  are  broken. 
St.  Arnobius  was  wont  to  beg  a  blessing  for  every  anointed 
stone.  The  Council  of  Toledo,  a.  d.  681,  decreed  punishment 
for  stone  worshipers,  and  in  789  Charlemagne  condemned 
them.  Many  of  these  ancient  relics,  erected  because  of  vows, 
or  to  crown  tumuli  of  unknown  purpose,  perhaps  alined  to 
perpetuate  astronomic  lore,  etc.,  are  products  of  a  psychosis 
now  almost  extinct  in  adults,  but  relegated  to  ineffectual  child- 
hood. 

Still  more  interesting  because  revealing  a  still  closer  rapport 
with  the  higher  development  of  the  soul  is  the  lore  of  precious 
stones.^     Most  of  these  now  worn  as  ornaments  were  once 

^  See  C.  R.  Conder :  Heth  and  Moab.  Explorations  in  Syria  in  1881,  espe- 
cially chapter  vii.  Also,  Survey  of  Eastern  Palestine,  vol.  i,  p.  302  et  seq.  J. 
O'Neill :  The  Night  of  the  Gods,  i,  pp.  99-188.  Lubbock :  Origin  of  Civilization, 
first  ed.,  p.  204  et  seq.  The  Worship  of  Stones  in  France,  by  P.  Sibillot.  Am. 
Anthropologist,  1902,  pp.  76-107.  Mystical  Properties  of  Gems,  by  Wirt  Tassin  ; 
Annual  Report  Smithsonian  Tnst.,  1900,  pp.  558-588. 

'  See  G.  F.  King:  Folklore  of  Precious  .Stones.  Int.  Cong.  Anthrop. ,  Chicago 
Exposition,  1893.  Also  William  Jones:  History  and  Mythology  of  Precious 
.Stones;   London,  1880. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  I99 

charms,  and  their  names  often  suggest  what  they  meant  to  the 
heart.  The  madstone  drew  poison;  amber,  once  thought  a 
stone,  was  concentrated  tears  of  birds  or  electrides  and  is  still 
sometimes  worn  for  sore  throat;  the  carbuncle  was  sacred  to 
the  angel  Amoriel ;  the  touchstone  was  a  test ;  the  bloodstone 
stanched;  the  famous  bezoar  from  the  kidney  of  the  Arabian 
antelope  was  a  charm  against  poison ;  the  sapphire  against 
apoplexy;  arrow-heads  were  fairy  darts;  moonstones  waxed 
and  waned  with  the  moon,  were  clear  on  fortunate  and  dim  on 
unlucky  days;  the  lodestone  made  invisible,  cured  headache 
and  love,  and  is  still  sold  to  conjure  with  in  voodoo  charms; 
hydrophane,  as  it  absorbed  liquids,  became  opaque  or  trans- 
parent with  psychic  correspondences ;  eye  agate  cured  sight  dis- 
tempers ;  the  chrysoberyl  or  cat's-eye  drove  away  evil  spirits ; 
the  Cabot  stone  prophesied  weather;  opals,  beautiful  as  they 
are,  even  yet  have  limited  sale  because  they  bring  bad  luck; 
while  obsidian,  jade,  chalcedony,  carnelian,  onyx,  sardonyx, 
sard,  amethyst,  malachite,  tourmaline,  draconite  from  the  head 
of  a  dragon,  aetites  from  the  head  of  an  eagle,  and  many  others, 
were  centers  of  superstition  or  symbols  of  sentiment,  were 
worn  as  pendants,  amulets,  brooches,  rings,  and  had  a  meaning 
of  great  pregnancy,  as  they  were  carved,  faceted,  variously 
colored,  etc.  If  we  extend  our  survey  to  the  folklore  and  sym- 
bolism of  diamonds,  gold,  mercury,  brass,  iron,  crystal,  flint, 
soil,  sand,  and  reflect  on  their  mystical,  allegorical,  and  meta- 
physical uses,  we  shall  realize  what  they  have  meant  for  phy- 
letic  psychogenesis. 

Autochthones  spring  directly  from  the  bosom  of  the  earth 
and  feel,  as  Tecumseh  told  General  Harrison,  that  the  earth 
was  their  mother  and  at  death  they  repose  in  her  bosom.  Not 
only  are  our  bodies  dust  and  to  dust  return,  but  for  many 
primitive  races  the  soul  leads  a  gnome-like,  subterranean  exist- 
ence. The  dead  live  on  their  pallid  lives  beneath  our  feet ; 
affect  crops  and  the  fertility  of  soil ;  preside  over  mines  and 
buried  treasures ;  and  in  famine,  as  the  Muthos  of  the  Golden 
Bough  shows,  must  be  propitiated  that  the  earth  may  yield 
again. 

If  we  accept  the  Spencer-Allen  view  of  this  aspect  of  nature 
worship,  that  stones  first  became  sacred  because  erected  over 
graves,  thus  deriving  their  sanctity  from  ancestor  worship,  and 


200  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

even  myths  like  those  of  DeucaHon,  which  make  stones  be- 
come men  and  therefore  worshiped  as  their  parents,  we  can 
thus  see  a  possible  origin  of  idolatry  and  can  best  feel  whatever 
force  there  is  in  the  extreme  view,  which  derives  the  Hebrew 
EI  and  our  Christian  God  from  a  sacred,  ancestral  stone.^ 

So  again  in  cosmic  myths,  mountains  often  support  the 
heavens,  although  sometimes  the  mountain  is  the  hollow  heav- 
enly vault  and  we  are  inside,  not  outside,  it.^  Atlas's  head 
sometimes  touches  the  North  Pole.  The  Hindu  mountain 
Meru  is  the  polar  home  of  the  gods,  a  column  joining  earth  and 
sky,  the  highest  terrestrial  spot ;  it  goes  through  the  earth  and 
protrudes  on  the  other  side.  The  Chinese  thought  mountains 
form  a  more  subtle  substance  than  plain  earth ;  and  Schopen- 
hauer says  the  study  and  sight  of  them  throws  us  into  a  sub- 
lime frame  of  mind.  They  brave  decay  that  sweeps  all  else 
aw:ay.  Mountains  are  often  the  home  of  the  gods,  or  again 
are  worshiped  as  themselves  divine.  They  uphold  the  earth. 
All  of  Horeb  was  sacred,  and  Hermon,  meaning  holy,  still 
bears  the  ruins  of  many  temples.  Here  the  Ephraimites  sac- 
rificed, and  many  temples  and  churches  have  been  built  on 
sacred  mountains,  a  catalogue  of  which  would  probably  more 
than  equal  all  the  mountains  of  the  earth,  because,  as  Words- 
worth said,  "  every  mountain  is  finest."  Many  a  tope  and 
pyramid  is  an  effort  to  rival  the  mountains  of  nature.  Buddha 
made  pilgrimages  up  mountains  a  symbol  of  the  renunciation 
of  earthly  comforts  for  hardship,  and  such  trips  are  still 
meritorious.  The  phenomena  of  altitude  favor  great  thoughts 
and  suggest  communion  with  the  gods.  Such  places  they 
would  choose,  as  have  many  monks,  especially  the  Benedictines. 
On  mountains  dead  bodies  are  often  exposed,  and  many  a 
fictitious  mountain  of  the  imagination  has  pierced  the  heart  of 
heaven.  On  their  summits  are  found  earthly  paradises,  per- 
haps wondrous  gardens  and  fountains.  The  cone  is  a  sacred 
symbol  of  the  hill. 

Mount  Sinai  is  a  bleak,  dark  granite,  waterless  rock,  sug- 
gesting a  moon  mountain,  because  having  no  life,  the  center 
of  terrible  storms,  an  utterly  unique  object,  an  isolated  accident 
throughout  all  the  wide  plain  and  Sahara  desert  region,  and 

'  See  Grant  Allen  :   Evolution  of  the  Idea  of  God,  chap.  v. 
*  O'Neill :   Night  of  the  Gods,  vol.  ii,  chap,  viii,  p.  383. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD  NATURE  201 

altogether  "  one  of  the  most  singular  phenomena  on  the  sur- 
face of  the  globe."  ^  In  a  sense,  it  is  the  mountain  of  Egypt; 
its  bare  rocks  were  centers  of  worship  ages  before  the  Hebrews 
saw  it.  The  impression  its  new  phenomena  made,  when  first 
seen  by  a  plain-dwelling  people,  was  indelible.  Like  the  sacred 
mountain  of  Japan,  Olympus  and  many  others,  it  was  the  home 
of  deity.  Veiled  in  cloud  perhaps  when  he  descended,  the  God 
of  Sinai  was  a  fierce  deity,  who  brewed  storms  and  lightning 
and  rode  on  the  wings  of  the  wind,  and  so  awful,  that  no  one 
could  see  him  and  live.  In  his  theophany,  Moses  must  be  hid 
in  the  cleft  of  a  rock  and  covered  with  his  hand  and  could  only 
catch  a  glimpse  of  his  back  parts.  Jehovah  was  its  special 
local  deity,  and  Sinai  after  Moses  was  "  the  basis  of  all  the 
theology  of  the  Israelites."  They  became  now  as  much  the 
people  of  the  mountain  as  in  the  days  of  Ezra  they  became  the 
people  of  the  Sacred  Book.  The  mountain  phenomena  per- 
vaded their  literature  and  made  it  sublime.  After  the  appari- 
tion, it  became  their  Parnassus  and  Olympus  in  one.  The 
children  of  Israel  left  it  filled  with  awe,  terror,  and  faith  in 
the  awful  power  of  the  deity,  who  made  the  earth  shake  and 
dwelt  in  a  pavilion  of  clouds.  Finally,  the  judgment  would 
be  ushered  in  by  mountain  phenomena. 

The  mind  of  children  is  still  replete  with  fancies  about 
stones.  They  collect  luckies,  carry  them  everywhere,  and  boast 
where  they  have  been,  keep  them  warm,  sometimes  in  cotton ; 
think  sand  is  baby  stones,  plant  and  water  them  to  see  if  they 
grow,  take  them  apart  from  piles  that  they  may  not  press  each 
other,  will  not  step  on  them,  fish  them  out  of  the  fire  and 
water,  that  they  may  feel  more  comfortable,  give  them  dirt 
and  sand  to  eat,  believe  they  rain  down  or  come  up  from  the 
ground  because  they  are  so  much  more  abundant  after  a 
shower,  pity  the  little  or  ugly  ones,  think  them  sociable  and 
perhaps  put  them  together,  give  them  names,  talk  to  them, 
regard  rocks  as  friendly  or  hostile,  protecting  or  silent  wit- 
nesses who  could  tell,  regard  them  as  related  if  alike,  think 
they  appreciate,  have  moral  qualities  and  are  sympathetic,  and 
often  regard  them  as  fetishes.^ 

'  Renan:    History  of  the  People  of  Israel,  chap.  xiv. 

'  Fetishism  in  Children,  by  G.  Harold  Ellis;   Pad.  Sem.,  June,  1902,  vol.  ix, 
pp.  205-220. 


202  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

For  youth  this  rarely  survives  even  in  the  realm  of  play 
and  "  make-believe,"  although  for  some  it  lingers  through 
life.^  Our  data  show  the  following  typical  changes  :  i,  A  sense 
of  the  great  age  or  perdurability  of  stones  and  rocks  comes 
with  the  expansion  of  the  time  sense;  2,  there  is  a  very  marked 
rise  of  the  curve  of  interest  in  precious  stones  and  deepened 
appreciation  of  their  beauty  and  their  different  characteristics, 
often  with  new  superstitions;  3,  the  rare  and  distant  are  more 
valued ;  4,  the  carrying  power  of  association  is  enhanced,  and 
mementoes  and  keepsakes  have  more  meaning  and  are  more 
cherished;  5,  monuments,  and  yet  more  mountains,  are  now 
first  really  both  comprehended  and  felt,  the  size  of  the  latter 
being  too  great  for  the  child  mind ;  6,  rock  and  earth  come  to 
be  the  symbol  of  reality,  solid  substantiality,  and  matter  gen- 
erally ;  and  lastly,  collections  of  them  are  not  merely  amassed, 
but  ordered  and  grouped  with  far  more  mentality  and  zest  for 
classification. 

Geology  and  physical  geography,  the  percentages  of  stu- 
dents in  both  of  which  are  decreasing  in  our  high  schools,  are 
too  dehumanized  for  want  of  contact  with  folklore,  scenery, 
landscapes,  charts,  and  pictures,  and  the  dynamic  and  historical 
elements.  Paleontology,  full  of  suggestion  of  the  great  age  of 
the  world,  is  encumbered  with  details  and  technical  names,  and 
forgets  that  growth  is  analytic  in  the  sense  that  large  views 
and  apergus  should  come  first.  Petrography  and  crystallogra- 
phy can  be  made  impressive  if  taught  by  a  full  mind,  which 
alone  can  elementarize  well.  So  too,  later,  mining,  metallurgy, 
economic,  commercial,  and  industrial  processes  precede  classi- 
fication and  technique  in  the  order  of  nature  and  mental 
growth.  The  study  of  glaciers,  beaches,  ripple-marks,  old 
volcanoes,  hill-top  views,  collections,  excursions,  and  above  all, 
talks,  which  is  the  method  of  the  real  teacher  charged  with  two 
interests,  that  in  the  subject  and  in  the  youth,  these  are  the 
only  beginnings  of  this  age  that  do  not  disenchant. 

X.  A  change  I  am  coming  to  regard  as  at  the  same  time  one 
of  the  most  characteristic,  suggestive,  and  beautiful,  in  pubes- 
cent years,  is  in  the  new  relation  to  flowers  and  plants.  Before, 
both  the  psychic  qualities  ascribed  to  them  and  the  impressions 

*  Gould:    Child  Fetishes.     Fed.  Sem.,  vol.  v,  p.  421. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS   TOWARD   NATURE  203 

they  make  npon  the  child  are  predominantly,  frankly,  and 
naively  in  the  physical  realm  of  sense.  From  the  data  of  Alice 
Thayer  ^  and  others,  we  can  now  roughly  describe  these 
changes  in  the  several  senses  most  involved.  Children  love  to 
fondle  and  feel  of  flowers,  and  some  can  hardly  keep  their 
hands  off  every  flower  in  the  garden.  They  are  often  toys, 
and  played  with  as  dolls,  pets,  dishes,  soldiers,  and  money ;  are 
made  into  wreaths,  girdles,  necklaces,  and  gaudy  trimmings, 
and  their  petals  are  soft  to  "  poor  "  and  stroke.  The  hateful 
ones  are  those  that  sting,  prick,  are  pitchy,  or  leave  stains ;  or, 
again,  it  hurts  them  to  be  trampled,  plucked,  etc.  But  with  the 
teens  they  are  often  caressed,  pressed  against  the  cheeks,  neck, 
lips,  and  kissed,  and  the  face  is  buried  in  them.  Their  coolness 
and  more  often  the  velvety  softness  of  their  petals  and  their 
fragrance  is  mentioned.  This  is  more  common  with  favorite 
flowers  or  those  with  associations  with  loved  persons,  places, 
or  incidents,  while  reluctance  to  touch  indifferent  or  disliked 
flowers  is  also  more  pronounced  and  relations  to  the  other 
senses  more  satisfying. 

Smell,  though  dominant  before  puberty  as  mediating  likes 
and  dislikes  in  a  purely  sensuous  way,  is  now  a  very  strong 
factor,  in  the  appeal  of  flowers,  far  more  subjective.  Its  irra- 
diation widens  more  and  more.  Odor  becomes  almost  the 
soul  of  flowers.  It  is  an  index  to  the  human  attributes  which 
now  the  flowers  seem  to  possess,  and  much  of  their  symbolism 
is  in  large  part  suggested  by  this  deepened  sense.  By  their 
fragrance  flowers  suggest  crime,  death,  funerals,  the  sick- 
room, weddings,  commencement,  churches,  Easter  time, 
spring,  the  cool  woods,  solitude,  the  running  brook,  the  open 
fields,  sunshine,  summer  and  harvest  scenes,  festive  occasions, 
love  in  all  its  many  forms,  may  bring  joy,  depression,  pensive- 
ness,  or  voluptuous  sensations  that  make  it  almost  wicked  to 
enjoy  the  fragrance  of  some.  Malodorous  flowers,  perhaps, 
seem  morally  bad,  their  odors  bespeak  a  gentle,  sweet,  or  ugly 
disposition,  those  with  pleasant  odors  are  friendly.  Disagree- 
able odors  are  harder  to  overcome.  A  young  man  met  and 
smelled  of  a  wild  rose  unexpectedly  in  a  field,  and,  with  no 
conscious  process,  found  himself  crying,  and  only  after  some 

^  An  article  soon  to  appear  in  the  Ped.  Sem. 


204  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

time  could  recall  that  years  ago  his  mother,  now  dead,  called 
him  in  the  doorway  as  he  stood  at  that  spot.  Thus  they  may 
scent  the  very  heart,  "  their  breath  make  sweet  a  world  of 
pain,"  "  their  censers  with  faint  odors  swinging,"  or,  again, 
they  may  fret  the  nostrils  and  through  them  the  soul  with  fetid 
and  nauseous  exhalations. 

So,  too,  their  color  flames  more  inwardly  at  this  age,  sug- 
gesting blood,  fire,  sky,  snow,  and  January  fields,  solitude  and 
sociability,  precious  stones,  sunlight,  flashes  of  glittering  gold 
(although  most  hated  flowers  are  yellow).  Chromatic  likes 
and  dislikes  unfold  a  complex  symbolism.  White  means 
purity  ineffable;  red,  pleromal  life  and  love,  and  is  of  the 
heart;  purple  is  regal.  Colors  seem  more  intense,  and  there 
is  something  mystically,  transcendently  real  behind  them. 
Their  relations  make  whole  symphonies  of  harmony  or  painful 
discords. 

Taste  seems  least  of  all  changed,  while  bad  tastes  do  not 
so  immediately  blight  beauty.  Plants  and  flowers  that  are 
medicinal,  poisonous,  or  edible,  tend  to  be  excluded  from  the 
esthetic  sphere,  as  use  and  beauty  grow  apart.  These  changes, 
however  manifest,  are  slight  compared  with  others.  To  the 
child  flowers  live  and  die,  grow,  sleep,  are  tired,  sick,  feel 
hunger,  thirst,  and  temperature.  They  are  loved  because  they 
are  bright,  pretty,  or  fragrant.  Their  wounds  may  even  be 
bandaged ;  there  are  prayers  and  thanks  for  rain  for  their  sake. 
Some  would  like  to  become  flowers,  but  the  corrective  thought 
is  that  they  die  soon  or  are  neglected,  alone,  out  nights,  and 
so  children  would  be  like  them,  the  motive  being  that  they  are 
loved  or  caressed  by  some  one  whose  good-will  they  wish  to 
obtain,  or  because  they  are  beautiful,  or  they  would  be  as  pure, 
sweet,  and  good  as  the  flowers.  In  Plato's  figure,  man  is  him- 
self a  plant  of  heavenly  parentage,  and  the  child  is  in  the 
vegetative  stage. 

With  adolescence,  the  flower  world  slowly  acquires  a  new, 
far  more  diversified  and  inward  meaning.  Tangibility  and 
sense  are  less,  and  subjective  resonance  more.  Their  relations 
become  more  internal  and  they  have  psychic  more  than  physical 
bearings  upon  human  life.  While  many  previous  tendencies 
are  developed,  others  are  shed,  and  we  meet  the  frequent 
phrases  "  suggest,"  "  seem  like,"  "  stand  for,"  "  speak  of,"  for 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD  NATURE  205 

both  the  nascent  and  the  decadent  responses  of  the  soul.  The 
number  of  cultivated  as  distinct  from  wild  flowers,  especially 
for  city  children,  that  are  known  and  also  that  are  both  liked 
and  disliked,  increases.  There  is  a  new  sense  for  form  and 
shape.  Individual  preferences  come  out.  Crass  forms  of 
fancy  slowly  yield  to  sentiment,  and  early  fictions  are  no  longer 
believed  but  are  felt,  and  their  effects  persist  as  if  they  had  been 
absorbed  and  had  fertilized  the  heart.  The  pure  animism  of 
the  child  fades,  though  it  may  persist  as  a  feeling  in  a  deepened 
sense.  Some  are  perplexed  to  find  hateful  and  lovely  qualities 
in  the  same  flower,  or  pity  those  sweet  in  scent  but  ugly  in 
form  or  color. 

As  to  language,  for  the  child  flowers  nod  or  shake  yes  or 
no,  whisper  with  squeaky  voices  in  peepy  mouths  like  fairies 
in  disguise,  asking  for  water  or  care,  have  a  speech  for  each 
other,  and  when  alone  at  night  or  in  the  moonlight,  perhaps, 
are  heard  to  say,  "  Do  not  tread  on  us,"  "  Take  me  with  you," 
"  Love,  or  be  like  us,"  "  Spring  is  here,"  "  Be  happy,"  "  We 
come  out  from  nature  for  you."  They  at  least  try  to  say  some- 
thing very  sweet  in  a  silent  language,  or  they  sigh,  sing,  sob, 
have  delectable  things  they  could  say,  are  voluble  to  bees,  birds, 
trees,  and  grass.  But  while  the  average  pubescent  no  longer 
hears  or  believes  in  vocal  speech,  he  holds  all  the  more  to  a 
higher  symbolic  communion.  Their  motions  are  full  of  grace, 
beckoning  and  gesture.  They  are  seers  revealing  the  real  heart 
of  nature  to  us.  They  meditate,  sympathize,  are  hard  or  easy 
to  get  acquainted  with,  incite  to  mischief,  solitude,  joy,  or 
pathos.  They  "  burn  with  a  mystical  love,"  and  every  bud  and 
leaf  is  full  of  dreams.  Their  speech  is  in  a  tongue  no  one 
exactly  knows,  but  which  in  certain  moods  comes  home  to 
every  heart.  They  teach  lessons  of  virtue  and  usefulness  and 
incite  to  noble  lives.  A  bouquet  is  a  mute  letter.  At  such 
times  when  we  are  wise  in  the  rhythm  of  blossom  and  leaf, 
they  tell  wondrous  secrets  to  those  whom  they  love  and  who 
love  them,  but  it  is  all  in  the  dialect  in  which  the  wind  and 
the  sun  and  rain  murmur  to  the  seed-corn  in  the  dark  ground 
of  the  coming  harvest,  or  of  the  scythe  to  the  grass.  "  Hush 
and  heed  not,  for  all  things  pass,"  or  in  which  the  daisy  wishes 
to  say,  "  I  am  the  star  of  the  day." 

Flowers  have  their  own  friendships  and  enmities.    In  gen- 


2o6  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

eral  they  love  bees  and  butterflies  but  hate  noxious  parasitic 
insects,  ants,  hens,  and  weeds,  and  dread  large  animals  that 
eat  or  injure  them.  Some  invite  birds,  protect  other  flowers, 
or  are  protected  by  trees,  nestle  together  affectionately  in  beds. 
They  are  friends  to  good  people,  and  rebuke  evil.  Wild  flowers 
are  savages  or  unkempt  street  urchins  friendly  to  animals,  and 
perhaps  to  bad  people.  The  homely  are  jealous  of  the  pretty 
ones,  and  the  small  ones  love  the  protection  of  the  large. 
Thistles,  thorns,  and  poison,  malodorous  and  shabby  plants, 
are  criminals  in  the  flower  world.  The  rose,  e.  g.,  is  an  enemy 
of  the  lilac,  but  loves  the  violet;  the  daisy  is  jealous  of  the 
buttercup's  golden  calyx,  and  all  the  flowers  are  jealous  of  the 
daisy's  white  frill. 

Many  flowers,  too,  in  their  appearance  suggest  birds  or  ani- 
mals. Some  have  all  the  human  features ;  the  pansy  is  a  little 
face  to  almost  everyone,  a  sweet  and  innocent  baby  face,  a 
roguish  child,  sly,  cute,  and  mischievous,  or  even  the  face  of  a 
cross  old  woman. 

Again,  the  human  attributes  of  flowers  are  no  longer  found 
in  physical  analysis,  but  they  both  acquire  and  suggest  moral 
qualities.  They  teach  or  illustrate  modesty,  humility,  meek- 
ness, resignation,  content,  cheer,  gentleness,  serenity,  purity, 
perfection,  candor,  honesty,  sensitiveness,  elegance,  sweetness, 
piety,  as  they  look  up  to  heaven  and  pray,  etc.  Some  are 
bold,  selfish,  gaudy,  bedizened,  brazen,  ill-tempered,  unsocial, 
reserved,  fierce,  full  of  fire  and  of  red  blood,  pert,  jaunty, 
affected,  coarse,  old-fashioned.  Others  are  dainty,  true,  cour- 
teous, reserved,  snobbish,  coxcomb-like,  stupid,  clumsy,  quick- 
tempered, frail,  cross,  barbaric  or  overrefined,  greedy,  and 
selfish.  Some  suggest  golden-haired  children,  some  fussy  and 
prim  old  ladies  in  frills  and  flounces,  some  roistering  young 
blades,  some  helpless,  new-born  babes,  or  soldiers,  nuns, 
queens.  The  qualities  assigned  to  different  flowers,  while 
varying  considerably  with  different  individuals,  have  much 
general  similarity,  but  each  has  its  dispositions  and  its  own 
sphere  of  suggestiveness.  The  lily,  violet,  and  rose,  for  ex- 
ample, are  especially  replete  with  deep  significance.  In  all 
these  many  ways,  too,  the  appeal  in  adolescent  years  is  notice- 
ably much  fuller  and  far  more  suggestive  in  the  case  of  girls 
than  with  boys. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  207 

Two  typical  illustrations  must  suffice.  One  is  from  a  country 
girl  of  thirteen,  who  was  passionately  fond  of  pansies,  and  each  blos- 
som was  given  a  name,  generally  that  of  a  quality.  They  were  love, 
charity,  humility,  sweetness,  envy,  pride,  goody,  sweetie,  dearie, 
birdie,  etc. ;  each  preserved  its  own  individuality  and  name,  and  when 
one  died  the  latter  was  never  given  to  another  individual,  but  a  new 
name  was  sought.  Occasionally  playmates'  names  were  used,  from 
fancied  resemblance,  or  names  of  characters  in  stories  she  had 
heard,  and  usually  everything  was  suggested  by  resemblance.  She 
was  very  fond  of  keeping  school  and  teaching  or  reproving  each  indi- 
vidual pansy.  Sometimes  she  preached  to  them  and  exhorted  them  to 
be  good,  to  avoid  certain  faults,  to  rise  early,  and  be  clean.  Some- 
times they  were  sick  and  in  need  of  special  treatment,  of  water  or  shel- 
ter. If  the  nights  were  cool  they  must  be  protected,  that  they  might 
sleep  warmly.  Occasionally  romances  and  characteristics  far  more 
definite  than  those  suggested  by  the  names  were  given. 

The  other  is  the  case  of  a  young  lady  about  twenty.  For  her  the 
rose  is,  e.  g.,  an  ideal  madam  craving  perfection  and  claiming  homage 
from  all  the  rest;  the  violet  is  a  universal  favorite,  and  for  children,  es- 
pecially those  who  are  much  alone  and  in  the  country,  and  like  so  many 
others,  is  very  companionable.  It  is  affectionate,  huggable,  "  loves 
you,  and  turns  its  face  toward  you,"  as  if  craving  a  kiss ;  is  the  home- 
maker,  shading  and  hiding  itself  under  and  never  without  its  leaves, 
from  which  it  is  almost  indecent  to  separate  it.  The  daisies  are  "  faces 
but  with  souls  behind  them  " ;  geraniums  are  "  honest  poor  persons  in 
bright  calico";  pinks  are  pretty  but  soulless,  all  color;  calla-lilies 
are  the  most  stately,  generally  unmarried  vestals ;  the  tiger-lily  is  "  a 
priestess  of  Africa,  gaudy,  and,  like  all  lilies,  stately  and  craving  ad- 
miration with  an  almost  processional  dignity";  the  lilac  is  hardly  hu- 
man, strongly  but  somewhat  vulgarly  odorous ;  the  buttercup  is  very 
human,  but  virginal ;  the  hyacinth  is  "  hardly  a  true  flower,  but  ar- 
tificial, waxy,  or  snowy " ;  the  tulip  is  mainly  color,  as  the  honey- 
suckle is  mainly  perfume;  the  sweet  pea  is  "  besouled,  but  of  a  light 
butterfly  character  " ;  the  peony  is  "  married,  like  the  rose,  but  less 
refined  and  spiritual,  more  undeveloped,  but  vital  and  robust  on  a  low 
plane  " ;  the  forget-me-not  is  "  a  dear,  sweet,  young  country  girl  " ; 
the  morning-glory  is  "  simply  pretty,  conceited  perhaps,  a  grisette  and 
overconscious  " ;  the  dahlia  is  "  married,  but  at  heart  an  old  maid  " ; 
the  chrysanthemum  has  "  traveled,  and  has  a  foreign  air,  with  a 
highly  individualized  and  perhaps  conceited  soul  " ;  the  arbutus  is  "  an 
Indian  girl,  brought  up  to  play  shyly  and  hide  in  the  forest  " ;  the  snow- 
ball is  not  a  flower,  though  a  distant  friend  of  the  peony;  the  anemone 
is  morbidly  delicate,  "  too  good  for  this  earth,"  can  hardly  be  picked 
without  being  lain  out  delicately;  the  aster  has  its  own  soul,  and  is 
"  on  speaking  terms  with  the  daisy,  but  on  a  lower  plane  of  life  " ;  the 
sunflower  is  a  gaudy  but  ineffably  conceited  creature ;  the  lady's-slip- 
per  is  a  "  thoroughbred  fairy  " ;  the  cactus  is  made  of  wax ;  Jack-in- 
the-pulpit,  equisetae,  cattails,  and  goldenrods  are  often  conceived   as 


208  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

male  flowers,  while  all  the  rest  are  female.  The  poppy  is  "  a  brilliaMt, 
dashing  brunette";  the  hollyhock  aspires  to  perfection,  like  the  lily, 
and  though  much  more  lowly,  serves  like  it  in  the  temple ;  the  mignon- 
ette is  a  simple  child;  the  verbenas  make  good  children  to  keep  school 
with ;  the  water-lily  is  another  "  sacred  princess,  and  its  pads  are 
prayer-mats  " ;  the  cowslip  is  the  male  of  the  buttercup ;  the  thistle  is  a 
regal,  married  Irishwoman;  the  gentian,  a  beautiful  and  ideal  old 
maid ;  the  yarrow,  an  "  honest  farmer  in  brown  overalls,"  etc. 

Why  this  strange  fascination  for  flowers?  Why  does  this 
new  rapport  increase  at  adolescence  when  the  immediate  inter- 
est of  sense  begins  to  abate?  Flowers  were  not  developed  for 
man,  who  has  had  little  agency  in  their  fertilization.  Their 
beauty  was  meant  to  appeal  to  bees  and  other  insects.  Perhaps 
it  is  in  part  because  woman  first  domesticated  them,  but  so 
she  did  most  animals,  for  which  her  feeling  was  very  different; 
and  why  her  peculiar  fondness  that  first  led  her  to  cultivate 
them  ?  I  believe  it  to  be  at  root  because  of  the  fact,  now  more 
or  less  overlaid  and  lost  to  modern  consciousness,  that  she 
feels,  as  also  does  man  in  a  duller  way,  that  flowers  are  the 
best  expression  nature  affords  of  her  adolescence,  that  from 
the  efflorescence  of  dawning  puberty  to  full  maturity  she  is  a 
flower  in  bloom,  and  that  till  the  petals  fall  they  are  the  ex- 
ternal type  of  her  virginity,  and  so  they  remain  ever  afterward 
the  memento  of  her  unfallen  paradise.  Poetry  is  often  only 
a  mature  expression  of  the  ideas  and  sentiments  of  childhood, 
which  are  vastly  older  and  truer  to  nature  than  those  of  adults, 
and  with  this  key  we  can  better  understand  the  pathos  of  the 
rose,  which  has  been  in  all  the  historic  period  a  favorite  theme 
of  poetry.^  This  sheds  light  on  the  frequency  of  flower  names 
for  girls  common  everywhere.  The  general  term  for  woman 
in  Malay  is  flower. 

For  the  genetic  psychologist,  Fechner's  Nanna.  or,  The  Soul 
Life  of  Plants,  lately  republished,  is  of  interest  here.^  He  as- 
sumed a  psychic  continuity  throughout  the  universe.  The 
spirit  that  besouled  the  universe  was  mostly  under  the  threshold 
of  consciousness,  human  minds  being  specialized  apexes  which 

'  See  an  anthology  on  this  subject  in  Rosa  Rosarum  Exhorto  Poetarum,  by 
E.  V.  B.      Also,  The  Pathos  of  the  Rose,  in  J.  A.  Symonds's  Essays,  vol.  i,  p.  187. 

*  Nanna,  oder  iiber  das  Seelenleben  der  Pflanzen,  von  Gustav  T.  Fechner, 
Seconded.,  Leipzig,  1899. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  209 

cropped  out,  but  it  had  a  larger  though  obscurer  expression  in 
plants  and  in  planets.  The  former  have  an  individual  con- 
sciousness but  only  slightly  unfolded,  but  this  rests  back  on 
a  higher  one  without  losing  its  individuality  by  so  doing.  This 
parallelism  is  universal.  The  Clytie  metamorphosis  was  a 
myth  of  the  special  relations  between  the  vegetable  world  and 
that  of  man.  Nanna,  Balder's  widow,  was  a  German  goddess 
and  better  suggests  this  than  Flora,  whom  he  condemns  to 
herbaria.^ 

The  plant  world  is  far  vaster  and  older  than  man  or  perhaps 
even  than  animals,  and  vernacular  names  are  of  the  highest 
antiquity  and  connect  flowers  with  animals,  stars,  ancient  gods, 
Christ,  angels,  historic  persons,  fairies,  Naiads,  elves.  Puck, 
demons,  trolls,  witches,  medicine,  magic,  are  wrought  into 
proverbs,  festivals,  calendars,  and  many  miraculous  plants 
have  been  invented  as  if  there  was  once  a  full  florigraphic  lan- 
guage. "  Could  we  penetrate  to  the  original  suggestive  idea 
that  called  forth  the  name  it  would  bring  valuable  information 
about  the  first  openings  of  the  human  mind  toward  nature, 
and  the  merest  dream  of  such  a  discovery  invests  with  strange 
charm  the  words  that  could  tell,  if  we  could  understand,  so 
much  of  the  forgotten  infancy  of  the  human  race."  ^  Flower 
lore  shows  still  further  what  they  have  meant  in  the  early 
world.  These  names  and  lore  are  also  woman's  work.  No- 
where has  she  been  more  original  or  creative.    The  plant  world 


'  If,  he  says  in  substance,  we  could  invert  things  and  set  plants  upon  the  throne 
of  the  earth  and  we  become  plants,  we  should  be  inclined  to  ask  what  these  restless 
human  bipeds  were  running  about  for  and  whether  they  had  any  use  save  to  serve 
vegetative  life.  We,  the  plant  men,  would  continue,  remain  in  dignified  rest  in  our 
own  place,  and  need  do  nothing  save  to  spread  out  our  roots  and  leaves  in  order  to 
receive  all  divine  gifts  as  our  due  in  tribute.  Men  live  to  prepare  carbonic  acid  for 
our  breath,  and  die  only  that  their  decaying  bodies  may  furnish  us  nitrogen.  Men 
have  to  cultivate  us  in  flower-pots  and  gardens,  field  and  forest,  and  yet  we  con- 
sume them  in  the  end.  If  we  wish  to  send  our  bacterial  army  in  their  blood,  we 
exterminate  them,  and  although  they  take  a  small  part  of  our  fruit  and  leaves,  it  is 
only  to  spread  and  fertilize  our  seeds.  Insects  as  far  outnumber  men  as  our  leaves 
do  insects,  and  yet  even  they  serve  us  as  love  messengers  to  bring  the  pollen  of 
our  blossoms  to  fertile  corollas. 

^  P^nglish  Plant  Names.     Also  Folklore  of  Plants,  by  T.  F.  Thiselton  Dyer, 
chap.  XX.      Flowers  and  Flower-Lore,  by  Hilderic  Friend,   p.  353  et  seq.     Also 
Folkard :    Plant-Lore,  Legends,   and   Lyrics,  chaps,  xiii,  xiv,  and  xv.     Cockayne, 
Leechdoms,  Wortcunning,  and  Starcraft,  London,  1871. 
53 


210  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

she  has  used  as  her  own  private  pass-key  to  the  universe.  In 
some  such  view  as  Fechner's  her  natural  reHgion  would  have 
its  intellectual  expression,  as  if  a  garden  were  her  primal  home, 
her  paradise  still  revisited  as  in  a  dream,  in  the  normal  psy- 
choses of  these  years  which  should  be  forever  sacred  to  senti- 
ment and  intuition  so  instinct  with  the  best  that  has  been  in 
the  past.  There  is  something  here  which  ages  of  past  utilities 
can  not  account  for,  even  if  some  of  them  do  tend  to  be  in- 
herited as  esthetic  effects.  Perhaps  beauty  to  us  was  all  once 
religion  or  love. 

The  pedagogic  lessons  of  this  are  plain  and  unequivocal.  A 
botany  that  begins  by  merely  plucking,  collecting,  analyzing,  classify- 
ing, affixing  Latin  names  that  mean  nothing  in  place  of  those  that 
mean  everything,  desiccating  in  herbaria,  makes  havoc  with  all  this, 
and  if  economic  and  edible  plants  are  preferred,  the  soul  is  starved. 
A  technical  term  is  at  first  a  weed,  which  is  defined  as  a  plant  out  of 
place.  Taxonomy  has  its  important  function,  but  here  it  is  not  even  a 
necessary  evil.  The  fact  that  so  many  young  and  old  maidens  wear  out 
a  Gray's  Botany  or  other  text-book,  and  learn  to  give  uncouth  names  to 
all  wayside  plants,  is  a  pathetic  illustration  of  woman's  subserviency  to 
authority  or  to  man-made  fashion  in  making  something  of  a  stone  when 
her  soul  cried  out  for  bread.  I  have  collected  twenty-one  poems  on 
the  daisy,  more  than  half  of  them  written  by  women,  and  not  one 
taught  a  new  fact  or  term,  but  all  talk  directly  to  the  heart.  If  Latin 
were  accepted  as  the  inexorable  mind-breaking  condition,  and  the 
whole  circa  150,000  plant  species  known,  it  would  not  be  botany  but 
a  rank  crop  of  Latin  tares,  and  would  put  the  child's  soul,  which  is 
normally  nearer  the  floral  kingdom  than  the  adult's,  farther  away, 
while  what  lore  survived  would  be  like  flowers  springing  from  a  grave 
till  "  nothing  can  bring  back  the  hour  of  splendor  of  the  grass  or 
glory  in  the  flower."  It  is  like  the  study  of  the  grammar  and  diction- 
ary by  themselves.  We  must  recognize  the  natural,  youthful  senti- 
ments as  the  persistence  of  what  was  once  and  long  man's  highest 
philosophy.  Rightly  taught,  no  science  equals  botany  in  educational 
influence  and  benefit,  and  wrongly  taught  nothing  so  dries  up  the 
spontaneous  springs  of  interest. 

I  can  not  detail  here  but  only  briefly  indicate  the  method  of  na- 
ture. After  the  folk-lore  stage,  scientific  study  at  the  high  school 
should  begin  with  fertilization,  first  revealed  by  Sprengel  and  Dar- 
win, with  the  relations  of  blossoms  to  insect  life,  and  thus  the  whole 
philosophy  of  sex  taught  in  the  delicate  far-off  way  of  the  field.  Then 
should  come  the  relations  of  plants  to  men,  the  vine,  sugar,  cotton, 
flax,  fruit,  and  cereals,  with  something  of  their  domestication.  A 
third  human  factor,  never  to  be  lost  sight  of,  should  be  the  biographic 
element  in  the  history  of  botany,  from  the  Herbalists  and  doctrine  of 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  2ii 

signatures  on  to  Linnaeus  and  down  to  the  present  time.  Something  of 
mythic  plants,  also  of  pests,  diseases,  struggle  for  existence,  and  com- 
mercial and  industrial  botany,  should  also  be  taught.  Drawing  should 
be  greatly  reduced;  much  taught  without  the  presence  of  specimens, 
and  laboratory  work  minimized,  save  a  fpw  experiments  on  move- 
ments, tropisms  and  plant  physiology.  The  text-books  of  Hodge,  Bes- 
sey,  Grant  Allen,  Macdougal,  Bailey,  and  the  Cornell  leaflets,  and 
especially  Hugh  Macmillan,  are  all  helpful.' 

XL  Children's  feeling  for  trees  is  another  of  the  indis- 
putable and  well-marked  psychogenetic  phenomena,  which  have 
hitherto  remained  utterly  inexplicable.  Our  returns  show  that 
children  instinctively  and  without  teaching  ascribe  emotion, 
sense,  intelligence,  morality  to  trees.  They  have  arms  and 
legs ;  sap  is  their  blood  or  tears ;  leaves  are  their  dress,  which 
they  feel  ashamed  to  lose ;  their  bark  is  skin ;  they  are  per- 
sonified ;  fall  in  love  with  each  other ;  are  lonesome  if  trees  near 
them  are  felled ;  make  shade,  if  they  are  kind,  just  for  the  chil- 
dren ;  like  to  have  them  around ;  spread  out  their  arms  in  bene- 
diction or  shelter:  watch  over  the  house;  miss  the  children  and 
perhaps  weep  for  lonesomeness  if  they  do  not  play  rotind  them ; 
are  fast  friends  of  the  birds,  who  perhaps  sing  to  put  the  leaves 
to  sleep,  and  are  welcomed  back  in  the  spring ;  trees  feel  hon- 
ored and  joyous  if  birds  build  their  nests  in  them;  hold  out 
their  hands  when  they  are  passing  to  invite  them  to  alight. 
Trees  talk  to  each  other  and  understand  the  thoughts  and  lan- 
guage, at  least  of  the  trees  of  the  same  species,  though  oftener 
of  all  kinds.  They  sometimes  laugh  loudly;  sway  their 
branches  as  if  to  shake  hands;  say  good-night.  The  rustling 
of  their  leaves  is  whispering  of  or  to  the  fairies,  who  live  in 
them ;  "  the  wind  blowing  through  branches  is  leaves  singing 

'  The  latter  (The  Deeper  Teachings  of  Plant  Life ;  New  York,  1902)  would 
restore  this  deep  ancestral  interest  to  its  rightful  place  in  the  soul.  He  even  says 
that  in  flowers  we  see  human  nature  reflected  in  a  way  we  had  lost  sight  of.  In 
the  cotyledons  for  the  nourishment  of  the  young  embryo,  we  have  the  analogue  of 
the  mother's  breast.  We  see  nature  adorning  her  bridal  bower  in  the  spring ;  our 
own  selfishness  in  the  spreading  of  the  flat  leaves  of  the  daisy  round  its  roots  close 
to  the  earth  that  no  other  may  grow  beside  it.  In  the  dried  spathe  of  the  daffodil 
is  the  lesson  of  death,  while  its  blossom,  the  first  in  spring,  means  mortality.  The 
cowslip,  a  belated  primrose,  each  cup  the  home  of  an  elf,  is  the  key  flower  unlock- 
ing the  kingdom  of  heaven  in  the  spring,  through  the  gates  of  which  the  flowers 
issue ;  and  the  bluebell,  the  last  in  the  fall,  is  a  curfew  rung  by  the  trembling 
hand  of  an  old  man  to  bring  us  home,  etc. 


212  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

their  babies  to  sleep ;  trees  of  the  same  kind  like  to  be  planted 
near  each  other,  for  if  an  elm  is  planted  near  a  maple,  it  would 
be  like  putting  an  American  girl  with  a  little  Dutch  girl ;"  but 
trees  can  understand  the  children,  and  the  children  the  trees. 
A  child  of  six,  walking  in  the  woods,  looked  up  and  said,  "  Oh ! 
I  am  only  going  a  little  way,"  because  the  leaves  asked  her. 
To  one  of  ten,  if  the  wind  blew  mournfully,  the  leaves  said, 
"  I  am  sad;  "  if  it  blew  hard,  "  I  am  mad."  To  a  boy  of  ten, 
trees  get  angry  at  the  wind  and  scream,  scold,  and  slap  it.  To 
one  of  eleven  years,  God  comes  into  the  trees  at  times  when 
the  clouds  touch  their  tops.  The  spirit  of  trees  goes  to  heaven. 
They  sing  to  moon  and  stars.  Trees  are  very  often  hugged, 
greeted  after  a  long  absence,  thanked  for  giving  shade.  Trees 
that  cast  no  shadow  are  selfish ;  crooked  trees,  those  that  bear 
no  fruit,  or  are  bitter,  poisonous,  prickly,  malodorous,  are  bad. 
Children  are  pained  and  sometimes  exasperated  at  the  cruelty 
of  trimming  trees.  Dense  forests  soothe,  hush,  and  awe  the 
soul  and  feel  "  like  church." 

I  maintain  that  the  experience  of  the  child  and  its  personal 
relations  can  not  explain  these  phenomena  and  that  we  must 
here  again  have  recourse  to  the  phyletic  history  of  the  soul. 
Perhaps  no  cult  has  been  so  wide-spread  and  persistent  as  that 
of  sacred  trees,  and  few  throw  such  light  on  the  dark  ways 
of  primitive  and  childish  thought.  Nearly  every  early  race 
has  its  sacred  trees  or  groves ;  often  altars  are  set  up  beneath 
them  and  sacrifices  are  made ;  burials  are  among  their  roots  or 
in  their  branches ;  libations  are  poured  upon  them  so  that  often 
they  grow  to  great  size,  because  especially  nourished.  Trees 
are  planted  above  graves,  and  the  soul  of  the  dead  man  or  the 
matter  of  the  corpse  have  some  kind  of  reincarnation  in  the 
life  of  the  tree.  They  are  planted  at  birth  and  there  is  a  close 
rapport  between  the  life  or  fortunes  of  the  tree  and  that  of  the 
man.  Their  juice  is  often  interpreted  as  blood ;  prayers  are 
said  to  them,  if  they  are  to  be  cut;  gifts  are  hung  on  them: 
their  voice  is  often  heard.  Some  think  that  the  first  man  grew 
from  trees.  The  Druids  worshiped  all  trees,  but  thought  the 
mistletoe  especially  sacred.  Spirits  perch  or  live  in  their 
branches ;  God  may  be  incarnate  in  trees  or  make  a  theophany 
in  some  burning  bush.  Trees  are  anointed,  clothed,  fumigated  ; 
have  curative  properties;  are  Dodona  oracles;  have  temples 


ADOLESCENT   FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  213 

built  in  their  honor ;  are  sacred  to  deities — the  oak  to  Jove, 
laurel  to  Apollo,  fig  to  Buddha.  The  evergreens  teach  immor- 
tality, or  the  fruit  of  others  gives  it.  The  glorified  totemic 
world-trees — Yggdrasil,  the  Mohammedan  Tooba,  the  Persian 
Haoma,  are  of  immense  proportions ;  their  roots  hold  the  earth 
together,  are  watered  by  mystic  rivers ;  their  branches  bear  the 
stars  as  fruit,  souls  come  down  them  at  birth,  and  to  climb 
them  is  the  way  to  heaven.  God  is  sometimes  tree-shaped,  and 
tree  was  the  Acadian  idiograph  of  God.  This  cult  survives  in 
the  Christmas-tree  and  May-day  festivals.  The  fruit  of  the 
tree  of  knowledge  gives  wisdom  and  inspiration,  as  that  of  life 
does  immortality.^ 

If  all  this  established  body  of  data  must  be  invoked  and 
conceded  to  have  a  more  or  less  prima  facie  explanatory  power 
for  the  phenomena  of  childhood,  I  think  we  must  boldly  take 
the  further  momentous  step  of  postulating  that  both  the  child- 
ish and  the  ethnic  phenomena,  however  related,  need  ulterior 


^  The  universe-tree  has  been  often  regarded  as  the  axle-tree  of  the  earth.  It 
yields  the  gods  their  soma.  It  is  so  high  that  it  casts  a  shadow  on  the  moon.  Of 
it  the  great  stick  that  churns  the  ocean  is  made.  Yggdrasil  is  the  tree  of  life  and 
the  judgment-seat  of  the  gods.  A  mythological  sucker  which  sometimes  has  be- 
come a  substitute  of  it  is  the  bean-stalk  legend,  of  a  ladder  reaching  from  heaven  to 
earth.  Sometimes  these  mystic  trees  appear  suddenly  and  unexpectedly.  The 
barber's  pole  was  originally  a  human  sacrifice  post  grasped  by  the  victim,  and  later 
colored  with  red  paint  instead  of  blood  ;  this,  the  May-pole,  and  the  mystic  reed,  are 
all  irradiations  of  the  world-tree  in  whose  branches  Osiris's  body  is  suspended  be- 
tween heaven  and  earth.  Sacred  groves,  trees,  and  even  shrubs,  have  been  set 
apart  like  the  rowan  tree,  the  ganus  thorn,  the  mistletoe.  O'Neill  (Night  of  the 
Gods,  vol.  i,  p.  329)  thinks  the  all-embracing  idea  of  the  universe-tree  is  illus- 
trated in  the  two  hundred  or  more  chemicals  made  from  coal  tar,  all  extracted  from 
the  earth  in  past  time  by  trees,  and  ranging  from  Berkeley's  tar  water  to  the  anilin 
dyes,  from  the  strong  acids  to  saccharine,  the  sweetest  thing  known.  Christmas- 
trees,  the  myths  of  Daphne,  the  Druid  religions,  the  Golden  Bough,  all  belong 
here,  as  do  the  Kabeiroi,  the  Dioscures,  Corybantes,  Curetes,  Dactyles,  Tel- 
chines,  and  the  Arvalian  trees. 

Tree  worship  must  have  been  polygenous.  It  prevailed  in  Assyria,  Greece,  Po- 
land, France,  Persia,  and  is  now  found  in  Sahara  and  Central  Africa.  Tacitus 
described  sacred  groves  in  Germany.  On  the  Guinea  coast  nearly  every  village 
has  its  sacred  grove.  Tree  worshipers  are  abundant  among  Filipinos.  They 
are  often  hung  with  ornaments  and  ofTerings.  In  Mexico  useful  trees  and  even 
maize  are  worshiped.  The  Lapps  have  sacred  trees,  sometimes  regarded  as  gods 
themselves,  sometimes  as  ladders. — (The  Origin  of  Civilization,  by  Sir  John  Lub- 
bock ;   London,  1870,  p.   191  e/  seq.) 

Trees  have   strongly  marked  individual,   and   perhaps   still  more  accentuated 


214  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

explanation,  and  suggest  that  we  must  here  invoke  the  hy- 
pothesis of  arboreal  Hfe  in  man's  remote  progenitors.^  The 
argument  may  be  summarized  as  follows : 

The  earth  was  formerly  more  covered  with  forests  than  at  pres- 
ent, and  life  for  higher  anthropoids  nearest  man  in  bodily  structure 
was  for  an  unknown  but  no  doubt  very  prolonged  period  arboreal. 
This  stage  was,  at  any  rate,  protracted  enough  to  modify  the  body 
profoundly  to  fit  the  requirements  of  tree  life.  The  early  primates 
and  primitive  man  were  frugiferous.  Tree  life  lifted  the  fore-quarters 
of  quadrupedal  life  into  the  erect  position ;  differentiated  the  fore  and 
hind  legs,  and  especially  the  fore  and  hind  feet ;  elevated  the  head 
and  balanced  it  upon  the  spinal  column;  opened  the  hip-joint;  brought 
the  shoulder-blades  back  into  nearly  the  same  plane  instead  of  their 
former  parallel  position ;  gave  the  hand  and  arm  its  power  of  inner 
rotation  instead  of  the  palm  facing  backward;  created  the  human 
hand,  in  the  powers  of  which  Huxley  says  man  is  as  much  differen- 
tiated from  the  higher  apes  as  he  is  in  intellect ;  greatly  increased  the 
range  of  motion  in  the  arm  and  brought  handwork  under  the  control 
of  the  mind  and  into  the  focus  of  the  eye  in  what  I  have  elsewhere 
called  its  primary  position ;  ^  developed  the  palmaris  muscle ;  gave 
direction  to  the  hairs  on  the  body,  still  seen  in  the  human  embryo; 
lengthened  the  foot,  still  seen  in  the  negro ;  creased  its  sole,  as  still 
appears  in  infants ;  shaped  and  gave  power  to  the  great  toe  in  ways 
it  still  shows ;  developed  the  remarkable  clinging  power  of  the  fore- 
arm, also  shown  in  Robinson's  study  of  human  infants  a  few  days 
old,  which  at  three  weeks  of  age  can  cling  and  grasp  as  adults  can 
not.'  In  all  these  respects  savage  people  show  closer  correlation  with 
simian  structure  than  civilized  races.  The  female  pelvis;  the  small 
and  large  toes ;  the  scapula  index ;  the  humeral  torsion ;  the  spinal 

specific  characters.  The  apple-tree  is  kindly  and  sheltering ;  the  willow,  lithe  and 
graceful  for  mourning;  the  oak,  strong  and  heroic  ;  the  cedar,  sacred;  the  elm,  the 
hickory,  chestnut,  birch,  beech,  aspen,  spruce,  magnolia,  hemlock,  locust,  linden, 
mahogany,  sycamore,  fir,  rosewood,  almond,  banyan,  ebony,  holly,  bamboo,  catalpa, 
yew,  are  all  types  and  symbols  of  thought  or  illustrations  of  character  about 
which  myth,  fancy,  childish  sentiment,  and  adult  reminiscences  have  spun  a  mani- 
fold texture  of  association.  Even  the  despised  garden  vegetables  (potato,  cab- 
bage, bean,  onion,  pea,  radish,  corn,  beets,  turnip,  carrot,  pumpkin,  squash,  yam, 
rhubarb,  watermelon,  pepper,  citron,  orange,  peanut,  etc.)  have  often  psychic  quali- 
ties and  are  used  as  metaphors  or  descriptions  of  human  traits  and  qualities. 

'  Dr.  Quantz,  who  worked  under  my  direction  and  with  data  which  I  had  col- 
lected to  this  end,  has  written  a  significant  article  to  which  the  reader  is  referred. 
Dendro- Psychoses.  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy. ,  July,  1898,  vol.  ix,  pp.  449-506.  Also 
Philpot :  The  Sacred  Tree.  London,  1897.  Mannhardt :  Baumkultus,  2  vols., 
Berlin,  l875-'77,  pp.  646  and  359. 

'  Notes  on  the  Study  of  Infants.     Ped.  Sem.,  June,  189I,  vol.  i,  p.  130. 

'  See  The  Nineteenth  Century,  November,  1891.     Darwinism  in  the  Nursery. 


ADOLESCENT   FEELINGS  TOWARD  NATURE  215 

curvature ;  relative  length  of  arms ;  the  absence  of  calves  of  the  legs, 
which  were  developed  after  walking  on  the  earth  was  an  established 
habit;  the  form  of  the  nose;  the  size  of  the  brain;  most  of  the  cerebral 
indices;  the  early  closing  of  the  sutures;  the  development  and  opposi- 
tion of  the  thumb — in  all  these  respects,  as  we  go  down  the  scale  of 
civilization,  we  approximate  the  arboreal  form  of  life. 

Passing  from  the  body  to  the  soul  is  like  passing  from  hard  parts, 
which  paleontology  conserves,  to  the  soft  parts,  which  shape  them 
but  are  not  preserved,  so  that  difficulties  are  great  and  we  must  be 
content  with  less  conclusive  evidence.  No  one  familiar  with  the  facts 
now  doubts  that  man  has  inherited  nearly  every  organ  and  tissue  in 
his  body  from  lower  forms  of  life,  and  that  there  are  many  rudimen- 
tary organs  (Wiedersheim  thinks  over  a  hundred)  of  no  use  in  the 
human  stage — mere  pensioners,  relics,  like  silent  letters  in  spelling, 
but  I  think  we  do  not  dishonor  the  soul  by  making  it  no  less  freighted 
with  mementoes  of  earlier  stages  of  development  than  the  body.  We 
must  summarily  break  from  the  arbitrary,  vicious,  and  persistent  in- 
fluence of  Descartes's  automaton  theory,  and  revert  to  a  broader 
and  more  Aristotelian  conception  of  the  soul,  which  conceives  it  as 
more  nearly  coincident  with  life  and  the  evolutionary  push  upward. 
Function  is  as  important,  persistent,  and  as  specifically  characteristic 
as  structure.  It  is  more  variable,  and  perhaps,  when  established,  is 
no  less  stable.  Instincts  are  as  plastic  to  the  environment,  and  in 
man,  since  evolution  focused  on  the  brain,  still  more  so.  The  psychic 
vestiges  in  man,  which  are  suggestive  of  former  arboreal  life,  are  the 
following: 

1.  As  I  have  elsewhere  shown,'  the  fear  perhaps  strongest  and 
most  widely  diffused  in  man  is  that  of  thunder  and  lightning,  a  fear 
out  of  all  proportion  to  the  danger,  as  shown  by  statistics  of  those 
struck  by  lightning,  and  with  nothing  in  man's  present  condition  to 
account  for  its  instinctive  strength.  But  in  tropical  regions  tree  life  is 
particularly  exposed  to  lightning,  for  a  tree  is  a  better  conductor  than 
air,  and  its  tips  attract.  If  then  we  assume  many  generations  of  life 
in  trees,  and  that  this  danger  has  left  its  mark  and  can  be  transmit- 
ted, the  intensity  and  diffusion  of  this  fear  and  awe  is  to  some  extent 
explained. 

2.  Next  in  the  catalogue  of  fears  comes  that  of  reptiles,  and  es- 
pecially serpents.  No  creatures  are  objects  of  such  instinctive  horror 
to  apes  as  snakes,  as  the  literature  well  shows.  Now,  tree-dwellers 
have  ready  immunity  or  escape  from  most  animals  that  prey  upon 
them  except  serpents,  still  the  chief  enemies  of  monkeys,  which  can 
follow  them  into  the  trees  and  prey  upon  their  young.  Although  their 
progressive  movements  are  slow,  their  strike  or  dash  is  sudden,  and 
they  lie  in  wait  in  tree-tops.  Hence  even  in  Ireland,  where  for  gen- 
erations there  have  been  no  snakes,  this  fear  is  strong,  and  again  out 

*  A  Study  of  Fears.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy. ,  January,  1897,  vol.  viii,  p.  201. 


2i6  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

of  all  proportion  to  danger  in  modern  life.  To  be  sure,  serpents  are 
dangerous  on  the  ground,  and  in  some  lands  their  venom  destroys 
hundreds  of  lives  yearly,  so  that  we  must  be  cautious  in  ascribing  too 
much  weight  to  the  inference  here. 

3.  Another  prevalent  fear  is  of  high  winds,  even  in  districts  where 
they  are  rare.  Against  these,  cave-dwellers  would  be  more  or  less 
protected,  and  to  tornadoes  which  destroyed  trees,  wood-dwellers 
would  be  especially  exposed.  Yet  life  in  trees  would  be  still  more  sus- 
ceptible to  air  currents  and  to  storms  of  all  kinds.  The  depth  of  the 
impression  weather  has  made  is  still  seen  in  its  constant  recurrence 
as  a  topic  of  conversation,  even  now  when  we  are  so  protected  by 
clothing  and  houses.  But  life  in  trees  would  be  most  of  all  exposed, 
and  would  thus  intensify  the  fear  with  the  danger. 

4.  Closely  connected  with  this  is  the  habit  of  inducing  sleep  in  in- 
fants by  rocking.  Sleep  is  reversionary.  Rhythm  stamps  the  organ- 
ism. Sailors  on  landing  must  readjust  their  gait;  soldiers  keep  on 
walking  in  sleep ;  children  and  idiots  sway,  and  we  count  or  beat  or  pat 
to  induce  sleep,  and  even  sing  "  Rock-a-by  baby  in  the  tree-top."  For 
creatures  wonted  through  many  generations  to  tree  life,  swaying 
would  be  a  natural  accompaniment  to  sleep,  and  rhythm,  the  mother 
of  poetry  and  music  that  rules  the  soul  in  love,  war,  religion,  would 
be  deeply  ingrained. 

5.  Agoraphobia  is  sometimes  a  very  marked  psychosis,  which 
prompts  its  victims  to  walk  near  houses  or  shelter,  and  gives  them  a 
horror  of  city  squares  or  open  spaces,  exposure  of  which  they  seek  to 
avoid.  In  a  forest-clad  world,  and  especially  for  tree-dwellers,  dan- 
ger was  directly  as  distance  from  this  shelter,  and  we  can  imagine 
that  many  generations  were  required  before  man  could  really  feel  at 
home  in  cleared  open  spaces,  which  brought  new  dangers  to  locomo- 
tion, for  which  arboreal  habits  are  ill  adapted.  Thus,  in  types  of  ar- 
rest or  degeneration,  we  hark  back  to  far  prehistoric  conditions. 

6.  Again,  tree  life  requires  its  own  peculiar  kind  of  locomotion. 
It  developed  longer  than  any  other  after  life  had  emerged  from  the 
primeval  sea  and  perhaps  at  a  greater  distance  from  or  above  it. 
Some  apes  do  not  even  need  to  drink,  but  find  fluid  enough  in  foods. 
Most  vertebrates,  even  mammals,  especially  those  living  in  warm  cli- 
mates, can  swim,  and  many  love  to ;  but  apes  have  a  cat-like  horror  of 
water,  and  it  has  been  stated  that  some  species  can  not  swim.  Human 
infants,  too,  as  I  have  elsewhere  shown,  have  an  untaught  horror  of 
water,^  and  man  must  learn  to  swim.  The  movements  and  organs  de- 
veloped by  life  among  branches  seem  especially  incommensurate  with 
swimming  movements,  although  it  must  be  admitted  that  there  would 
be  less  force  in  this  evidence  taken  by  itself. 

7.  Fear  of  falling  is  another  instinctive  horror  of  children,  whose 
individual  experience  has  not  justified  it.  This  danger,  and  the  per- 
sistent clinging  to  clothes,  beard,  etc.,  may  be  a  reverberation  from  a 

^  A  Study  of  Fears.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy. ,  January,  1897,  vol.  viii,  p.  166. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD  NATURE  217 

life  where  falling  was  an  incessant  danger.     On  this  group  of  cor- 
relations considerable  stress  may  be  laid. 

8.  Despite  this  fear,  children  have  a  strange  propensity  to  climb. 
Before  they  can  walk  they  often  have  an  "  insane  desire  to  climb  up- 
stairs." The  modes  of  creeping  and  of  assuming  the  erect  position 
have  many  suggestions  of  climbing.^  Yet  boys  often  perform  prod- 
igies in  this  respect,  and  often  with  safety  akin  to  that  of  somnam- 
bulists. To  mount  a  high  tree  even  without  the  stimulus  of  nuts  or 
eggs,  perhaps  to  construct  a  tree  platform  like  the  ourang,  and,  as  in 
many  cases  in  our  returns,  to  find  places  where  they  can  readily  pass 
from  tree  to  tree  by  boughs,  even  to  pass  the  night  in  tree  houses, 
with  ladders  drawn  up  for  mimic  safety,  is  often  a  passion.  Man  has 
an  instinctive  pleasure  to  get  up  high  and  look  down  and  afar. 

9.  Among  the  chief  psychic  analogies,  we  must  place  the  extreme 
imitativeness  which  is  so  characteristic  of  the  lowest  savages  and 
still  more  so  of  monkeys,  the  very  verb  to  ape  indicating  where  this 
habit,  which  may  become  a  mania,  is  best  developed.  Motor  imita- 
tions in  children  culminate  early,  before  inhibitory  powers  are  devel- 
oped. In  no  forms  of  life  is  the  impulse  to  mimic,  which  has  been 
lately  so  well  explored  by  psychologists,  so  highly  developed  as  in  the 
apes  and  in  men.  It  is  one  of  the  bases  of  gregariousness,  and  brings 
ape  and  man  into  singular  rapport.  So  similar  are  their  structures 
that  the  movements  of  each  are  significant  to  the  other,  and  to  see 
children  watch  and  mimic  apes  suggests  deep  sense  of  kinship. 

10.  There  are  other  miscellaneous  and  merely  suggestive  intima- 
tions pointing  to  the  same  conclusion  seen  in  some  forms  of  playing 
hide  and  seek ;  some  resemblances  between  the  postures  of  children  in 
sleep  and  those  of  the  ourang  and  chimpanzee;  several  automatisms, 
often  ancestral,  that  suggest  ape  life.  Wild  or  feralized  children  and 
also  idiots  often  develop  ape-like  qualities.  They  often  go  on  all-fours, 
are  expert  climbers,  and  assume,  as  savages  often  do  in  their  dances, 
many  strikingly  ape-like  attitudes  and  contortions,  while  often  their 
physical  features — jaw,  teeth,  length  of  arm,  etc. — point  in  the  same 
direction. 

These  facts  and  inferences,  while  they  can  not  individually  or  even 
collectively  be  said  to  amount  to  demonstration,  erect,  in  my  judg- 
ment, a  strong  probability  in  favor  of  the  theory  which  I  am  urging; 
at  any  rate,  they  give  a  new  genetic  interest  to  the  esthetic  rapport  of 
the  human  soul  with  trees,  and  make  them  an  object  of  such  unique 
zest  to  nature  lovers. 

Now  the  significant  fact  is  that  most  of  both  the  childish 
animisms  and  also  of  these  special  dendropsychoses  fall  away 
or  end  completely  at  puberty,  so  that  there  is  a  striking  con- 

^  Creeping  and  Walking,  by  A.  W.  Trettien.  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  October, 
1900,  vol.  xii,  pp.  1-57. 


2i8  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

trast  between  the  effect  of  this  epoch  upon  the  feelings  for 
trees  and  those  for  flowers.  The  psychic  soil  becomes  poor  and 
thin  for  the  grosser  fancies  of  trees  that  bear  golden  fruit, 
precious  stones,  birds  and  babies,  the  metamorphoses  into  god- 
desses, men  and  maidens,  the  crass  analysis  of  leaves  as  hairs 
or  clapping  hands,  roots  as  feet,  etc.,  before  or  during  the 
earliest  school  years,  and  later  prepubescent  years  are  autumnal 
for  this  deciduous  psychic  foliage.  Here  again  the  early  his- 
tory of  the  race  affords  a  clue.  Frugivorous,  primitive,  trop- 
ical man  often  subsisted  largely  upon  tree  fruit,  the  list  of 
which  from  veritable  trees  of  life  included  many.  He  plucked 
and  ate  through  the  entire  year.  So,  too,  on  arid  plains  a  tree 
was  precious  from  its  associations  with  water,  shade,  shelter, 
and  rest.  All  this,  to  say  nothing  of  tree-dwelling,  would 
favor  the  various  tree  cults  or  even  worship  which  higher 
human  religions  have  condemned,  as  did  so  often  the  ancient 
Hebrews. 

With  the  northern  migrations  those  who  had  once  dwelt  in 
the  tropics  or  jungle  found  tree  fruit  less  abundant  and  edible, 
shade  less  desired  and  better  protection  than  branches  and 
boughs  needed,  so  that  their  psychic  role  declined.  Druidism 
was  perhaps  a  survival  or  attempted  restoration  of  a  cherished 
past,  the  heart  of  which  had  perished.  Again,  in  the  north, 
trees  acquired  a  new  utility  that  was  as  inconsistent  with  re- 
spect for  them  as  was  the  use  of  mummies  as  fuel  with  the  old 
Egyptian  reverence  for  corpses,  as  was  the  function  of  the 
butcher  in  the  shambles  with  the  Hindu  veneration  for  animal 
life,  or  of  the  perfume  manufacturer  with  sentimental  love  for 
his  acreage  of  roses  and  violets.  Not  living,  but  slaughtered 
trees  for  fire-wood  and  dwellings  are  now  needful.  Agriculture, 
too,  makes  war  upon  the  forest  to  clear  land  for  crops.  These 
kings  of  the  vegetable  as  man  is  of  the  animal  world  suffer  dis- 
enchantment, like  currant  once  wnld  and  pretty  in  a  kitchen 
garden,  and  totemism  is  incompatible  with  extermination  of  its 
species.  Somewhere  we  must  perhaps  postulate  a  wood  age 
like  that  of  stone,  iron,  and  bronze,  but  beginning  earlier  with 
the  control  of  fire  and  continuing  after  metals  and  the  ore. 
Once  more  the  century  life  of  a  tree  is  harder  to  oversee  than 
the  annual  life  of  plants  and  flowers,  so  that  it  requires  a  long 
period  of  mental  and  moral  development  to  attain  the  same 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  219 

Standpoint  of  control  and  cultivation,  and  modern  forestry  is 
only  now  fully  domesticating  trees.  Later  esthetic  interest  in 
them  is  less  in  brilliancy  of  blossom,  color,  and  perfume,  and 
more  purely  in  form. 

Thus  modern  youth  is  coming  out  of  the  forest  and  away 
from  its  influence.  Most  of  its  ancestral  effects  upon  his  soul 
are  becoming  more  rudimentary,  and  there  is  much  in  his  en- 
vironment that,  if  it  does  not  actually  score  away  early  den- 
dritic influence,  at  least  tends  to  indifference.  But  while  this 
is  the  general  law  it  is  not  without  limitation  and  important 
exceptions.  He  may  become  more  susceptible  to  the  literature 
of  antiquity,  that  fancied  woodland  scenes  with  fauns  and 
dryads,  tropes  of  sap  or  blood,  milk,  wine,  the  evergreens  or 
trees  of  life,  and  the  symbolism  of  oak,  aspen,  palm,  California 
big  trees,  cypress,  lotus,  banyan,  and  many  others  which  he  has, 
and  perhaps  more  that  he  has  never,  seen.  Class  and  historic 
trees,  those  owned  or  set  out,  can  acquire  much  zest.  The  grand 
myths  of  celestial  or  universe  trees  and  their  mazes  of  allegory, 
as  well  as  family  trees  and  pedigrees,  may  impress  and  even 
instruct  him.  But  like  Arbor  Day,  poetic  anthologies  of  the 
"  Woodman-spare-that-tree  "  order,  and  even  the  tree  raptures 
of  the  modern  field  naturalist,  or  the  wisdom  of  tree  botany,  are 
likely  to  be  in  too  large  measure  adult-made  or  school-bred 
artifacts  that  strike  no  deep  root  in  the  soul.  Very  vital  to  him, 
however,  are  the  influences  of  the  forest  in  solitude.  In  its 
stillness  and  awe  his  thoughts  are  lifted  upward,  his  soul  ex- 
pands, awe,  reverence,  expectation,  poise,  make  it  the  very 
temple  of  the  natural  religion  of  the  heart.  The  lessons  of  life 
and  death,  growth,  age,  and  decay  come  home.  Anything 
might  appear  or  happen  to  his  quickened  fancy.  He  thinks 
inevitably  of  God,  love,  destiny,  and  his  future.  The  wood 
voices  will  bring  out  atavistic  echoes  which  put  him  into  un- 
witting communion  with  his  remote  forebears  and  evoke  latent 
mythopeic  tendencies  otherwise  mute.  If  he  is  ever  to  have  a 
muse,  it  is  here  she  may  first  appear  to  him.  For  many  it  is 
perhaps  a  little  too  solemn  and  tame,  but  every  youth  should 
be  exposed  to  these  sylvan  influences  in  spring,  fall,  summer- 
tide,  and  winter,  for  thus  all  that  is  best  in  his  nature  will  ripen 
and  gain  ascendency.  Thus  adolescence  can  never  do  all  its 
work  without  an  occasional  day  alone  in  a  city  of  trees. 


220  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

XII.  Some  think  the  best  approach  to  psychology  is  the 
study  of  the  instincts  and  Hfe  history  of  animals.  However 
this  be,  this  is  the  natural  beginning  of  zoology,  which  has 
hitherto  been  so  devoted  to  the  study  of  anatomical  form  and 
growth-stages  that  its  representatives  have  grown  not  only 
incompetent  or  unwilling  to  start  aright,  but  have  lost  the  peda- 
gogic sense  of  how  to  do  so.  To  the  young  child,  there  is  no 
gap  between  his  soul  and  that  of  animals.  They  feel,  think, 
act,  much  as  he  does.  They  love,  hate,  fear,  learn,  sleep,  make 
toilets,  sympathize,  and  have  nearly  all  the  basal  psychic  qual- 
ities that  the  child  has.  Indeed,  we  might  almost  define  the 
animal  world  as  consisting  of  human  qualities  broken  up  and 
widely  scattered  throughout  nature  and  as  having  their  highest 
utility  in  teaching  psychology  to  the  young  by  a  true  peda- 
gogical method.  The  pig,  e.  g.,  to  one  who  knows  its  habits 
and  therefore  what  piggish  means,  is  a  symbol  not  only  of 
impetuous  greed  in  eating  and  gross  selfishness,  but  also  of 
filth  and  untidiness,  which  gives  the  child  a  better  conception 
and  a  truer  reaction  to  all  that  these  qualities  mean  in  the  world 
of  man.  To  say  of  a  woman  that  she  is  a  butterfly  or  a  pea- 
cock, describes  traits  which  it  would  take  a  long  time  to  ex- 
plain to  one  who  was  not  familiar  with  these  forms  of  animal 
life.  In  the  same  way  the  goose,  the  fox,  the  eel,  the  lion, 
bulls  and  bears,  the  eagle,  dove,  jay,  cuckoo,  hawk,  pelican, 
crow,  serpent,  gazelle,  cormorant,  badger,  wolf,  tiger,  ele- 
phant, alligator,  fish,  the  frog,  tadpole,  chrysalis  and  its  meta- 
morphoses, the  bee,  ant,  wasp,  the  sloth,  insects,  the  ape,  hiber- 
nation, migration,  nest-building,  and  scores  more,  are  psycho- 
logical categories  or  qualities  embodied  and  exaggerated  so 
that  we  see  them  w^it  large  and  taught  object-lesson  wise,  to 
those  who  live  at  a  stage  when  character  is  being  molded  and 
influenced  pro  or  con  in  each  of  these  directions.  More  than 
one  thousand  editions  of  Reynard  the  Fox  are  enumerated  and 
its  lessons  entered  into  all  the  great  discussions  of  centuries,  for 
it  is  perhaps  the  best  of  all  the  ^sop  class  in  which  the  animal 
fahleaiix  were  a  language  of  man's  moral  nature.  We  might 
add  a  long  list  of  more  or  less  mythic  animals,  the  leviathan, 
phenix,  dragons,  centaurs,  or  popular  misconceptions  of  animal 
traits,  while  children's  fancy  in  creating  impossible  new  ani- 
mals is  still  almost  as  fecund  as  Nature  herself.    Therefore,  we 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS   TOWARD   NATURE  221 

plead  for  menageries,  for  collections  of  animals  in  every  public 
park,  pets,  familiarity  with  stables,  for  school  museums  of 
stuffed  specimens,  and  for  the  flora  and  fauna  of  the  neighbor- 
hood in  every  schoolhouse,  to  say  nothing  of  instruction  in 
every  school  concerning  insects,  birds,  and  animals  which  are 
noxious  and  those  which  are  helpful  to  vegetation,  fruit,  and 
agriculture  generally.  The  story  of  the  gipsy-moth,  the  phyl- 
loxera, the  caterpillar,  the  tobacco-worm,  the  life  history  and 
habits  of  other  parasites  in  the  bark  or  on  the  leaf,  in  seed  or 
pulp,  the  marvelous  habits  of  the  botfly,  the  angle-worm, 
through  whose  body  all  our  vegetable  mold  has  so  often 
passed,  the  common  house  fly  with  its  interesting  story,  the 
grub,  the  wire-worm,  moth  and  bat,  the  food  fishes,  the  peach- 
tree  borer,  the  apple  aphis,  the  tent  makers,  and  many  other  fas- 
cinating living  creatures  which  have  been  so  carefully  studied 
of  late  in  our  agricultural  colleges,  all  these  have  a  moral  as 
well  as  a  scientific  interest  to  childhood  and  constitute  a  kind 
of  knowledge  which  has  an  educational,  to  say  nothing  of  an 
economic,  value,  and  which  must  be  ranked  as  one  of  the  very 
highest. 

Many  animals  excel  man  in  certain  qualities  of  sensation, 
instinct  and  physical  development,  so  that  even  the  adult  is 
often  looking  up  and  studying  higher  qualities  than  his  own  in 
learning  of  animals  and  their  ways.  They  are  not  only  our 
older  brothers,  but  fit  in  some  respects  to  be  our  teachers. 
Man's  supremacy  in  the  world  consists  in  the  fact  that  the 
qualities  in  which  he  excels  animals  are  more  numerous  than 
those  in  which  he  is  inferior  to  them,  and  that  certain  of  these 
qualities  are  developed  in  him  to  a  high  and  perhaps  even  ex- 
cessive degree.  The  unfoldment  of  these,  however,  comes  late 
in  his  own  development,  and  those  which  most  distinguish 
him  from  animals  are  added  last,  so  that  arrest  in  the  critical 
later  stages  of  adolescent  development  condemns  him  to  pass 
through  life  deficient  in  just  those  traits  which  are  most  char- 
acteristically human. 

Children  thus  in  their  incomplete  stage  of  development  are 
nearer  the  animals  in  some  respects  than  they  are  to  adults, 
and  there  is  in  this  direction  a  rich  but  undiscovered  silo  of 
educational  possibilities  which  heredity  has  stored  up  like  the 
coal-measures,  which  when  explored  and  utilized  to  its   full 


222  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

extent  will  reveal  pedagogic  possibilities  now  undreamed  of. 
The  domestication  of  the  two  or  three  hundred  animal  species, 
as  history  shows,  has  largely  been  the  product  of  this  sym- 
pathy with  the  brute  mind  and  life,  and  if  it  be  true,  as  is 
claimed,  that  most  of  all  these  animals  have  been  tamed  by 
woman,  this  is  only  another  illustration  of  the  fact  that  her 
life  and  mind  are  more  generic  than  that  of  man.  Even  the 
children's  instinctive  fears  of  animals,  insects,  etc.,  that  are 
often  harmless,  show  not  only  how  old  and  close  the  relation 
between  man  and  beast  has  been  in  the  past,  despite  the  great 
evolutionary  chasm  caused  by  the  loss  of  whole  series  of  miss- 
ing links,  but  supply  the  other  chief  ingredient  of  interest 
which  is  most  intense  where  fear  and  the  love  which  casts  it 
out  are  battling  for  supremacy,  for,  as  I  have  elsewhere  shown, 
our  souls  in  infancy  are  scarred  with  ancient  fears  as  of  big 
eyes,  teeth,  fur.^  This  stratum  is  one  of  the  very  richest  layers 
in  paleopsychic  development,  and  its  outcrops  in  the  many 
varied  zoolatries  of  savage  life,  which  show  its  strength,  con- 
stitute one  of  the  most  interesting  illustrations  of  the  way  in 
w^hich  the  stages  of  a  child's  development  repeat  those  through 
which  the  race  has  passed. 

All  this  may  be  concisely  illustrated  by  studies  of  the  child's 
relations  to  the  two  commonest  household  pets.  Brehm  says, 
"  We  can  not  conceive  savage  man  without  the  dog,"  and 
Longkanel  adds,  "  The  dog  is  a  part  of  man  himself."  ^  It 
was  an  important  factor  in  helping  him  to  supremacy.  Some 
northern  races  would  now  cease  to  exist  without  it,  as  the 
prairie  Indians  vanished  with  the  buffalo.  It  is  most  com- 
pletely domesticated  and  has  entered  most  deeply  and  sympa- 
thetically into  man's  psychic  life.  It  has  been  a  specialty  in 
art,  for  Landseer  has  been  called  the  "  Shakespeare  of  dogs," 
and  the  world  would  be  poorer  without  the  story  of  Gelert  and 
the  famous  dogs  of  literature  and  history  from  Homer's  Argus 
down.  It  was  already  domesticated  in  paleolithic  days.  Dogs 
have  been  close  companions  of  great  men,  and  for  nearly  a 
quarter  of  a  century  a  French  society  has  conferred  a  colleur 
d'honneiir  upon  dogs  for  acts  of  signal  merit.     Although  do- 


^  See  my  Fears,  sees,  xii-xv,  incl. 
*  Quoted  from  Bucke. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  223 

mestication  probably  early  interfered  with  dog  totemism,  their 
superiority  to  man  in  the  power  of  scent,  orientation,  speed, 
their  patience  with  children,  companionship  in  play  and  hunt- 
ing, dulness  among  races  that  use  them  chiefly  for  food,  their 
hardiness,  diseases,  tricks,  etc.,  all  suggest  improvement  by 
association  with  man  and  participation  in  the  advantages  of 
civilization.  While  some  writers  fear  or  rebuke  too  much  sen- 
timent about  or  interest  in  them,  others  think  far  more  might 
be  done  in  communicating  with  and  training  them  than  has 
even  yet  been  dreamed  of. 

Their  attention  to  small  children  is  often  almost  un- 
bounded and  they  are  their  companions  in  every  aspect  of  their 
life,  share  their  food  and  perhaps  their  bed,  are  their  play- 
fellows, are  talked  to  and  partake  of  all  their  confidences,  are 
taught  their  lessons,  are  thought  to  understand  all,  are  loved 
because  of  their  smooth,  soft,  and  shaggy  coats,  color,  lively 
actions,  and  are  often  treated  with  full  recognition  of  the  qual- 
ities in  which  they  excel  man.  Children  are  credulous  and  un- 
critical about  the  most  remarkable  dog  stories,  are  anthropo- 
morphic and  chummy.  As  Mr.  Bucke  shows,  on  the  basis  of 
2,804  returns,  at  or  soon  after  puberty  important  characteristic 
changes  of  attitude  toward  the  dog  occur.  Boys'  interest  in 
hunting  and  coursing  qualities  rises  sharply,  and  the  hound  is 
invested  with  and  reflects  a  new  interest  and  takes  him  afield. 
Fighting  qualities  are  much  more  appreciated,  dog  fights  more 
absorbing  and  often  cultivated  not  only  instinctively  on  occa- 
sions, but  promoted  and  prepared  for,  while  the  bulldog  be- 
comes a  hero  and  an  object-lesson,  and  perhaps  an  inspirer  of 
pluck,  courage,  gameness,  perseverance,  and  sometimes  has  a 
marked  influence  on  the  boy's  life  and  disposition  for  a  time. 
Again,  there  is  a  new  interest  in  the  dog's  intelligence,  and  the 
boy  not  only  values  but  teaches  tricks  and  boasts  of  the  mental 
qualities  and  sagacious  acts  of  his  pet.  This  is  illustrated  by 
the  downward  curve.  There  is  also  a  new  interest  in  breeds  and 
pedigrees.  The  quality  of  different  species  is  discussed  with 
psychologic  acumen,  and  points  about  eyes,  mouth,  teeth,  tail, 
and  shape  generally,  and  also  the  money  value  of  favorites  are 
foci  of  attention.  While  the  superstitions  of  childhood  are  out- 
grown, credulity  about  general  intelligence  is  for  some  time 
unabated.     Finally,  sexual  differences  are  sharply  developed, 


224  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

girls  preferring  St.  Bernards,  for  their  size,  strength,  protec- 
tion, and  the  sense  of  dependence  they  foster,  as  well  as  for  the 
romance  that  attaches  to  them,  greyhounds  for  their  elegance, 
or  poodles  for  their  beauty,  and  little  dogs  generally,  and  being 
more  prone  to  decorate  with  embroidered  blankets,  orna- 
mental collars,  ribbons,  and  more  sensitive  to  any  hardship  and 
cruelty  they  suffer.  They  are  more  interested  in  face  and 
feature  than  in  general  form,  in  cleanliness,  bath,  toilets,  and 
sometimes  in  dog  hospitals,  regimen,  hygiene,  and  diet,  teach- 
ing them  to  eat  ice-cream  and  confectionery,  etc.  Not  one  in  all 
Bucke's  returns  shows  interest  in  the  dog's  anatomy  by  a  single 
mention.  For  youth,  they  still  have  almost  every  psychic  qual- 
ity of  man,  but  their  limitations  and  arrest  or  inferiority  are 
also  more  clearly  recognized.  In  view  of  all,  Bucke  argues  that 
every  child  and  youth  should  have  a  dog  for  the  moral  and 
psychological  education  they  would  bring  their  masters.  In 
a  well-known  western  summer  school  every  boy  is  given  a 
horse,  and  the  work  of  the  season  consists  chiefly  in  caring  for, 
training,  using,  and  studying  the  horse;  so  the  dog  teaches 
loyalty,  reverence,  and  fidelity,  which  illustrate  the  very 
ideal  of  man's  relation  to  God,  as  well  as  patience,  sympathy, 
good-will,  companionship,  occupation  that  keeps  from  mis- 
chief, and  the  sense  of  responsibility  that  ownership  can  teach. 
To  this  end  also  the  dog  should  be  studied  more  systematically 
and  scientifically.  In  respect  to  this  animal  the  average  child 
should  repeat  somewhat  more  fully  the  history  of  the  race. 

The  cat  represents  the  great  family  of  Felidae,  the  larger 
members  of  which  have  long  been  very  dangerous  to  man. 
Morbid  fears  and  phobias  of  cats  by  both  children  and  adults, 
of  its  eyes  in  the  dark,  of  exceptional  acts,  sizes,  colors,  and 
the  many  uncanny  superstitions  and  proverbs  about  them  and 
their  association  with  witchcraft  suggest  both  that  man's  old 
fear  of  this  genus  has  not  subsided  and  also  that  the  cat  is  not 
yet  fully  domesticated.  In  a  careful  statistical  study  Mr.  C. 
E.  Browne  ^  shows  that  most  cats  get  lost,  run  away,  or  easily 
relapse  toward  the  feral  state,  and  that  the  cat  in  many  house- 
holds is  found  or  rescued  by  the  still  active  domesticating  in- 
stincts of  children.    In  the  lives  of  young  children  the  cat  plays 

^  The  Cat  and  tlie  Child.     Ped.  Sem.,  Macen,  1904,  vol.  xi,  p.  4. 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS   TOWARD   NATURE  225 

an  important  role.  It  is  ceremonially  named,  often  with  epi- 
thets designating  its  form,  acts,  or  traits,  as  names  are  given 
by  our  Indian  tribes,  or  to  dolls.  It  sings,  scolds,  swears, 
smiles,  laughs,  talks,  saying  words  and  sentences,  has  its  own 
code  of  conduct  to  which  it  must  be  trained  with  many  penal- 
ties, is  bad  or  good  in  many  ways  or  degrees.  It  pities,  appre- 
ciates care,  is  sorry,  cross,  understands,  is  moody,  and  ftnis  fclis 
often  means  tears  and  elaborate  funerals.  At  all  ages,  but  far 
more  so  as  puberty  approaches,  the  cat  is  the  girl's  pet  as  the 
dog  is  the  boy's.  Boys'  interest  in  cats  as  fighters,  however, 
rises  very  rapidly  through  the  early  teens,  that  of  the  girls 
rather  declining.  Puberty  at  first  seems  to  augment  in  both 
sexes  the  feeling  that  the  cat  really  "  says  things,"  although 
this  new  sympathy  soon  declines.  Despite  its  cruelty  to  birds, 
etc.,  it  pities  more,  seems  more  musical,  etc.,  just  in  proportion 
as  the  child's  own  psychic  life  expands.  But  even  with  girls 
interest  in  this  pet  after  an  initial  increase  is  greatly  reduced 
again  by  the  middle  teens.  The  varieties  of  punishment  are 
less  and  there  is  less  zest  in  disciplining  it.  It  eats,  sleeps,  is 
cold,  sick,  etc.,  like  us,  but  its  rapport  with  the  child's  higher 
qualities  now  nascent  is  less,  and  it  never  equals  the  dog  in  this 
respect.  Boys  often  become  torturers  or  kill  it  in  a  way  that 
seems  inexcusable,  and  thus  childish  interest  may  come  to  a 
sharply  marked  conclusion.  The  acute  detection  and  respon- 
siveness to  every  feature,  act,  and  trait,  shade  of  eyes,  colors, 
markings,  shape  of  foot,  ear,  degree  of  gentleness,  activity, 
tameness ;  its  most  attractive  quality  of  the  power  to  play ;  its 
size,  which  must  be  adjusted  somewhat  to  that  of  the  child, 
that  it  may  be  easily  handled,  many  animals  being  too  small, 
others  too  big  for  them;  its  nocturnal  habits  in  sleeping  day- 
times ;  its  power  to  climb,  almost  as  impressive  as  that  of  the 
dog  to  swim ;  the  progressive  recognition  of  sex  in  naming 
cats;  the  fact  that  here,  too,  there  is  not  one  expression  of  in- 
terest in  feline  anatomy,  which  many  school  courses  make  so 
prominent ;  the  pubescent  lapse  back  at  first  to  earlier  interests, 
as  if  here  again  adolescence  were  not  so  old  or  mature  as  child- 
hood— in  all  this  we  see  restored  in  childhood  the  psychic  stage 
of  taming  animals  and  how  important  a  factor  in  the  education 
of  a  child  is  experience  with  pets  like  this.     As  no  carnivora 

were  so  well  fitted  to  their  wild  environment  as  the  cat  family, 
54 


226 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


SO  that  its  feral  traits  are  still  almost  intact,  it  appeals  most  to 
girls,  relatively  useless  as  it  is,  in  part  because  the  old  instinct 
which  made  her  the  domesticator  of  wild  animals  survives  best 


Age  7  8  9  10         11         12         13         14         15         16 


Boys'  Intereet  in  cats  i—i .  o  .n.  Boytf  Intpifnt  in  horses 

_____  Girls'    ,(  «      4.  x-xMf-x-     «  "         «  rabbits 

. Boys'    ,f  „  dogs  xxxxxx  Girls'       "        " 

Girls'    ••  •<     •'  ooooooooo     .<  '•        <•  Canarlee 


in  her.  It  is  preeminently  the  plaything  animal,  with  a  place 
in  several  score  of  plays  and  games,  is  highly  anthropo- 
morphized and  so  is  an  important  revealer  of  childhood.  It  is 
sometimes  loved  in  old  age  chiefly  as  a  memento  of  childhood, 
with  which  often  no  animal  is  so  closely  connected. 


ADOLESCENT   FEELINGS  TOWARD  NATURE  227 

Mr.  Bucke  ^  has  made  tentative  but  suggestive  statistical 
curves  showing  pubescent  changes  of  zest  for  some  of  the  com- 
mon forms  of  animal  life,  as  illustrated  on  opposite  page. 

From  the  census  on  which  these  curves  were  constructed, 
it  appears  that  boys'  love  of  and  interest  in  dogs  at  all  ages 
exceeds  that  of  girls,  but  rises  rapidly  from  seven  to  fourteen, 
where  it  appears  to  culminate.  Girls'  interest  follows  rather 
nearly  the  same  curve.  Boys'  interest  in  cats  is  at  all  ages 
much  inferior  to  that  of  girls,  and  appears  to  culminate  at 
eleven,  while  girls'  interest  does  not  increase  after  eight. 
Boys'  interest  in  the  horse  rises  very  rapidly  during  the  early 
teens.  Their  interest  in  rabbits  does  not  appear  to  increase 
after  the  eighth  or  ninth  year,  but  rather  to  decline.  Girls' 
interest  in  canaries  shows  an  early  pubescent  rise.  The  popu- 
larity of  dogs  for  both  boys  and  girls  at  early  puberty  is  more 
and  more  based  upon  their  intelligence.  The  ascription  of  moral 
qualities  and  love  of  animals  generally  undergo  some  decline 
at  the  dawn  of  puberty,  where  there  is  a  stage  of  disillusion 
and  the  high  childish  estimate  is  corrected  by  progressive 
knowledge,  but  after  about  fourteen,  feeling  for  common  ani- 
mals and  a  belief  in  their  intelligence  rise  again.  From  eight 
to  nine  there  is  great  disillusion  of  the  feeling  that  animals 
appreciate  care,  but  the  impression  that  they  do  so,  after  being 
for  a  time  repressed  by  intelligence,  rises  instinctively  again 
later.  Games  of  hide  and  seek,  catch  ball,  etc.,  also  decline 
rapidly  at  about  eight  or  nine  and  thereafter.  The  appreciation 
of  the  utility  of  the  dog  in  both  boys  and  girls  rises  rapidly  and 
steadily  through  the  early  teens.  Disposition  to  train  dogs  in- 
creases very  rapidly  from  ten  to  fifteen.  Of  all  the  animals 
the  dog  is  the  favorite;  cats  follow;  then  come  birds,  rabbits, 
horses,  parrots,  chickens,  pigeons,  squirrels,  and  many  others. 
Although  most  of  the  exploration  in  this  field  of  youthful  in- 
terest is  yet  to  be  done,  and  the  above  conclusions  are  sure  to 
be  more  or  less  modified,  we  can  already  see  that  just  as  man's 
development  would  have  been  very  different  without  animals, 
and  the  fishing,  hunting,  and  pastoral  stages,  so  childhood  is 
maimed  if  long  robbed  of  its  due  measure  of  influences  from 
this  comprehensive  arsenal  of  educational  material.     Indeed, 

^  Cyno.  Psychoses.     Ped.  Sem.,  Dec,  1903,  vol.  x,  pp.  459-513. 


228 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


96fi 


80  J( 


&ii 


4S5( 


32lC 


16lC 
Ages 


r-'y''    \ 


ii) 


12 


li 


Id 


I  can  almost  believe  that,  if  pedagogy  is  ever  to  become  ade- 
quate to  the  needs  of  the  soul,  the  time  will  come  when  ani- 
mals will  play  a  far  larger  educational  role  than  has  yet  been 
conceived,  that  they  will  be  curriculized,  will  acquire  a  new  and 
higher  humanistic  or  culture  value  in  the  future  comparable 
with  their  utility  in  the  past,  and  that  there  will  be  a  new  poign- 
ancy of  regret  over  the  loss  by  extermination  of  many  species 

akin  to  that  now  felt  at  the 
barbaric  iconoclasm  that 
has  deprived  the  world  of 
so  many  of  the  priceless 
monuments  of  antiquity. 

Meanwhile  one  of  the 
greatest  educational  needs 
of  the  present  time  is  not 
one  but  a  series  of  animal 
books,  one  each  on,  e.  g., 
the  dog,  cat,  lion,  the 
monkey,  horse,  snake,  one 
each  on  several  species  of 
birds,  fish,  and  insects,  and 
a  dozen  or  two  more 
of  a  kind  that  does  not  now  exist,  giving  very  little  about 
structure  but  much  about  nests,  food-getting,  migrations,  ani- 
mal families,  homes,  and  colonies,  domestication,  training, 
with  some  standard  tales  and  fables,  folk-lore,  literature, 
breeds,  myth,  and  poetry,  copiously  illustrated,  and  full  of  the 
spirit  of  the  field  naturalist,  observer,  and  lover,  something  of 
animals  famous  in  history,  with  some,  but  not  too  many,  eco- 
nomic uses  and  still  less  technicalities,  and  guided  in  each  case 
by  some  such  studies  as  those  above  instanced  on  the  dog  and 
cat.  To  one  in  rapport  with  interests  of  childhood  and  youth  it 
requires  no  Phaethon  flight  of  imagination  to  see  in  the  future 
a  new  type  of  literature  here  that  will  rescue  the  early  teaching 
of  zoology  from  its  present  degradation,  which  will  utilize  for 
moral  and  humanistic  as  well  as  scientific  uses  a  wealth  of 
natural  zest  now  going  to  waste.  I  am  glad  to  know  a  very 
few  people  who  could  confect  such  a  book,  but  they  are  not 
professors  or  even  high  school  teachers  of  biology,  for  these 
have  singularly  lost  contact  with  the  nature  and  needs  of  child- 


-Boys  who  train-  doga 


GirlB 


ADOLESCENT  FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  229 

hood  and  youth  and  regard  the  spirit  of  Brehm's  Thierleben 
as  obsolete  and  unscientific. 

Finally,  in  view  of  all  this,  there  is  no  other  possible  con- 
clusion than  that  the  problem  of  teaching  sciences  in  the  teens 
is  in  the  main  yet  to  be  solved.  City  life  favors  knowledge  of 
mankind,  physics,  and  perhaps  chemistry,  but  so  removes  the 
child  from  the  heavens  and  animate  nature  that  it  is  pathetic 
to  see  how  unknown  and  merely  bookish  knowledge  of  them 
becomes  to  the  town-bred  child.  Biology,  that  has  given  us  evo- 
lution, is  perhaps  farthest  from  recognizing  the  necessity  of 
developing  a  genetic  pedagogy  that  shall  very  slowly  pass  over 
to  the  adult  logical  stage  which  cross-sections  it  only  when  it 
has  completed  its  own.  How  undeveloped  the  development 
theory  still  is  is  here  seen  in  the  fact  that  it  has  not  yet  drawn  its 
own  obvious  but  momentous  lesson  for  education  where  it  has 
its  most  fruitful  field  of  application.  When  this  science  knows 
life  histories  as  well  as  it  does  morphology  it  will  have  the 
material  with  which  to  begin  aright.  We  no  longer  deform  the 
child's  body,  and  have  in  more  and  more  ways  recognized  its 
rights,  but  we  still  arrest  and  even  mutilate  the  soul  of  adoles- 
cence by  prematurely  forcing  it  into  the  mental  mold  of 
grown-ups.  Instead  of  the  ideal  of  knowing  or  doing  one 
thing  minutely  well,  like  the  ant,  bee,  or  wasp,  we  should  con- 
struct, even  if  at  certain  points  it  be  done  tentatively  and 
out  of  glimpses,  apcrgns,  hints,  a  true  universe,  and  pass 
from  the  whole  to  parts  and  not  vice  versa.  Love  of  nature 
always  burgeons  in  the  soul  of  youth,  but  its  half-grown  buds 
are  picked  open  or  stunted,  and  disenchantment  too  often 
leaves  the  soul  only  a  few  mouthfuls  of  wretched  desiccated 
phrases,  as  meager  and  inadequate  as  those  of  poetry  in  a  con- 
ventional age  that  has  drifted  far  from  her.  A  true  pedagogy 
of  science  is  in  large  measure  yet  to  be  developed.  Art,  liter- 
ature, and  perhaps  above  all,  religion,  need  this  reconstruction, 
and  I  could  not  be  an  optimist  in  education  if  I  did  not  expect 
its  coming  without  the  shadow  of  a  doubt. 

Harnack  says,  "  How  often  in  history  theology  has  only 
been  a  means  of  setting  religion  aside."  It  is  just  as  true 
that  science  is  often  taught  in  a  way  to  destroy  the  love  of  the 
very  department  of  nature  it  should  develop.     The  only  cor- 


230  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

rective  is  to  introduce  evolution  as  a  conscious  method,  a  goal 
to  which  everything  focuses  to  a  great  unity.  Heredity,  varia- 
tion, recapitulation,  natural  and  artificial  selection,  the  strug- 
gle for  existence,  parasitism  and  retrogression,  development 
histories,  lessons  from  paleontology,  etc.,  are  perfectly  practical 
themes  when  made  concrete  in  the  high  school.  There  is  no 
such  correlation  and  coordination,  no  such  lever  of  culture, 
nothing  so  educational,  necessary,  and,  I  believe,  inevitable. 
Nor  should  it  be  restricted  to  the  biological  field  where  it  is 
always  implicit  and  irrepressible  to  even  youthful  minds  that 
have  begun  to  really  think.  The  proper  introduction  to  nature 
study  in  adolescence  includes  ether,  nebulae,  young  and  old 
worlds,  rotation  of  cooling  masses,  and  formation  of  orbits 
and  systems,  the  geological  strata,  the  ascending  orders  of  life, 
the  descent  of  man,  his  primitive  modes  of  life,  thought,  and 
feeling,  as  taught  by  anthropology,  the  unfoldment  of  arts, 
industries,  social  life,  culture,  the  stages  of  development  of 
science  and  the  great  heroes  of  each,  and  finally  the  slow 
growth  of  morals  and  religion  and  their  institutions.  This 
view  of  the  world  is  the  greatest  achievement  of  our  race,  re- 
establishes on  firmer  bases  all  the  goods  and  truths  men  have 
striven  and  died  for  in  the  past,  takes  away  nothing,  gives 
back  and  enriches  all  that  is  w^orth  while  that  was  thought 
imperiled,  gives  all  who  teach  it  wisely  and  well  new  mission- 
ary zest  for  their  work,  and  fires  the  heart  and  mind  of  youth. 
Its  unprecedented  pedagogic  motive  power  is  still  for  the 
most  part  unutilized.  It  is  a  new  educational  gospel  just  re- 
vealed and  not  yet  proclaimed.  Adequately  taught  it  would 
revolutionize  not  only  instruction  in  science  but  in  every  other 
department.  The  enthusiasm  at  new  utilizations  of  natural 
forces,  legitimate  as  it  is,  is  a  low  thing  compared  with  that 
felt  when  some  great  law  or  group  of  facts  swings  into  its 
true  place  in  the  development  history  of  the  world.  Of  all 
pedagogic  problems  since  the  Renaissance  the  greatest  and 
most  pressing  is  now  upon  us,  viz.,  to  bring  out  these  latent 
educational  potentialities  in  effecting  what  Forel  calls  the  next 
step  in  increasing  the  perfectibility  of  man.^ 

^  As  I  write  comes  a  modest  attempt  to  begin  just  this  work  in  the  earliest  teens. 
Die  Abstammungs  Lehre  im  Unterricht  der  Schule,  by  W.  Schoenichen.  Leipzig, 
1903.  See  also  attempts  by  D.  K.  Shute,  A.  W.  Bickerton,  A.  R.  Dewar,  C. 
Morris  &  Co. 


ADOLESCENT   FEELINGS  TOWARD   NATURE  231 

Christianity  not  only  depends  on  but  recognizes  the  relig- 
ion of  nature  that  underlies  it  in  ever  more  conscious  and 
still  more  unconscious  ways.  The  sentiments  on  which  the 
highest  religion  rests  are  best  trained  in  children  on  the  no- 
blest objects  of  nature.  Natural  theology  once  had,  and  is 
destined  in  new  forms  to  have  again,  a  great  role  in  the 
intellectual  side  of  religious  training.  So,  too,  in  many  sum- 
mer meetings,  twilight  services  on  hills  or  exposed  to  vesper 
influences,  perhaps  out  of  doors,  are  found  to  have  wondrous 
reenforcements.  Worship  on  a  hill  or  mountain,  at  the  shore, 
out  at  sea,  under  towering  trees,  or  in  solemn  forests  or  flowery 
gardens,  amidst  harvest  scenes,  in  moonlight,  at  midnight,  at 
dawn,  in  view  of  the  full  moon,  with  the  noises  of  the  wind 
or  streams,  the  hum  of  insects,  the  songs  of  birds,  or  in  pastoral 
scenes,  is  purer  and  more  exalting  for  these  pagan  influences 
set  to  the  music  of  nature  from  which  they  all  took  their  origin, 
than  it  can  ever  be  in  stuffy  churches  on  noisy  city  streets  upon 
the  dull  or  familiar  words  of  litany,  sermon,  or  Scripture. 
Here,  again,  so-called  "  progress  "  has  broken  too  completely 
with  the  past  and  forgotten  the  psychogenesis  of  religion, 
which  has  thus  grown  anemic,  superficial,  and  formal.  It  is 
the  old  error  of  amputating  the  tadpole's  tail  rather  than  letting 
it  be  absorbed  to  develop  the  legs  that  make  a  higher  life  on 
land  possible. 


CHAPTER   XIII 

SAVAGE  PUBIC   INITIATIONS,   CLASSICAL  IDEALS  AND  CUSTOMS, 
AND   CHURCH  CONFIRMATION 

I.  Pubic  initiation  among  Thlinkets,  Metlakahtlans,  Omahas,  Hupas,  Hopis, 
Zunis,  Seris,  Brazilians,  Aztecs,  Australians,  Papuans,  ancient  inhabitants  of 
India,  Zulus,  Pygmies,  Bechuanas,  Kosas — Circumcision  once  a  wide-spread 
pubic  rite — Its  value  and  meaning.  II.  Ephebic  education  in  ancient  Greece 
and  Rome — The  use  of  song,  poetry,  myth,  philosophy,  physical  and  military 
training,  antique  music,  ceremonies,  higher  education,  politics,  the  toga  virilis. 
III.  The  advent  of  youth  in  medieval  knighthood.  IV.  Religious  confirma- 
tion, its  ceremonies  and  the  ideas  that  underlie  them,  among  (a)  the  Jews ;  {p) 
Catholics ;   {c)  Russians  ;   (d)  Episcopalians ;  {e)  Lutherans. 

After  the  chapters  on  love  and  on  the  feelings  for  nature, 
and  before  considering  the  subjective  religious  changes  at  this 
stage  of  life,  we  must  pause  to  describe  the  objective  regimen  to 
which  youth  have  been  subjected  as  they  cross  the  threshold 
from  childhood  to  maturity.  The  universality  of  these  rites 
and  their  solemn  character  testify  impressively  to  a  sense  of 
the  critical  importance  of  this  age  almost  as  wide  as  the  race. 
Here  education  began  and  extended  up  toward  more  mature 
years  and  downward  toward  infancy  almost  in  exact  propor- 
tion as  civilization  and  its  luggage  of  cultures  and  skills  in- 
creased. The  functions  of  the  teacher  began  genetically  with 
the  rude  regimentations,  tortures,  mutilations,  instructions 
often  most  antihygienic,  and  immoral  ceremonies  of  these 
initiations  to  manhood,  womanhood,  and  often  at  the  same 
time  to  nubility,  with  almost  no  interval  after  the  first  physical 
signs  of  puberty,  for  the  slow  processes  of  maturation  of  body 
and  soul.  The  progressive  increase  of  this  interval  is  another 
index  of  the  degree  of  civilization,  as  is  also  the  mitigation  of 
the  primitive  perversity  of  the  early  teacher  to  which  in  recent 
centuries  individuals  and  localities  have  often  tended  to  relapse. 
Of  the  importance  of  this  stage  of  transition,  religion,  which  is 
so  preeminently  conservative,  has  preserved  the  best  and  most 
adequate  sense.  It  still  maintains  the  idea  that  the  great  change 
232 


SAVAGE  PUBIC   INITIATIONS  233 

is  fixed,  brief  in  time,  radical  in  nature,  and  mediated  to  a 
greater  or  less  extent  by  external  pious  offices.  Secular  and 
purely  intellectual  education,  however,  has  broken  so  radically 
with  the  consensus  of  the  past  as  to  retain  no  vestige  of  recog- 
nition of  this  great  revolution,  and  hence  natural  interest, 
which  is  to  the  school  what  the  Holy  Spirit  is  to  the  Church 
or  his  Muse  to  the  poet,  has  been  ignored  and  even  suspected, 
and  motivations  of  utility,  always  of  a  far  lower  order,  or  else 
the  pedagogic  fictions  of  special  disciplinary  virtue  inherent 
in  indifferent  or  abhorred  studies,  which  is  the  last  resource  of 
the  baffled  and  belated  conservatives,  have  been  invoked  in 
its  place.  Credo  quia  absitrdnm  had  some  justification,  be- 
cause the  heart  often  needs  what  the  head  condemns.  Doceo 
quia  abhorrendum  has  none,  and  its  analogies  are  with  methods 
of  the  savage  past,  of  which  I  now  give  the  best  samples,  which 
might,  however,  be  greatly  increased  in  number.  It  would 
seem  that  among  American  aborigines  the  girl  receives  most 
attention,  while  in  Africa  and  in  the  Eastern  islands  it  is  be- 
stowed upon  the  boy. 

I.  Primitive  People — (o)  American  aborigines. — In  the  life  of 
the  Thlinket  there  is  almost  nothing  between  childhood  and  adult  age. 
"  Youth,  that  delicious  pause  between  infancy  and  maturity,  has  no 
place  in  his  existence.  At  an  age  when  our  children  are  barely  ready 
to  lay  aside  pinafore  and  short  trousers,  Alaskan  boys  and  girls  are 
declared  old  enough  to  marry  and  begin  life  for  themselves." '  "  The 
first  great  event  in  the  Thlinket  girl's  life  is  her  arrival  at  maturity." 
The  old  custom  was  to  banish  her  for  six  months  in  a  small  out- 
house, from  which  she  could  not  stir  except  after  dark,  when  she 
must  go  with  her  mother,  and  wear  a  peculiar  cloak  or  hood  as  badge 
of  her  condition.  The  daughters  of  the  rich  were  imprisoned  longer, 
but  in  larger  huts,  sometimes  elegant,  and  with  several  girl  friends. 
Sometimes  a  corner  of  a  room  was  partitioned  off  for  her  by  boards 
and  blanket  screens.  During  this  isolation  she  was  kept  very  busy 
early  and  late  sewing  squirrel  skins  into  blankets,  and  weaving  hats 
and  baskets,  to  teach  her  industry  and  patience.  On  the  first  day  of 
her  retreat,  a  tiny  pin  was  inserted  through  her  lower  lip  by  a  slave, 
who  was  then  either  freed  or  killed,  according  to  the  mood  of  his 
master.  This,  on  the  wedding-day,  was  changed  to  a  labret.  The 
first  four  days  were  a  fast ;  then  the  mother  brought  a  little  grease  and 
a  tiny  basket  of  water.     The  latter  must  be  overturned  three  times 

1  Thlinkets  of  Southeastern  Alaska,  by  F.  Knapp  and  R.  L.  Childe.  Chicago, 
1896,  chap.  vii. 


234  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

before  she  could  drink,  to  teach  her  self-denial.  Then  she  could  eat 
the  grease  and  sip  four  swallows  of  water  through  the  hollow  bone 
of  a  stork's  leg.  Complimentary  boxes  of  grease  were  also  sent  out 
to  the  chief  families  of  the  father's  totem.  Then  followed  another  four 
days  of  fast,  and  then  a  regular  diet  of  dried  venison,  fish,  and  pota- 
toes ;  but  great  care  must  be  exercised,  for  fat  meat  would  make  her 
stout,  clams  lean,  anything  raw  would  make  her  die  young,  portions 
of  the  salmon  would  make  her  thoughts  transparent.  Should  she  dress 
her  hair  before  the  fifth  day,  it  would  come  out.  She  must  not  move 
about  much,  lest  she  acquire  habits  of  restlessness ;  must  not  talk 
much,  lest  she  become  a  scold.  Reserve,  self-control,  and  the  weigh- 
ing of  consequences  were  emphasized.  She  soon  took  this  life  philo- 
sophically, and  strove  to  fix  all  her  thoughts  upon  rapid  workman- 
ship and  skilful  weaving.  Her  prayers  during  this  seclusion  were 
very  effective.  When  this  period  was  over,  the  friends  of  the  parents 
were  invited  orally  "  to  see  the  girl  behind  the  cloth."  At  this  com- 
ing-out feast  the  daughter  was  introduced  to  the  young  men  of  the 
opposite  phratry.  Wealthy  families  made  great  potlatches.  The  de- 
butante was  led  out  by  her  mother  and  girl  friends,  in  a  new  calico 
dress,  costly  Chilkat  blanket,  and  basket-woven  conical  hat  with  to- 
temic  designs,  silver  and  abalone  rings  in  her  nose,  broad  bands  of 
silver  from  her  wrists  to  her  elbows,  many  rows  of  fancy  beads  about 
the  ankles,  and  embroidered  moccasins.  She  was  mounted  on  a  box. 
Conscious  of  looking  her  best,  she  met  without  flinching  the  gaze  of 
the  curious.  If  she  were  healthy  and  industrious,  modest  and  re- 
served, spoke  slowly,  quietly,  and  moved  deliberately,  and  especially 
if  she  had  gained  a  reputation  for  unusual  industry  and  skill,  suitors 
abounded  and  she  was  very  soon  married. 

"  It  was  the  custom  among  the  Metlakahtlans  to  confine  for  one 
month  in  an  isolated  cabin  girls  when  attaining  the  age  of  puberty, 
usually  their  thirteenth  year.  No  one  is  allowed  to  see  them  during 
this  time,  and  it  is  supposed  they  are  away  on  a  voyage  to  the  moon 
or  some  other  celestial  abode,  and  at  the  end  of  the  month  they  return 
to  their  people,  amid  great  feasting  and  rejoicing."  On  these  occa- 
sions, and  when  youth  are  initiated  into  the  mysteries  of  Shamanism, 
dog-eating,  devil-dancing,  cannibalism,  and  the  reckless  giving  away 
or  destruction  of  property  occur.^ 

The  Omaha  child  was  initiated  into  the  tribe  at  three,  but  its  in- 
dividual life  did  not  begin  till  its  mind  had  "  become  white,"  or  till 
events  are  recalled  with  clearness  and  full  detail.  This  comes  at 
about  the  age  of  puberty,  when  the  youth  is  "  inducted  into  religious 
mysteries  by  a  distinct  personal  experience  acquired  by  the  rite,  Non- 
zhin-zhon,  which  brought  them  into  what  was  believed  to  be  direct 
communications  with  the  supernatural  powers.  In  preparation  for  this 
rite  the  Omaha  youth  was  taught  the  tribal  prayer.  He  was  to  sing 
it  during  the  four  nights  and  days  of  his  vigil  in  some  lonely  place. 

>  The  Story  of  Metlakahtla,  by  G.  H.  S.  Wellcome.     New  York,  1887,  p.  7. 


SAVAGE  PUBIC  INITIATIONS  235 

As  he  left  his  home  his  parents  put  clay  on  his  head,  and  to  teach  him 
self-control  they  placed  a  bow  and  arrows  in  his  hand,  with  the  in- 
junction not  to  use  them  during  his  long  fast,  no  matter  how  great 
the  temptation  might  be.  He  was  bidden  to  weep  as  he  sung  the 
prayer  and  to  wipe  his  tears  with  the  palms  of  his  hands,  to  lift  his 
wet  hands  to  heaven,  and  then  lay  them  on  the  earth.  With  these 
instructions,  the  youth  departed  to  enter  upon  the  trial  of  his  endur- 
ance. When  at  last  he  fell  into  a  sleep  or  trance  and  the  vision  came 
of  bird  or  beast  or  cloud,  bringing  with  it  a  cadence,  this  song  became 
ever  after  the  medium  of  communication  between  man  and  the  mys- 
terious power  typified  in  his  vision,  and  by  it  he  summoned  help  and 
strength  in  the  hour  of  his  need."  The  words  of  the  prayer  are  ad- 
dressed to  Wa-Kon-da,  the  power  thdt  makes  and  brings  to  pass  and 
is :  "  Here,  needy,  he  stands,  and  I  am  he."  It  is  far  older  than  the 
advent  of  Columbus.  It  is  a  cry  voicing  the  climactic  desire  of  the 
youth  in  his  weary  fast  and  vigil,  as  after  long  preparations  he  faces 
nature  and  the  supernatural  above.  The  melody  is  so  soulful  and 
appealingly  prayerful  that  one  can  scarcely  believe  it  to  be  of  bar- 
barous origin,  yet  what  miracles  may  not  religious  feeling  work !  The 
boy  is  waiting,  in  fact,  for  a  vision  from  on  high,  a  revelation  to  be 
vouchsafed  to  him  personally,  and  to  show  what  his  life  is  to  be, 
whether  that  of  a  hunter  or  of  a  warrior,  medicine  man,  etc' 

Miss  Fletcher  also  writes  me,  May  i6,  1903:  "Among  the  tribes 
with  which  I  am  acquainted  there  are  ceremonies  at  puberty,  but 
they  are  rather  simple.  At  maturity  the  parents  of  a  girl  make  a 
feast,  or  else  defer  the  feast  until  the  time  of  some  tribal  gathering  or 
festival.  At  this  feast  the  girl  is  clad  in  gala  dress,  and  makes  many 
gifts  to  the  guests.  She  stands  beside  her  mother,  and  with  her  own 
hand  offers  the  presents.  The  official  herald  sometimes  proclaims  this 
feast,  and  those  who  receive  gifts  shout  or  sing  their  thanks.  By 
this  act  the  girl  takes  her  place  among  the  mature ;  but  in  olden  times 
she  was  not  considered  marriageable  until  she  had  mastered  certain 
arts,  as  the  tanning  of  skins,  cutting  and  making  garments  and  tents, 
etc." 

The  Hupa  Indians  of  California  have  a  somewhat  elaborate  cere- 
mony of  initiating  girls  into  maturity.'  At  the  dawn  of  first  menstrua- 
tion the  girl  goes  to  one  of  the  established  bathing  places  in  a  creek 
near  by,  enters  the  water  at  once  to  her  waist,  throws  it  over  each 
shoulder  twice  with  her  hands,  returns  to  the  house,  stoops  and  puts 
out  her  hands,  looks  at  the  door,  but  does  not  enter.  She  then  runs  to 
another  bathing  spot  about  half  as  far  from  the  house  as  the  first, 
bathes,  and  goes  back  in  the  same  way.  Then  she  goes  to  a  third 
place  half  the  distance  of  the  second.  Returning  from  this  last  ex- 
cursion, she  brings  some  wood  into  the  house,  which  no  girl  can  do 

*  Alice  C.  Fletcher:  Indian  Story  and  Song  from  North  America,  1900,  p.  27 
et  seq. 

■  *  Goddard:   Life  and  Culture  of  the  Huap,  vol.  i,  p.  53  et  se^- 


236  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

before.  She  must  not  eat  until  this  is  done,  and  her  chaperon  gives 
her  but  one  regular  meal  a  day.  She  must  go  without  drinking  water 
for  ten  days,  during  which  this  ceremony  is  repeated,  and  must  live 
upon  acorn  mush,  dried  eels,  and  salmon,  but  must  eat  no  fresh  fish. 
During  all  this  time  she  must  wear  a  dress  made  of  the  inner  bark  of 
the  maple,  shredded  out  and  woven  into  cloth,  such  as  those  women 
who  are  training  to  be  doctors  always  wear  thereafter.  She  must 
never  touch  her  hair  or  face,  is  dressed  by  the  chaperon,  and  wears  a 
sharp  bit  of  bone  about  her  neck,  shaped  something  like  a  human  nail, 
with  which  she  may  scratch  her  hair.  If  she  touches  it  with  her  own 
nails  they  will  decay  and  fall.  During  these  days  she  must  not  look 
at  the  sky,  must  look  no  one  in  the  face,  least  of  all  a  man,  and  while 
in  the  house  is  covered  with  a  blanket  if  a  man  enters.  She  must  be 
very  careful  in  her  acts  and  words,  for  whatever  she  says  or  dreams 
during  these  ten  days  will  come  true,  and  she  will  ever  afterward  be 
what  she  was  during  her  training.  It  is  considered  an  honor  to  go 
through  the  entire  period,  and  many  are  not  able  to  stand  the  train- 
ing so  long. 

The  second  night,  dancing  begins.  It  is  in  the  house,  but  the  g^rl 
is  covered  with  a  blanket.  In  the  dances  the  women  sit  around  the 
wall,  and  the  men  shake  and  brandish  sticks  made  of  mock  orange, 
split  at  the  end  so  that  they  will  rattle,  and  decorated  with  paint. 
When  the  men  go  out,  at  intervals  of  about  an  hour,  the  women  sing. 
This  lasts  for  nine  nights.  At  the  concluding  session  a  special  song 
is  sung,  which  is  not  allowed  at  any  other  time,  during  which  the 
blanket  is  held  over  the  girl  and  struck  with  sticks.  When  the  men 
leave  at  daybreak,  the  girl  is  uncovered  and  comes  forth.  Two  women 
stand  in  front  of  the  house,  one  hundred  yards  from  it,  facing  each 
other,  holding  abalone  shells  high  above  them.  As  the  girl  comes 
toward  them  she  whips  herself  over  the  shoulder  with  woven  strands 
of  maple  bark  like  her  dress.  She  approaches  and  then  backs  from 
the  women,  all  the  while  whipping  herself.  When  near  them  she 
leaps  up  and  gazes  into  the  shells,  repeating  this  ten  times  for  each 
woman.  She  has  now  seen  the  world  of  the  immortals,  and  makes  a 
final  trip  to  the  bath,  followed  by  small  boys,  who  try  to  make  her 
look  back.  If  they  succeed,  all  the  ceremony  has  to  be  begun  again. 
When  the  bath  is  ended  she  is  a  free  woman.  Sometimes  the  dance  is 
omitted.  It  is  said  that  no  such  ceremonial  is  known  for  young  men 
among  this  tribe. 

Among  the  Crescent  City  Athabascan  Indians  a  similar  ceremony, 
with  some  variation,  is  established.  There  are  usually  two  meals  a 
day,  although  some  eat  but  twice  in  the  entire  ten  days ;  the  less  eaten, 
the  better.  Instead  of  bathing,  the  girl  must  swim,  and  before  daylight, 
and  that  for  four  months.  No  man  and  not  even  a  boy  must  be  in 
the  house  when  she  eats.  Her  body  is  cut  with  sharp  grass.  Medi- 
cine is  made  over  her  food.  She  must  now  wear  in  her  nose,  which 
has  been  previously  pierced,  the  feather  of  the  yellowhammer.  In 
the  dance  there  are  six  very  distinct  motions.     She  must  peep  into 


SAVAGE   PUBIC   INITIATIONS  237 

the  house  five  times  before  entering,  and  walk  up  and  down  five  times 
behind  the  door.  Sometimes  the  dance  is  repeated  at  the  advent  of 
the  second  period.  Every  absentee  must  have  an  effigy  representing 
him  if  he  would  live  long.  All  is  done  with  the  strictest  solemnity 
and  seriousness. 

J.  Walter  Fewkes  writes  me,  May  18,  1903 :  "  The  Hopi  maid,  at 
the  time  of  her  first  menstruation,  invites  her  girl  friends  to  a  family 
festival,  which  one  often  '  happens  in  upon '  in  prowling  about  the 
pueblo.  Naturally,  the  participants  are  very  shy,  and  although  I  have 
occasionally  seen  the  girls  grinding  corn  in  company — which  is  part 
of  the  festival — I  have  never  been  able  to  gather  much  about  it 
except  that  it  was  elaborate  and  had  secret  rites.  With  the  boys  I 
suppose  the  flogging  ceremony  '  ay  Powamii '  is  practically  a  puberty 
rite." 

James  Mooney  writes  me.  May  30,  1903 :  "  From  general  acquaint- 
ance with  Indian  things  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  practically  every 
tribe  has  some  puberty  rite  for  girls,  and  many  of  them  for  boys  also. 
With  boys  the  '  medicine  dream,'  in  which  the  young  man  fasted, 
prayed,  and  kept  vigil  to  obtain  visions  of  his  future  guardian  spirit, 
took  the  place  of  the  puberty  rite  in  some  tribes.  The  Mescalews  have 
a  puberty  dance  for  girls,  a  public  coming-out  ceremony.  The  Chey- 
ennes  have  a  private  purification  rite  for  girls,  which  takes  place 
within  the  tipi  in  the  presence  of  certain  old  women,  the  girl  stand- 
ing over  a  sort  of  burning  incense  while  the  prayers  are  recited.  The 
Qutayu,  an  ancient  incorporated  tribe  of  the  Cheyennes,  had  a  puberty 
rite  for  boys,  during  which  the  young  man  was  painted  over  his  whole 
body  with  Indian  red,  which  probably  remained  as  a  public  notifica- 
tion of  the  fact  until  it  wore  off,  the  Qutayu  men  wearing  only  the 
G-string.  The  Cheyenne  ceremony  for  girls  was  probably  closely 
paralleled  among  most  of  the  Plain  tribes.  The  regular  menstrual  se- 
clusion and  taboo  for  women  seems  to  have  been  universal,  and  still 
exists  in  most  tribes." 

Mrs.  M.  C.  Stevenson  writes,  September  25,  1903  :  "  With  the  Zunis 
marriage  usually  occurs  at  very  tender  years,  girls  frequently  marry- 
ing two  years  before  reaching  puberty ;  but  should  one  not  be  married 
at  the  time  she  arrives  at  womanhood,  her  mother  goes  to  the  house 
of  the  paternal  grandmother  and  informs  her  of  the  event.  The  grand- 
mother returns  with  the  mother  (if  the  grandmother  is  not  living  the 
paternal  aunt  fills  the  place),  and  the  girl  accompanies  her  grand- 
mother to  her  dwelling,  where  she  labors  hard  all  day  grinding  corn. 
When  the  girl  returns  to  her  home  in  the  evening  she  carries  a  bowl 
of  meat-stew  prepared  and  presented  by  the  paternal  grandmother, 
who  returns  with  her  to  her  house.  If  a  girl  works  hard  at  the  dawn 
of  her  womanhood,  she  will  not  suffer  pain  at  this  period ;  should  she 
be  idle  on  the  first  day,  she  will  always  suffer  from  dysmenorrhea. 
This  is  the  only  occasion  when  a  woman  makes  a  point  of  exerting 
herself  during  menstruation.  As  a  rule  the  women  walk  but  little  at 
this  time ;  they  are  excused  from  carrying  water  from  the  well.    This, 


238  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

however,  is  not  due  to  any  particular  weakness  at  this  period,  though 
the  women  do  suffer  to  some  extent.  They  employ  themselves  with 
indoor  work  (a  Zufii  woman  is  never  idle),  usually  weaving  or  grind- 
ing, sitting  at  the  loom  or  kneeling  before  their  mills  over  heated  sand 
spread  thickly  upon  the  floor.  Their  robes  are  brought  up  around 
their  waists  and  blankets  are  fastened  round  their  shoulders,  falling 
loosely  to  the  floor,  covering  all  traces  of  the  sand.  [This  custom 
has  been  largely  discontinued  since  I  secured  the  confidence  of  the 
women.]  Extreme  delicacy  is  observed  by  the  women  at  this  period. 
A  heated  stone  is  worn  in  the  belt  and  a  hot  tea  made  of  cedar  is 
frequently  drunk.  The  menses  usually  continue  four  days,  but  in 
some  cases  cease  at  the  expiration  of  two  or  three  days.  The  Zufii 
women  are  not  segregated  during  this  period.  It  is  claimed  that  a 
certain  root  tea,  which  is  drunk  hot,  will  permanently  suspend  the 
menses  after  four  months.  The  first  two  months  the  flow  is  said  to 
be  copious  and  of  a  very  dark  color,  the  third  month  the  color  is  nor- 
mal, and  the  fourth  month  the  discharge  is  almost  colorless,  after 
which  the  catamenia  cease.  Specimens  of  the  root  referred  to  were 
collected  during  the  summer  of  1902,  and  are  now  with  the  remainder 
of  the  plant  collection  in  the  National  Museum  for  classification.  I 
would  add  that  this  root  is  in  the  possession  of  certain  old  medicine 
men  and  women,  who  carefully  guard  the  secret,  that  the  young 
women  may  not  procure  the  medicine  and  thereby  render  themselves 
incapable  of  becoming  mothers." 

W  J  McGee  writes  me.  May  13,  1903:  "There  are  elaborate  (rela- 
tively, if  not  absolutely)  puberty  rites  for  girls  in  the  Seri  tribe, 
though  I  was  unable  to  obtain  much  information  concerning  them  from 
the  Indians  themselves,  and  none  from  any  other  source.  So  far  as 
I  can  judge,  these  observances  are  of  an  importance  proportionate  to 
that  of  the  mortuary  observances  over  matrons  or  that  of  the  marital 
regulations  and  ceremonies — indeed,  so  far  as  I  could  learn,  the  only 
collective  ceremonies  of  such  consequence  as  to  bring  together  the 
several  clans  are  the  girls'  puberty  feasts.  In  certain  cases,  at  least, 
bodily  mutilations  are  suffered  by  females  (e.  g.,  the  removal  of  the 
incisors,  noted  in  Hrdlicka's  description  of  the  skeleton  obtained  by 
me),  though  I  was  unable  to  ascertain  whether  this  is  connected  with 
puberty  or  with  marriage  ceremonials,  which  are  in  some  degree  in- 
terwoven." 

Partridge  says :  "  The  use  of  intoxicants  in  pubertal  rites  is  very 
common,  especially  among  the  American  Indians.  The  Tuscaroras 
of  North  Carolina,  among  other  initiatory  ordeals  for  boys,  adminis- 
ter to  them  some  kind  of  a  bark  and  several  stimulating  plants,  which 
reduce  them  to  a  state  of  raving  intoxication.  When  the  Creek  boys 
were  to  be  initiated  into  manhood,  they  gathered  two  handfuls  of  a 
certain  plant  which  intoxicates  and  maddens,  and  continued  eating 
the  bitter  root  for  a  whole  day,  and  then  steeped  the  leaves  in  water 
and  drank  from  this  decoction." 


SAVAGE  PUBIC   INITIATIONS  239 

On  the  first  sign  of  puberty,  the  Brazilian^  girl,  secluded  for  a 
month  previously  indoors  and  fed  on  bread  and  water,  is  brought  out 
naked  before  all  relations  and  friends,  and  each  person  present  gives 
her  five  or  six  severe  blows  with  a  sipo  across  back  and  breast  till 
she  falls  senseless,  and  sometimes  dead.  If  she  recovers,  it  is  repeated 
by  them  every  six  hours,  and  it  is  considered  an  offense  to  parents 
not  to  strike  hard.  Pots  of  meat  and  fish  are  prepared  and  the  sipos 
dipped  in  them  and  given  her  to  lick;  then  she  is  a  woman,  can  eat 
anything,  and  may  marry. 

Boys  undergo  a  similar  ordeal  but  not  so  severe,  which  allows 
them  to  see  the  Jurupari — pipes  or  trumpets  made  of  bamboo  or  palm 
stems  and  hollowed,  each  pair  producing  a  distinct  note — a  mystery 
which  no  woman  can  see  on  pain  of  death.  If  they  are  heard,  every 
woman  hides,  and  if  she  is  thought  to  have  seen  them  she  is  killed 
by  poison.  On  the  Rio  de  la  Plata  the  girl  is  sewn  up  in  her  hammock 
as  if  she  were  dead,  with  only  a  small  breathing  hole.  Very  many 
dietary  customs  are  enforced  on  pubescent  girls.  These  ceremonies 
are  for  first  menstruation  only. 

Among  the  ancient  Aztecs,  children  from  the  earliest  years  were 
trained  to  endure  hunger,  cold,  and  heat;  they  were  made  to  sleep 
on  a  mat,  and  when  they  reached  the  age  of  puberty  were  taught  the 
use  of  arms ;  they  accompanied  their  fathers  on  military  expeditions, 
and  were  taught  trades.  If  detected  in  lies,  their  tongues  were 
pricked  with  agave  thorns ;  the  feet  of  those  who  ran  away  were 
bound ;  quarrelsome  children  were  whipped  with  nettles.  Two  ancient 
documents,  of  too  great  length  to  quote  here,  containing  some  of  a 
father's  teaching  to  his  son  and  that  of  a  mother  to  her  daughter,  con- 
stitute an  admirable  code  of  morals  and  manners,  which  with  a  few 
changes  in  detail  would  be  helpful  in  any  land  and  age.'' 

Pritchard'  says:  "  A  certain  stage  in  the  life  of  each  girl  is  cele- 
brated by  a  festivity  in  the  camp.  An  ornamented  toldo  is  put  up 
temporarily  for  the  girl's  occupation,  and  the  young  men  of  the  tribe 
march  around  it  singing,  while  the  women  howl,  probably  with  a  view 
of  exorcising  any  evil  spirit  which  may  be  lingering  about  the  camp. 
The  ceremony  is  followed  by  a  feast,  and  the  evening  winds  up  with 
a  dance.  The  men  alone  take  part  in  this,  and  it  consists  in  circling 
around  the  fire,  pacing  sometimes  slowly  and  sometimes  quickly.  A 
few  dance  at  a  time,  accompanying  their  movements  by  a  constant 
bowing  or  nodding  of  the  head,  which  is  adorned  with  tufts  of  ostrich 
feathers.     When  one  party  is  tired  out,  another  takes  its  place." 

(b)  The  Far  East. — Haddon  *  describes  many  ceremonies  of  initia- 
tion of  boys  into  manhood,  such  as  are  found  throughout  the  greater 

*  A.  R.  Walker:  Travels  on  the  Amazon,  i88g,  p.  325. 

'  The  Aztecs :  Their  History,  Manners,  and  Customs,  by  Lucien  Biart.    Trans, 
by  J.  L.  Garner.     Chicago,  1900,  p.  21/^  etseq. 

'  Through  the  Heart  of  Patagonia.     New  York,  1902,  p.  92. 

*  Head  Hunters,  Black,  White,  and  Brown.     London,  1901,  chap.  Iv  et  seq. 


240  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

part  of  the  Melanesian  and  the  Indonesian  Archipelago.  These  begin 
when  lads  first  show  a  sprouting  beard.  They  are  secluded  in  a 
tabooed  spot  in  the  bush,  instructed  in  the  moral  code,  social  customs, 
and  sacred  legends,  which  a  man  must  know,  especially  those  con- 
nected with  the  totemic  animal,  plant,  or  object  peculiar  to  the  clan. 
Many  of  these  customs  are  in  various  stages  of  disintegration,  and 
old  men  often  weep  over  the  profanation  of  ancient  mysteries,  of 
which  only  just  enough  echoes  are  preserved  to  enable  us  to  under- 
stand some  of  their  old  solemnity.  It  is  very  hard  to  get  all  of  the 
sacred  words,  formulae,  and  myths,  but  Haddon  has  found  more  of 
them  in  the  East  than  any  one  else,  and  has  even  obtained  masks  and 
other  paraphernalia,  photographed  some  of  the  scenes  of  the  cere- 
monies, obtained  songs  in  phonographs,  etc. 

The  Malu  mysteries  are  cherished  somewhat  as  we  cherish  the 
church  and  school.  They  take  the  young  man  out  of  the  family  and 
weld  him  into  a  solidarity  with  the  community  in  which  he  lives. 
They  often  follow  the  death  dances.  Boys  that  have  been  good  are 
treated  easily,  while  the  bad  ones  may  be  initiated  with  great  cruelty. 
The  morality  taught,  as  far  as  it  goes,  is  often  high,  and  one  common 
exhortation  is  not  to  be  like  women  in  various  enumerated  respects. 

All  the  manifold  Australian  rites  agree  in  being  tests  of  endurance 
of  pain.  In  almost  all,  the  boys  lose  one  or  more  teeth.  There  is  an 
elaborate  ceremony  with  a  grass  effigy  of  a  kangaroo,  by  which  the 
young  are  given  power  over  this  animal.  The  men  personate  the 
kangaroo,  with  grass  tails,  leaping,  looking  about,  lying  on  their  sides, 
while  others  act  the  part  of  hunters  and  pretend  to  kill  them.  In 
some  forms  the  operators  deliberately  cut  long  gashes  on  the  back 
and  shoulders,  and  if  the  youth  groans  or  even  winces,  three  long 
yells  indicate  that  he  is  unworthy  to  be  a  warrior,  and  he  is  handed 
over  to  the  women,  to  be  forever  ranked  with  them  and  to  do  their 
tasks.  In  a  mental  trial  a  crystal  with  magic  power  is  given  to  each 
candidate,  and  the  old  men  try  all  their  arts  of  persuasion  to  induce 
him  to  give  it  up.  If  he  does  not  resist  all  their  threats  and  cajoleries, 
he  is  rejected  as  a  warrior.  When  the  ceremony  is  over,  with  loud 
yells  the  women  are  summoned,  and  great  dances  and  feasts  occur. 
The  young  men  who  have  passed  through  these  ceremonies  think  very 
highly  of  themselves,  and  go  out  to  hunt  the  largest  game. 

The  most  careful  study  of  pubertal  rites  yet  made  is  by  Mathews.* 
Some  Australian  tribes  have  typical  and  elaborate  initiation  cere- 
monies, called  Burbung  or  Bora,  for  their  adolescents.  In  an  open- 
ing in  the  woods  a  round  cleared  space  of  eighty  to  ninety  feet  in 
diameter  is  marked  by  a  groove  in  the  soil.  In  the  center  is  a  short 
pole,  to  the  top  of  which  bushes  and  emu  feathers  are  tied.     From 

1  R.  H.  Mathews :  Journal  of  the  Anthropological  Institute  of  Great  Britain  and 
Ireland,  vol.  xxiv,  pp.  411-427;  xxv,  pp.  297-330;  xxvi,  pp.  272-285,  320-340. 
See  also  his  interesting  variant :  The  Toara  Ceremony  of  the  Dippil  Tribes  of 
Queensland.     Am.  Anthropologist,  January-March,  1900,  p.  139. 


SAVAGE  PUBIC  INITIATIONS  241 

this  circle  a  track  about  four  feet  wide  runs  several  hundred  yards 
into  brush  and  scrub.  First,  beside  this  path  is  a  hole  three  feet  by 
eighteen  inches,  to  represent  the  place  where  a  girl  must  sit  during 
her  first  menstruation.  A  few  yards  farther  is  a  human  figure  and  an 
emu,  life  size,  cut  in  the  ground.  Next  come  two  spiral  strips  cut  in 
a  tree  and  other  zigzags  to  represent  lightning;  then  a  fire,  which  is 
kept  burning  during  all  the  days  of  the  ceremony,  and  a  gigantic 
human  figure,  twenty-one  feet  long,  with  the  dent  of  his  fist  in  the 
ground  where  he  fell,  always  made  beside  his  figure  by  puddling  clay. 
This  figure  represents  Baiamai,  the  culture  hero  who  slew  Dhurmoo- 
lan,  an  awful  being,  with  a  voice  like  thunder,  by  whom  boys  used 
to  be  taken  to  the  brush  to  be  instructed  in  the  customs,  laws,  and 
traditions  of  the  community,  that  they  might  take  part  in  councils 
and  do  all  the  duties  of  tribesmen.  Each  boy,  it  was  said,  he  cut  up, 
burned,  formed  the  ashes  to  human  shape,  and  restored  to  life,  with 
the  exception  of  one  upper  front  tooth,  which  he  kept  and  the  loss 
of  which  was  a  sign  of  initiation.  It  was  found  out,  however,  that  he 
bit  out  the  tooth,  and  often  devoured  a  boy.  So  after  killing  him 
Baiamai  put  his  voice  into  the  trees,  from  which  it  could  be  charmed 
into  bull-roarers  made  from  their  wood.  Farther  along  this  walk  is 
a  tree  with  an  imitation  of  an  eagle's  nest,  figures  representing  the 
sun  and  moon  cut  large  through  the  bark  to  the  white,  an  immense 
fabulous  snake-like  monster  fifty-nine  feet  long,  four  little  mounds 
of  earth,  making  a  square,  with  native  weapons  stuck  in  them  for 
decoration,  and  between  these,  four  seats  made  of  saplings  dug  up 
with  their  roots,  formed  to  a  seat  stained  with  human  blood  and  their 
stems  inverted  in  the  ground,  while  turtles,  iguanas,  and  fish,  pointed 
up  and  down,  carved  on  tree-trunks,  with  other  mystic  lines  and  pat- 
terns, complete  the  scenes  for  this  long  walk,  which  is  terminated  by 
a  screen  of  boughs. 

Early  in  the  spring  two  messengers  are  sent  to  invite  the  neigh- 
boring tribes.  They  carry  kilts  and  bull-roarers,  and  arrive  at  the 
camp  at  about  sundown,  when  the  men  come  home.  A  council  is 
held,  at  which  the  invitation  is  presented  and  discussed  and  word  sent 
to  the  next  camp.  They  all  muster,  so  as  to  arrive  on  the  prepared 
ground  together,  and  are  ceremoniously  received  in  the  circle ;  some- 
times two  or  three  weeks  are  spent  before  the  arrival  of  the  last  con- 
tingent. For  several  days  there  is  much  marching,  stamping,  and 
beating  the  ground  with  resonant  pandamelon  skins,  and  other  per- 
formances. Finally  all  assemble,  the  men  painted  in  full  savage  re- 
galia, tramping  and  waving  their  arms  or  dancing  a  corroboree,  and 
the  women  throwing  leaves  at  them.  Sometimes  the  men  represent 
dogs  running  after  each  other,  or  kangaroos,  or  they  parody  an  emu 
hunt,  and  the  wizards  perform  their  mummeries.  Recent  initiates 
are  taken  over  the  walk,  and  all  the  devices  of  the  sacred  ground 
where  they  had  been  inducted  the  year  before  are  fully  explained  to 
them.  During  the  night  bull-roarers  are  sounded,  and  the  boys  are 
told  that  the  dreadful  Dhurmoolan  is  coming  for  them  the  next  morn- 
55 


242  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

ing.  At  dawn  all  assemble  in  the  circle,  each  tribe  distinct,  the  boys 
to  be  initiated  sitting  naked  on  bark  back  of  the  circle,  looking  at 
the  earth,  each  with  his  sister  near  by  and  her  husband,  who  acts 
as  the  boy's  guardian  during  the  ceremony.  The  two  latter  paint 
each  boy  all  over  with  red  ochre,  put  pipe  marks  on  his  breast,  swan 
feathers  in  his  hair,  and  gird  him  with  a  band  with  four  kilts  depend- 
ing, representing  a  man's  dress,  while  his  head  is  bound  with  two 
bands.  The  headsman  then  shouts :  "  He  is  coming — lie  down  !  "  All 
the  women  and  boys  are  then  securely  covered  with  blankets,  and 
men  stay  to  watch  that  they  do  not  see.  A  group  of  men  advance 
from  the  sacred  path,  beating  the  ground  with  sonorous  pieces  of 
bark,  tramp  around,  sound  the  bull-roarers,  and  with  a  great  noise 
throw  brands  near  the  women  and  children,  to  make  them  think 
Dhurmoolan  tried  to  burn  them.  Each  guardian  then  patches  his 
boy  under  the  arm,  and  leads  him  along  the  path,  all  the  men  follow- 
ing with  terrific  din.  They  are  then  taken  a  few  miles  away,  seated, 
and  given  advice  on  the  conduct  of  life  and  on  the  coming  ceremony, 
when  the  blankets  are  removed  from  their  heads.  Here  they  are 
kept  two  or  three  days,  watched  and  taught,  and  join  the  men  for  the 
first  time  in  hunting.  Every  night  the  men  steal  off  and  make  a  great 
noise,  pretending  to  drive  off  the  giant  who  seeks  to  burn  the  boys. 
Meanwhile  those  in  camp  form  a  yard,  shaped  like  a  horseshoe,  and 
thickly  walled  with  boughs,  and  here  on  a  platform  opposite  the  open- 
ing they  await  them.  When  they  arrive  each  boy  gets  on  the  shoul- 
ders of  his  guardian,  and  the  sisters  or  mothers  spirt  pipe-clay  into 
their  faces.  After  a  night  here,  four  days  more  are  spent  in  the  brush, 
and  they  are  still  further  instructed  in  the  tribal  ordinances  and 
taught  songs  and  dances  which  women  and  the  uninitiated  never 
know  and  which  it  is  unlawful  to  hear  or  teach  elsewhere.  Each  boy 
is  given  a  new  name,  known  only  to  the  initiated,  each  animal  is  given 
a  secret  name,  and  there  are  many  ceremonials  and  sham  fights,  panto- 
mimes, and  trick  magic,  leaping  on  the  four  mounds,  running  among 
the  inverted  roots  of  saplings  above  described,  shouting  the  names  of 
other  bora  grounds,  squatting  in  black  paint  and  with  horrid  grimaces, 
long  and  silent  gazing  at  the  feet,  tableaux  often  disgustingly  obscene, 
songs  and  dancing,  during  all  of  which  the  boys  are  not  allowed  to 
question  or  speak,  and  thus  by  these  and  other  devices  they  are  well 
seasoned  to  fear.  At  the  last  afternoon  the  boys'  heads  are  again 
covered  with  blankets  and  a  big  fire  is  kindled,  where  they  are  told 
they  are  likely  to  be  burned.  Then  the  blankets  are  taken  off  and 
the  boys  are  shown  the  men  with  bull-roarers,  fumigated,  and  in- 
formed that  Dhurmoolan  is  only  they;  his  story  is  told,  the  rites 
explained,  and  death  threatened  for  any  revelation  of  what  they  have 
learned.  They  are  told  that  when  they  marry  it  must  be  according  to 
the  totem  laws,  which  are  explained.  All  the  symbols  of  every  ob- 
ject beside  the  path  and  the  rites  are  also  explained.  Formerly  human 
ordure  was  eaten,  a  tooth  extracted,  and  the  hair  cut. 

The  ceremonies  differ  in  detail  among  different  tribes.     In  one 


SAVAGE  PUBIC  INITIATIONS  243 

form  of  the  ceremony  the  novitiates,  when  taken  from  their  mothers 
and  relatives,  are  made  to  believe  that  a  giant  has  slain  them  all, 
while  mothers  loudly  lament,  that  the  young  girls  may  think  the  boys 
are  all  slain.  The  boys  are  initiated  into  many  forms  of  gross  ob- 
scenity. Instead  of  a  blanket  over  his  head,  the  novice  may  have  to 
sit  and  walk  all  day  with  his  head  and  eyes  bent  down  so  low  that 
he  faints  on  being  allowed  to  straighten  up  after  dark.  In  the  bush 
he  may  be  required  to  go  off  alone  and  sustain  himself  by  hunting. 
The  mode  of  death  threatened  for  revealing  what  is  seen  or  heard  or 
for  speaking  of  or  letting  women  know  of  the  bull-roarer  differs,  as 
does  the  mode  of  impressing  the  form  and  meaning  of  the  figures 
cut  in  the  trees  or  on  the  ground.  If  a  tooth  is  removed,  the  boy's 
feet  arc  confined  in  a  hole  in  the  ground.  His  hair  may  be  singed 
and  his  body  painted  white,  so  that  his  mother  can  not  recognize 
him.  The  annual  dances  vary,  and  the  camp  is  often  daily  split  into 
small  groups.  There  is  a  wide  field  of  exceeding  difficulty  yet  to  be 
explored  before  it  can  be  known  just  what  the  novices  are  taught  and 
what  is  the  esoteric  significance  of  these  mysteries.  Great  precau- 
tions are  taken  that  none  but  the  initiated  shall  ever  penetrate  them. 
Many  ceremonies  are  according  to  a  minutely  prescribed  ritual,  and 
on  the  other  hand  the  program  is  often  made  up  anew  each  night  for 
the  next  day. 

Among  the  Victorian  aborigines  ^  boys  of  thirteen  are  taken  away 
from  the  camp  by  old  men  for  about  a  month,  during  which  time  they 
are  instructed  in  the  legends  of  the  tribe.  At  the  end  of  this  time 
each  is  held  by  two  men,  while  two  others  bore  the  flesh  around  one 
of  his  front  teeth  with  a  piece  of  bone,  and  then  knock  it  out  with  a 
bit  of  wood  used  as  a  punch.  The  nakedness  is  then  covered,  and  he 
returns  to  the  camp.  At  eighteen  years  of  age  he  is  again  taken 
away  and  the  initiation  completed.  The  tribes  of  the  Xarra  River 
eat  human  excrement  as  one  part  of  the  symbolic  ceremonies  of  initia- 
tion. In  another  form  of  the  ceremony,  known  as  Tit-but,  the  boys  of 
fourteen  or  fifteen  are  led  away,  and  the  hair  cut  close  with  chips  of 
quartzite,  except  a  strip  half  an  inch  wide  from  the  middle  of  the 
forehead  to  the  neck.  Naked  save  at  the  hips,  which  are  covered 
with  opossum  skin  and  strings  of  the  fur,  the  initiated  is  daubed 
with  clay  and  every  kind  of  filth,  and  with  a  basket  full  of  the  same 
material  he  wanders  throughout  the  camp,  casting  it  at  every  one.  He 
is  isolated,  and  no  one  speaks  to  him  till  his  hair  begins  to  grow,  when 
he  is  given  over  to  the  women,  who  wash  and  paint  him  and  dance 
before  him.  Among  some  tribes  the  novitiate  is  simply  clothed  with 
man's  attire  ceremonially.  Probably  most  accounts  here  and  else- 
where are  mere  fragments  of  far  more  elaborate  ceremonials,  which 
are  so  carefully  guarded  that  it  is  very  difficult  to  gain  access  to  the 
rites  and  far.  more  so  to  learn  their  meaning,  which  latter  is  often  for- 

*  The    Victoria    Aborigines :     Their    Initiation    Ceremonies,    etc.,    by    R.    H 
Mathews.     Am.  Anthropologist,  November,  1898,  p.  325  et  seq. 


244  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

gotten  by  the  natives  themselves.  Many  of  the  forms  seem  to  be  pro- 
bationary or  degenerate. 

Among  the  natives  of  the  Murray  River  another  ceremony  occurs 
when  lads  are  about  sixteen.  They  are  seized  and  conducted  to  the 
chosen  field  amidst  the  cries  and  self-mutilations  of  the  women.  The 
boys  lie  down,  and  their  new  beards  and  hair  are  torn  from  their 
bodies. 

Among  another  tribe  there  are  three  ceremonies :  the  first  very 
simple,  where  the  boys  are  merely  carried  away  from  the  women  and 
blindfolded.  Here  the  Witarna  must  cease  using  their  natural  voices, 
and  not  speak  above  a  whisper  for  some  months  and  perhaps  a  year 
or  two.  The  initiates  of  the  second  degree  wear  a  bell-shaped  apron 
and  can  marry,  although  they  are  not  yet  warriors,  for  they  have  not 
suffered  sufficient  pain  to  take  their  full  rank.  They  still  bear  the 
trivial  names  given  them  by  their  mothers.  In  the  third  ceremony 
they  are  taken  to  a  secluded  spot,  covered  with  kangaroo  skins,  laid 
out  on  a  platform  of  boughs,  while  each  lad  sucks  the  open  vein  of 
an  adult  and  is  rudely  tattooed  with  broad  gashes,  that  are  pulled 
opened  by  the  fingers  as  far  as  possible.  Their  faces  and  upper  bodies 
are  blackened,  and  they  are  again  enjoined  to  whisper,  and  given  all 
sorts  of  advice  about  hunting,  etc.^ 

In  New  Zealand  there  seems  to  be  no  definite  ceremony  of  admis- 
sion to  manhood.  The  tattoo  is  a  sign  that  it  is  done ;  but  there  seems 
to  be  a  long  process,  extending  over  years,  which  can  not  be  consid- 
ered an  initiatory  rite,  like  those  of  the  Australians. 

According  to  J.  L.  Holmes,^  the  lads  of  the  Papuan  gulf  are  in- 
itiated by  being  first  isolated  in  the  eraro  or  clubhouse  till  their  hair 
is  grown  to  its  full  length.  Their  bodies  must  not  be  exposed  to  the 
sun,  and  they  are  subject  to  several  taboos.  The  bull-roarer  is  shown 
and  explained,  and  masks  play  a  great  part  in  the  more  important 
ceremonies. 

In  Korea  puberty  and  betrothal  ceremonies  often  coincide,  and  the 
ritualists  of  that  country  celebrate  these  events  by  elaborate  formulae, 
implying  that  the  full  responsibilities  of  manhood  are  assumed.  Three 
days  before,  the  head  of  the  clan  must  announce  the  approaching 
ceremony  to  the  tablets  of  the  ancestral  temple.  The  day  in  ancient 
times  was  chosen  by  divination.  When  capped,  the  boy  adds  a  new 
link,  says  Sandis,'  to  the  chain  of  descent.  Even  the  tutor  was  once 
chosen  by  lot,  and  he  must  be  virtuous  and  well  versed  in  the  cere- 
monial law.  Besides  the  black  paper  cap,  twenty  other  objects — belt, 
embroidered  shoes,  hood,  cowl,  cord,  trays  and  tables,  dried  meats, 
horn  spoons,  etc. — are  exactly  arranged  in  a  room  partitioned  from  a 
larger  hall.     All  the  relatives,   in  ceremonial  or  holiday  dress,   are 

^  J.  G.  Wood  :    Natural  History  of  Man,  vol.  ii,  p.  76  et  seq. 
a  Nature,  October  30,  1902. 

*  The  Capping  Ceremony  of  Korea,  by  E.  B.  Sandis,  M.D.,  Jour,  of  the  An- 
thropological Inst.,  May,  1898,  p.  525. 


SAVAGE   PUBIC   INITIATIONS  245 

grouped  in  a  prescribed  order,  and  a  tutor,  prompter,  and  assistant  in- 
vest with  the  virile  cap  and  cowl,  and  invoke  three  blessings.  Liba- 
tions, a  new  name,  salutations,  genuflections,  presents,  etc.,  follow. 
The  ceremony  for  girls  is  somewhat  similar,  and  is  called  tying  of  the 
hair,  with  jackets,  corsets,  a  new  name,  and  presentation  in  the  ances- 
tral temple. 

Nearly  every  Buddhist  boy  in  Burma  becomes  a  monk  for  a  time 
before  he  is  fourteen,  according  to  Fielding  Hall,  taking  the  vows  of 
chastity  and  poverty,  but  always  for  a  limited  time,  to  be  renewed  or 
not  at  the  end  of  the  term  according  to  inclination. 

Professor  E.  Washburn  Hopkins,  of  Yale,  writes  me.  May  16, 
1903,  of  ancient  India :  "  There  is  only  one  rite  connected  with  puberty 
by  inference.  That  is  the  Upanayana,  or  admission  into  caste,  when 
a  cord  is  bound  around  the  boy  at  ages  from  eight  to  twenty-four 
years.  It  seems  to  be  the  same  as  the  Avestan  circling  with  a  holy 
cord  at  fifteen  years,  and  for  this  reason,  with  the  wide-spread  analogy 
of  some  such  ceremony,  it  has  been  connected  by  ethnologists  (Lip- 
pert,  Culturgeschichte,  vol.  ii,  p.  320)  and  by  Oldenberg  (Religion 
des  Veda)  with  a  puberty  rite,  though  in  Hindu  form  it  is  quite  made 
over  into  an  introduction  of  a  boy  into  the  study  of  the  Veda  and 
admission  into  caste  privileges,  at  ages  according  to  caste.  There  is 
no  other  rite  at  this  time,  and  this  is  recognized  as  a  puberty  rite, 
more  by  analogy  than  by  inner  evidence,  since  all  reference  to  puberty 
is  lacking  in  the  Brahmanical  rite,  and  which  only  in  the  secondary 
stage  of  the  literature  receives  recognition.  The  earliest  Veda  has 
absolutely  no  reference  to  anything  of  the  sort.  It  appears  to  be  a 
faint  survival  of  the  old  rite,  much  modified  through  the  influence  of 
the  caste  system.  Latin  literature,  so  far  as  I  know,  refers  only. to  this 
rite  and  has  nothing  new,  except  that  at  this  epoch  the  (warrior  caste) 
boys  at  sixteen  were  admitted  into  the  rank  of  warriors  after  proving 
their  ability  at  a  joust  of  arms." 

(c)  Africa. — Frazer  tells  us  that  among  the  Zulus  and  neighbor- 
ing South  African  tribes  when  the  first  signs  of  puberty  appear  in  a 
girl  she  must  hide,  not  be  seen  by  men,  cover  her  head,  lest  the  sun 
shrivel  her,  and  seclude  herself  for  some  time  in  a  hut.  In  New  Ire- 
land girls  at  this  age  are  confined  for  four  or  five  years  in  small 
cages,  kept  in  the  dark,  and  not  allowed  to  set  foot  on  the  ground. 
These  cages  are  conical,  ten  or  twelve  feet  in  circumference  and 
seven  or  eight  high,  made  of  pandanus  leaves  sewed  tight,  and  three 
feet  from  the  ground.  The  cages  are  very  hot,  but  clean,  and  the 
girls  are  taken  out  once  a  day  to  bathe;  in  these  cages  they  remain 
until  they  are  taken  out  to  be  married,  and  attend  the  great  feast 
which  is  a  part  of  this  ceremony.  Poor  people  can  afford  to  keep 
their  daughters  thus  shut  up  for  only  a  few  weeks,  but  the  time  in- 
creases with  wealth  and  station.'  The  Borneo  girl  is  also  shut  up 
at  eight  or  ten ;  none  save  a  slave  waitress  must  see  her,  not  even 


^  Untrodden  Fields  of  .\nthropology,  vol.  ii,  p.  197  et  seq. 


246  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

her  family.  Sometimes  she  remains  here  six  or  seven  years,  doing 
handiwork.  Her  body  growth  is  stunted  and  her  complexion  becomes 
waxy.  On  coming  out  she  is  shown  sun,  water,  earth,  flowers,  and 
trees  as  if  she  were  new-born ;  the  great  feast  is  held,  a  slave  killed, 
and  she  is  smeared  in  his  blood.  In  New  Guinea,  Vancouver,  Ceram, 
and  among  some  Alaskan  tribes,  girls  are  isolated  in  cells  or  huts  for 
periods  of  varying  length.  Commonly  the  longer  she  stays  the  greater 
honor  to  her  parents.  Hoods  and  veils  are  worn,  that  the  sun  may 
not  see  her. 

"  From  the  age  of  eleven  to  thirteen  among  the  Pygmies,'  begins, 
for  individuals  of  both  sexes,  a  period  of  abstinence  called  akayaba, 
which  for  the  young  girls  extends  nearly  to  the  time  of  their  mar- 
riage and  for  the  young  men  to  the  time  of  puberty.  While  it  lasts 
they  can  not  eat  turtle,  pork,  fish,  or  honey,  that  is  to  say,  the  food 
forming  the  staple  of  their  usual  diet.  They  must  also  abstain  from 
the  use  of  certain  delicacies,  such  as  the  meat  of  iguana,  the  larvae  of 
a  large  beetle,  etc.  They  may,  however,  satisfy  their  hunger  with  any 
other  native  dishes.  This  kind  of  taboo  can  only  be  removed  by  the 
chiefs,  who  keep  it  in  force  until  the  time  when  the  candidates  have 
given  sufficient  proof  of  their  perseverance.  The  akayaba  comprises 
three  periods,  named  from  the  three  principal  kinds  of  food  tabooed 
— the  meat  of  the  turtle,  honey,  and  the  fat  of  pork  kidneys.  At  the 
expiration  of  the  time  a  feast  is  celebrated,  during  which  the  neophyte 
must  observe  silence,  deprive  himself  of  sleep  for  twenty-four  hours, 
and  then  with  ceremony  eat  one  of  those  dishes,  the  use  of  which  is 
henceforth  permitted  him.  The  ceremony  closes  with  a  special  dance, 
reserved  for  these  kinds  of  initiations." 

Among  the  Bechuanas,  when  boys  are  admitted  to  manhood  at  the 
:age  of  about  fourteen,  they  are  stripped  and  stood  in  a  row  opposite 
.an  equal  number  of  men,  each  with  a  long  torch  and  supple  switch. 
First  they  dance  the  odd  Koha,  and  each  boy  has  a  pair  of  sandals  on 
his  hands.  At  intervals  the  men  put  certain  questions  to  the  boys  con- 
cerning their  future,  when  they  are  admitted  to  manhood,  e.  g.,  "  Will 
you  herd  the  cattle  well?"  "I  will,"  says  the  boy,  lifting  his  san- 
daled hands.  The  man  then  strikes  with  full  force  at  the  boy's  head; 
the  ;hlow  is  received  on  the  sandals,  but  the  elastic  rod  curls  over 
with  :-such  force  as  to  make  a  deep  gash  on  his  back  from  twelve  to 
eighteen  inches  long,  from  which  the  blood  spurts  as  if  it  were  made 
withaiknife.  The  lesson  of  cattle  guarding  is  thought  thus  to  be  in- 
eradicably  impressed.  "  Will  you  guard  the  chief  well  ?  "  etc.,  and 
other  questions  are  repeated  through  a  long  series.  The  boys  must 
look  happy  and  continue  to  dance  through  it  all,  though  their  backs 
are  scarred  for  life,  on  pain  of  rejection.  It  may  be  remembered,  how- 
ever, that  where  nudity  is  common  the  skin  seems  less  sensitive.  Only 
older  and  otherwise  qualified  men  can  take  part.  These  ceremonies 
are  kept  very  secret,  and  are  common  to  many  tribes.    At  another  stage 

^  Quatrefages :   The  Pygmies,  p.  102. 


SAVAGE  PUBIC   INITIATIONS  247 

of  the  rite  boys  are  gathered  together  every  few  years,  under  the  com- 
mand of  one  of  the  sons  of  the  chief,  and  taken  into  the  woods  by  the 
old  men  for  some  time.  What  takes  place  is  unknown,  but  they  come 
back  lean  and  scarred,  and  are  henceforth  comrades  and  address  each 
other  by  a  new  familiar  name.' 

"  When  about  fifteen  or  sixteen  years  of  age  Kosa  boys  are  cir- 
cumcised. The  rite  is  purely  civil ;  by  it  a  youth  is  enabled  to  emerge 
from  the  society  of  women  and  boys,  and  is  admitted  to  the  privi- 
leges of  manhood.  Its  performance  is  attended  with  many  ceremonies, 
some  of  a  harmless,  others,  to  European  ideas,  of  a  criminal  nature. 
At  a  certain  period  in  every  year,  unless  it  is  a  time  of  calamity  or 
the  chief  has  a  son  not  yet  ready,  all  the  youths  of  a  village  who  are 
old  enough  are  circumcised.  Thereafter  for  a  couple  of  months  or 
longer  they  live  by  themselves,  and  are  distinguished  by  wearing  a 
peculiar  head-dress  and  a  girdle  of  long  grass  about  the  loins,  besides 
having  their  bodies  covered  with  white  clay.  During  this  period  they 
have  license  to  steal  freely  from  their  relatives,  provided  they  can  do 
so  without  being  caught  in  the  act.  After  returning  to  their  homes 
they  are  brought  before  the  old  men  of  the  tribe,  who  lecture  them 
upon  the  duties  and  responsibilities  which  they  have  taken  upon  them- 
selves. Presents  of  cattle  and  weapons  are  afterward  made  by  their 
friends  to  give  them  a  start  in  life.  A  free  rein  is  then  given  to  all 
kinds  of  immorality,  without  let  or  hindrance  from  their  elders."  ' 

"  Females,"  says  Theal,  "  who  arrive  at  the  age  of  puberty  are  in- 
troduced into  the  state  of  womanhood  by  peculiar  ceremonies,  which 
extinguish  all  virtuous  feelings  within  them.  Originally,  however,  the 
very  worst  of  the  observances  on  these  occasions  was  a  test  of  self- 
discipline.  The  object  of  the  education  which  a  people  like  the  Kosas 
go  through  is  to  make  a  man  entirely  master  of  himself.  He  must  be 
able  to  control  himself  so  that  no  trace  of  his  emotions  shall  appear 
on  his  countenance ;  he  must  not  wince  when  undergoing  the  most  se- 
vere punishment.  In  olden  times  a  further  test  was  applied,  which 
has  degenerated  into  the  most  abominable  licentiousness.  It  will  be 
sufficient  to  say  that  the  young  women  who  attend  the  revels  on  these 
occasions  are  allowed  to  select  temporary  companions  of  the  other 
sex,  and  if  they  decline  to  do  so  the  chief  distributes  them  at  his  pleas- 
ure. As  these  pages  are  being  prepared,  a  Kosa  chief,  who  is  consid- 
ered one  of  the  most  advanced  of  his  tribe  in  civilization,  has  come  into 
legal  collision  with  the  colonial  authorities  for  distributing,  in  a  dis- 
trict annexed  to  the  colony,  a  large  number  of  girls  in  this  manner." 

(d)  Circumcision. — There  is  some  evidence  that  circumcision  was 
common  in  the  age  of  neolithic  man,  and  it  now  seems  exceedingly 
improbable  that  it  originated  with  the  Hebrews.  It  was  practised  by 
the  priests  of  ancient  Egypt,  from  whom  Pythagoras  obtained  the  rite, 

'  J.  G.  Wood  :    Natural  History  of  Man,  vol.  i,  p.  324  et  seq. 
»  History  of  South  Africa,  by  George  McCall  Theal,  London,  1888,  vol.  ii,  p. 
205 


248  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

and  by  the  Persians  and  Phenicians.  It  is  common  among  the  Turks 
and  most  Moslem  races,  aUhough  not  commanded  by  the  Koran,  and 
was  adopted  by  Mohammed  for  himself  probably  from  a  prevailing 
custom  of  ancient  Arabia.  It  is  practised  by  many  of  the  aborigines 
of  Australia,  the  Malay  tribes,  and  a  number  of  the  native  African 
races.  The  best  authorities  now  think  it  prevailed  among  the  ancient 
Aztecs  and  perhaps  the  Peruvians,  and  among  certain  native  stocks  of 
central  North  America.  While  Andree  is  wrong  in  calling  it  "  a  cus- 
tom which  extends  over  the  whole  world,"  it  is  one  of  the  most  widely 
diffused  and  persistent  of  all  ancient  rites.  The  medical  and  an- 
thropological literature  upon  the  subject  is  now  extensive,  and  shows 
great  diversity  concerning  both  the  nature  and  the  manner  of  the 
operation  itself,  the  various  instruments  in  this  oldest  of  surgical  proc- 
esses, the  preparation,  curative  treatment,  and  the  attendant  rituals 
and  ceremonials  sometimes  elaborated  and  exactly  prescribed.  Its 
symbolic  significance  is  subject  to  manifold  interpretations,  and  its 
hygienic  and  moral  bearing  was  never  so  actively  discussed  as  at 
present. 

Circumcision  is  performed  at  almost  every  stage  of  life;  by  the 
Hebrews  at  the  age  of  eight  days,  by  the  Turks  between  the  ages  of 
six  and  thirteen  years,  by  the  African  tribes  south  of  the  Zambesi 
from  ten  to  fifteen,  by  most  of  the  Malay  and  native  American  races 
at  the  same  age  or  a  little  later,  by  other  tribes  just  before  or  after 
marriage,  or  when  a  certain  number  of  children  are  born,  or  on  be- 
coming a  soldier,  priest,  ascetic,  convert,  or  at  senescence.  Dr.  Re- 
mondino,'  from  inquiry  among  physicians,  thinks  it  is  extending  in 
most  civilized  communities  independently  of  race  or  creed.  That  it  is 
generally  and  essentially  connected  with  puberty,  and  that  its  habitual 
occurrence  at  earlier  or  later  stages  can  be  or  should  be  accounted  for, 
and  indicates  a  secondary  or  derived  origin,  I  think  any  careful  and 
fair-minded  reader  of  the  literature  will  grant.  My  reasons  for  this 
view  are  briefly  as  follows :  where  it  occurs  at  the  dawn  of  adolescence, 
the  ceremonial,  the  germs  of  which  are  often  as  old  as  the  custom 
it  attends,  is  fuller,  more  prolonged,  and  more  significant ;  and  even 
where  it  occurs  in  infancy,  the  symbolism  of  the  attending  liturgy  or 
ritual  refers  chiefly  to  sexual  maturity  and  function.  Its  transposi- 
tion to  infancy  also  seems  readily  accounted  for  by  reasons  of  prac- 
tical convenience. 

It  thus  marks  the  advent  of  youth  to  the  rites  of  manhood,  and  is 
sometimes  essentially  civic,  political,  or  social.  It  may  signalize  in- 
itiation into  the  secret  societies  or  religious  mysteries  of  the  tribe.  In 
some  cases  the  ceremonies  are  mainly  hygienic  or  psycho-physiologi- 
cal. Occasionally  it  is  associated  with  gross  sensual  orgies,  but  more 
often,  with  higher  races,  the  ritual  suggests  the  higher  rather  than 
the  lower  life,  both  of  which  now  become  possible.  A  Madagascar 
tribe  regards  circumcision  as  making  boys  into  men.    Without  it,  they 

^  History  of  Circumcision,  by  P.  E.  Remondino.     Philadelphia,  1891,  p.  346. 


SAVAGE  PUBIC   INITIATIONS  249 

can  never  become  soldiers  or  govern.  The  ceremony  includes  meas- 
urement, sprinkling  with  water,  and  a  formula,  "  He  is  not  a  child, 
but  a  man,  breasting  a  stream ;  his  money  fills  a  large  vault,  his  house 
is  crowded  with  slaves,  etc."  Bechuana  and  Kaffir  tribes  circumcise 
boys  in  the  early  teens,  and  set  them  apart  for  life  as  followers  of 
one  of  the  sons  of  the  chief.  They  are  taken  off  alone  to  recover  in 
huts  built  for  the  purpose.  Meanwhile  old  men  teach  them  to  dance 
and  interpret  the  wisdom  of  African  church  and  state,  while  each 
youth  composes  a  homily  praising  himself,  is  beaten,  and  later  points 
with  pride  to  the  scars  thus  left  as  signs  of  the  thoroughness  of  his 
education.  A  Peruvian  tribe  wrap  their  youths  in  skins  after  the 
operation,  give  them  presents,  and  send  them  to  hide  in  the  forest, 
there  to  feast  and  fatten  till  they  grow  weary  of  idleness.  In  Aus- 
tralia circumcision  is  a  very  sacred  ceremony,  admitting  to  the  rights 
and  duties  of  manhood,  marriage  among  the  rest.' 

Besides  the  physiological  aspect  presented  in  Chapter  VI,  this  topic 
has  or  should  be  given  a  higher  one.  The  latest  treatise  on  the  sub- 
ject that  I  have  read  urges  that  the  very  first  requirement  of  a  cir- 
cumciser  should  be  "  satisfactory  guarantees  of  a  moral  life  and  con- 
stant maintenance  of  an  honorable  character."  Although  the  writer's 
purpose  is  chiefly  medical,  this  ethical  requirement  is  placed  first,  sug- 
gesting that  the  symbolic  character  of  the  rite  predominates  over  the 
physical  in  the  Jewish  mind,  hardly  less  than  is  the  case  among  Chris- 
tians with  baptism  or  communion.  From  the  time  of  Abraham  to  the 
present  it  has  been  a  sacred  blood  covenant  with  Jehovah.  On  their 
part  the  Jews  were  to  obey  his  commands  and  keep  his  law,  and  their 
promised  reward  for  so  doing  was  that  they  should  be  blessed  in  their 
seed,  which  should  be  as  the  stars  for  multitude.  This  is  still  the 
blessing  possible  to  those  who  normalize  this  part  of  their  nature. 
When  the  latter  awakens,  the  need  of  control  is  most  imperative  till 
maturity  is  complete,  and  here  this  rite  originally  belonged,  enforcing 
inhibition  by  the  strongest  physical  and  psychic  motives.  Well  admin- 
istered, it  combines  the  best  yet  attainable  results  aimed  at  by  scores 
of  savage  methods  of  enforcing  chastity  for  a  season  by  physiologi- 
cal and  even  mechanical  restraints,  with  a  Platonic,  or,  better,  an 
essentially  Christian  mode  of  spiritualizing  and  long-circuiting  what 
might  be  the  love  of  sense  into  a  sacrament.  It  is  almost  as  if  Jeho- 
vah's chief  interest  in  man  and  that  of  man  in  him  centered  about  this 
biological  function  and  was  cemented  just  at  the  time  of  life  when  the 
chief  sin  against  self  and  the  Lord  becomes  possible. 

II.  Classical  Antiquity. — No  pedagogic  contrast  can  be 
greater  than  that  between  barbaric  rites  like  the  preceding  and 

^  Circumcision,  by  A.  B.  Arnold.  New  York  Med.  Jour.,  February  13,  1886. 
See  also  IafT6,  Bergson,  Terquem,   Bernheim,  Arnholdt,   Clapardde,  Chabas,  and 

Nogues. 


250  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

the  mode  of  inducting  youth  to  manhood  which  was  developed 
in  classical  antiquity.  The  latter  stands  in  hardly  less  sharp 
contrast  to  modern  methods,  and  every  informed  and  candid 
student  of  youthful  nature  and  needs  must  ponder  whether  we 
of  to-day  have  really  gained  more  than  we  have  lost.  The  best 
Attic  methods  especially  stand  out  in  the  golden  light  that  in- 
vests this  land  with  a  perennial  and  ideal  charm.  The  glory  of 
Greece  is  that  it  best  represented  and  understood  youth  as  no 
other  age  or  race  has  done.  It  seems  a  bitter  irony  of  fate 
that  just  the  pedagogics  that  advocate  and  teach  classical 
culture  are  not  only  dead  to  this  spirit  but  have  lapsed  farthest 
from  it  to  mere  verbalism,  as  we  shall  see  later. 

Few  subjects  are  more  difficult  or  have  given  rise  to  more 
diversity  of  conclusion  among  classical  scholars  than  the  de- 
tails of  the  education  of  pubescent  and  adolescent  boys  in 
ancient  Greece  and  Rome.  Authorities  are  fragmentary  and 
contradictory;  customs  differed  in  different  provinces  and  pe- 
riods; the  historical  value  of  Plato  and  the  poets,  distinction 
between  what  was  exceptional  or  habitual  or  merely  theoreti- 
cal, and  differences  of  rank  and  wealth  are  involved.  A 
Dumont  ^  for  Attica,  and  L.  Grasberger  ^  for  all  Greece  and 
Rome,  are  our  best  authorities.  Chaotic  as  is  the  arrangement 
and  slovenly  as  is  the  style  of  the  latter,  his  work  is  a  monu- 
ment of  erudition,  and  seeks  to  exhaust  all  the  original  sources, 
although  the  author  is  needlessly  wary  of  general  conclusions, 
and  the  incessant  comparisons  between  Greece  and  Rome  are 

1  Essai  sur  I'ephebie  attique.     Paris,  1879. 

'Grasberger,  L. :  Erziehung  und  Unterricht  im  klassischen  Alterthum  ;  Wiirz- 
burg,  Bd.  Ill;  Die  Epheben  Bildung,  1881.  See  also  Girard,  Paul:  L'Education 
Athenienne  au  ¥*=  et  au  IV«  siecle  avant  J.-C.  ;  Paris,  1889.  Hermann:  Lehr- 
buch  des  Griechen  Privat  Alterthums ;  2d  ed.,  pp.  71,  269.  Dittenberger :  De 
ephebis  atticis  ;  Gottingen,  1863.  Marquardt :  Das  Privatleben  der  Rotnern,  1886. 
Becker,  W.  A. :  Gallus.  See  also  his  Charicles.  Krause  :  Gymnastik  und  Agonistik 
bei  den  Hellenen.  Schmidt,  K. :  Geschichte  der  Padagogik.  Krause,  C.  J.  H.r 
Geschichte  der  Erziehung  bei  den  Griechen,  Etruskern,  und  Romern;  Halle,  1851- 
Capes,  W.  W.:  University  Life  in  Ancient  Athens;  New  York,  1877.  Jaeger,  O. 
H.:  Die  Gymnastik  der  Hellenen;  Stuttgart,  1881.  Cramer,  F. :  Geschichte  der 
Erziehung  und  Unterrichts  im  Alterthum,  2  vols. ;  Elberfeld,  1832.  Helfericht: 
Erziehung  und  Unterricht  bei  den  Romern.  W^eete  :  Erziehung  und  Unterricht 
bei  den  Romern,  1854.  Ussing,  J.  L.:  Erziehung  und  Unterrichtswesen  bei  den 
Griechen  und  den  Romern  ;   Altona,  1870. 


CLASSICAL  IDEALS  AND   CUSTOMS  25 » 

confusing.    The  large  features,  however,  stand  out  with  some 
distinctness. 

Higher  education  in  Greece  or  the  training  of  epheboi  lasted  some 
five  years,  or  from  the  end  of  a  period  of  more  private  education  to 
the  beginning  of  the  public  life  of  citizenship  with  more  or  less  for- 
mal induction  to  which  the  years  of  specific  apprenticeship  to  teach- 
ers ended.  Politics  were  regarded  as  the  highest  vocation  of  man, 
whom  Aristotle  defined  as  a  political  animal,  and  thus  the  maxim, 
non  scholcE  sed  vita  discimus,  was  valid  in  both  Greece  and  Rome  in 
a  very  different  sense  than  it  is  in  a  commercial  and  industrial  age 
like  our  own.  Much  earlier  than  now  boys  of  antiquity  were  brought 
into  close  contact  with  not  only  governmental  matters,  but  were 
trained  to  become  watchmen  of  the  state  and  zealous  custodians  of 
the  commonweal.  The  beardless  ageneioi  from  sixteen  to  eighteen 
or  more  often  to  twenty  were  a  third-class  intermediate  between  boys 
and  men  in  the  Greek  scheme  of  Agonistik.  In  Rome  the  term  puer, 
boy,  was  best  applied  to  the  first  fifteen  years  of  life;  and  adidescens 
to  subsequent  years,  sometimes  to  the  age  of  thirty,  but  was  often  not 
distinguishable  from  juvenis.  In  Athens  formal  induction  to  the 
ephebic  status  came  two  years  after  puberty,  and  at  eighteen,  majority 
was  attained  with  the  civic  oath  to  bear  arms  for  the  fatherland.  The 
ephebic  period  comprised  the  age  from  eighteen  to  twenty,  and  else- 
where from  sixteen  to  eighteen,  and  rarely  the  years  of  puberty,  hebe, 
from  fourteen  to  sixteen.  In  Athens  youths  were  formally  accepted 
as  epheboi  at  eighteen,  and  then  were  for  two  years  watchmen  in  the 
suburbs  or  at  the  frontiers  as  a  sort  of  compulsory  military  service ; 
they  then  took  the  civic  oath  in  the  grove  of  Agraulos,  were  inscribed 
on  the  list  of  burghers,  each  in  his  phratry  or  deme,  and  enjoyed 
more  freedom  and  certain  dispensations.  The  oath  was  as  follows : 
"  I  will  never  bring  disgrace  to  these  arms,  nor  desert  the  man  next 
me  in  the  ranks,  but  will  fight  for  the  sanctities  and  for  the  common 
good,  both  alone  and  with  others.  I  will  not  leave  the  fatherland  di- 
minished, but  greater  and  better  (by  sea  and  land)  than  I  received 
it.  I  will  listen  to  those  always  who  have  the  power  of  decision, 
and  obey  existing  laws  and  all  others  which  the  people  shall  agree  in 
ordaining;  and  if  any  one  would  nullify  or  refuse  to  obey  them,  I 
will  not  permit  it,  but  will  defend  them,  whether  alone  or  with  others. 
I  will  honor  the  religion  of  my  native  land,  witness  the  gods,  Agrau- 
los, Enyalius,  Ares,  Zeus,  Thallo,  Auxo,  and  Hegemone."  Of  this 
oath  there  were  many  variants,  detailed  comments,  and  explanations, 
and  the  gods  invoked  were  agrarian  and  military  and  not  distinctly 
ephebic.  It  was  administered  with  solemn  ceremonial.  In  Attica  the 
hair  was  festively  cut,  and  in  Sparta  the  hair  and  the  beard  were  now 
left  to  grow.  So  in  many  rites  of  confirmation  in  the  early  Christian 
Church,  as  is  common  in  pubescent  initiations  among  savages,  the  hair' 
is  symbolically  cut  or  dressed.   So,  too,  the  ancient  Persian  investiture 


252  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

with  the  girdle  at  fifteen  is  symbolic  of  becoming  a  warrior  for  Or- 
muzd,  while  in  India  a  similar  girdle  ceremony  signifies  being  twice 
born  or  else  entering  into  a  higher  caste.  In  Attica  the  hair  was  of- 
fered to  a  mystic  river  god  or  some  higher  deity,  to  whom  perhaps  it 
had  been  vowed  beforehand.  As  festive  hair-cutting  is  often  a  token 
of  sadness  or  an  offering  to  the  dead,  some  have  fancied  here  a  symbol 
of  the  death  of  the  old  self  as  the  higher  life  of  the  race  is  begun. 

The  chlamys  was  the  distinctive  garment  of  the  ephebos.  It  was 
a  short  war-mantle  of  Thessalian  or  Macedonian  origin.  Its  color 
was  always  black  in  the  older,  reflecting  the  serious  character  of 
nearly  all  earlier  festivities,  but  white  in  the  Roman  period.  Who- 
ever died  at  this  age  was  buried  in  the  chlamys.  Hardly  less  charac- 
teristic was  the  broad-brimmed  traveling  hat,  and  the  shield  and  spear 
were  the  ephebic  arms.  Ancient  art  often  represents  a  band  around 
the  forehead  and  the  right  hand  wrapped  in  the  mantle.  After  this 
oath  and  equipment,  the  youth  were  introduced  to  the  people  by  the 
herald,  usually  at  the  festival  of  Dionysus,  just  before  the  tragedy, 
after  which  they  were  conducted  to  the  first  place  in  the  theater  es- 
pecially reserved  for  them,  where  they  were  chaperoned  by  the  soph- 
ronists.  Thus  the  youth  became  at  once  a  citizen,  a  soldier  of  the 
army,  a  member  and  voter  in  the  popular  assemblies,  save  in  Sparta, 
where  complete  citizenship  was  reserved  till  the  age  of  thirty.  They 
were  now  ceremonially  enrolled  as  either  politai  or  senoi.  In  Sparta 
the  epheboi  were  officially  inspected  every  ten  days,  and  ranks  were 
ordered  according  to  drill  and  conduct.  In  Crete  chief  stress  was 
laid  on  military  and  practical  training  and  a  little  on  literature  and 
music,  as  in  Athens.  Everywhere,  however,  the  institution  of  the 
ephebiate  was  intended  to  lay  the  foundation  for  a  just  and  virtuous 
life.  Grasberger  (iii,  65)  finds  it  in  nearly  every  part  and  even 
province  of  Greece. 

Antique  song,  such  an  integral  part  of  the  education  of  Greek 
youth,  was  chiefly  recitative  and  declamatory,  but  was  not,  at  the 
same  time,  without  features  of  elaborate  ballet  and  pantomime. 
Words,  and  not  music,  led,  and  melody  and  rhythm  were  strictly  sub- 
ordinate to  the  text.  In  melic  poetry  music  in  this  sense  was  an  in- 
separable commentary,  and  the  creative  element  was  entirely  in  the 
song  of  the  performer.  Instrumental  music  was  a  still  later  offshoot 
of  song.  The  dance,  too,  was  in  a  similar  sense  auxiliary  and  an 
art  of  expressing  the  verbal  or  dramatic  content  of  a  given  theme. 
The  choral  rhythm  was  primarily  orchestral  and  only  secondarily 
musical ;  the  gymnastic  element  was  harmoniously  welded  to  the  dance 
as  poetry  to  music,  and  the  "  figures  "  were  expressions  of  the  games 
of  the  pentathlon.  "  The  musical  man  is  a  man  of  culture,"  and  only 
grim  Mars  and  Death  were  quite  unmusical.  Many  plays  and  games 
were  with  beats  and  in  rhythm.  Ball-games,  e.  g.,  were  the  root  of 
both  agonistic  and  also  of  orchestral  form.  Even  in  battle  warriors 
were  controlled  by  tone  and  tact.  Religious  dances  celebrating  gods 
and  heroes  were  no  less  common  than  profane.    In  Sparta  the  motto 


CLASSICAL   IDEALS   AND   CUSTOMS  253 

of  the  playgrounds  was  "  Strip  and  join  the  play,  or  go."  The 
standpoint  and  spirit  of  the  profane  orchestras  was  that  of  the  best 
and  most  vigorous  folk-festivals  of  Europe,  and  that  of  the  religious 
orchestras  was  cognate  with  the  mysteries  of  ancient  and  medieval 
times.  Harvest  and  other  agrarian  celebrations  (as  described  in  Era- 
ser's Golden  Bough,  Mannhardt's  Feldculte  und  Baumkultus)  were 
favorite  nuclei  for  both,  but  the  profane  was  derived  from  the  re- 
ligious, and  not  vice  versa.  Poetry,  music,  and  dance  were  never  be- 
fore nor  since  welded  into  such  educative  power  over  the  human  heart. 
The  true  singer  must  be  a  godlike  man,  whose  song  must  be,  like 
prayer,  a  mode  of  worshiping  the  gods,  or  a  teacher  who  forms  by 
his  art  the  souls  of  youth.  Plato  would  have  songs  for  each  age,  and 
virtue  was  taught  by  the  dance.  With  all  these  elements  the  com- 
pelling power  of  music  over  souls  is  illustrated  by  a  wealth  of  legend; 
the  martial  Phrygian  and  the  massive  Doric  music  were  thought  to 
implant  courage  and  temperance,  while  the  Lydian,  Ionian,  and  orgias- 
tic services  of  the  Muses  were  subversions  of  virtue.  In  the  early  days 
dancers  sang,  sharpened  their  minds,  strengthened  their  bodies,  and 
ravished  beholders  till  even  Solon  would  learn  a  new  dance  and  then 
die.  Later  not  only  instrumentation  but  song  was  delegated  to  others, 
and  dancing  became  more  intricate.  Love,  anger,  mourning,  and  mad- 
ness could  be  represented  with  such  intensity  that  the  postures  and 
gestures  were  athletic  culture ;  there  were  few  acts,  types  of  character, 
or  states  of  mind  that  could  not  be  expressed  by  pantomime,  and  all  of 
these  gave  the  best  basis  for  philosophical  education  and  for  eloquence. 
So  lucid  was  his  hand  alone,  the  use  of  which  was  at  first  very 
secondary  to  speech  and  sense,  that  Lesbonax  was  surnamed  chei- 
risophon,  or  "  wise  in  gesture,"  and  it  was  said  he  could  make  any- 
thing plain  to  barbarians  who  spoke  an  unknown  tongue.  Nothing 
of  all  that  is  lost  in  antiquity,  said  Buchholtz,  would  be  more  desirable 
to  restore  than  the  choral  dance  in  the  age  of  its  glory  in  Greece. 
The  prominent  dances  of  the  Spartan  gymnopsedia  were  religious  and 
national,  and  perhaps  began  with  festive  paeans  to  Apollo ;  but  most 
of  these  were  changed  by  the  ephors  after  the  defeat  of  Leuctra,  and 
ephebic  dances  became  largely  military  and  with  pyrrhic  maneuvers, 
in  which  some  think  strophe  and  antistrophe  were  first  introduced. 
The  cults  of  Apollo  and  Dionysus  were  chiefly  groups  of  these  acted, 
marched,  and  sung  dances.  Thus  literature  was  taught,  and  arithme- 
tic and  physics  were  parts  of  music.  There  were  also  song  contests 
and  prizes. 

The  substance  of  the  literary  education  of  Greek  and  Roman 
adolescents  was  the  reading  and  explanation  of  the  poets.  Here  even 
history,  astronomy,  and  geography  were  largely  learned.  Fortunate 
was  the  poet  who  was  recognized  in  the  curriculum  during  his  life, 
and  the  mind  was  cast  into  hexameter  and  pentameter  forms.  Till 
Solon  there  was  no  prose,  and  it  was  long  in  becoming  interesting 
and  dignified  with  good  rhythm  and  periods.  School  and  poesy  were 
most  intimately  unified,  and  prose  was  admitted  late  and  with  diffi- 


254  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

culty.  Not  only  prose,  but  foreign  languages  and  translations  and 
even  grammar  came  in  after  the  sophists,  and  especially  in  Rome, 
realism  and  such  natural  science  as  then  existed  followed  after  the 
Peloponnesian  war  for  the  more  mature  youth.  The  sophists  con- 
tributed greatly  to  increase  the  subject-matter,  the  time  and  the  ex- 
pense of  adolescent  education,  and  in  Greece  higher  instruction  began 
with  them.  They  made  thinking,  speaking,  and  criticism  vocations, 
and  held  that  everything  could  be  imparted  by  teaching,  and  every- 
thing could  be  proven  and  also  disproven.  A  doctrinaire  ethics  took 
the  place  of  the  dying  religious  faith,  cleverness  superseded  convic- 
tion, learning  supplanted  creative  genius,  and,  as  in  all  such  de- 
cadences of  culture,  adolescents  suffered  first  and  most.  Eloquence, 
which  can  only  flourish  in  a  free  state,  for  the  existence  of  which  in 
turn  it  is  itself  necessary,  and  which  is  perhaps  in  the  largest,  highest 
sense  the  most  worthy  and  effective  way  of  obtaining  and  using  per- 
sonal influence,  once  so  central  in  the  education  of  youth  in  the  best 
period  of  Greece  and  Rome,  slowly  lapsed  to  rhetoric,  and  even  to 
eristics,  dialectic  and  debate,  and  from  this  logic  was  evolved  as  a  set 
of  rules  of  the  game.  Historical  narration  was  often  the  first  step 
and  improvisation  the  last  in  the  education  of  the  orator.  Imaginary 
objects  and  situations  were  eulogized  or  blamed,  and  accusation,  de- 
fense, monologues,  suasion  and  declamation,  hortatory,  imprecatory, 
laudatory,  casuistic,  controversial,  epideictic,  descriptive,  mnemotech- 
nic  arts,  rules  for  the  arrangement  of  matter,  the  classification  and 
use  of  tropes,  and  a  copious  technical  nomenclature,  were  developed. 
The  so-called  myths  of  Plato  are  an  unique  educational  device  pe- 
culiarly fitting  to  the  adolescent  mind  as  a  mode  of  formulating  or 
rather  frescoing  the  unknown  frontiers  of  human  knowledge.  Great 
principles  that  meet  deep  needs  of  the  soul  must  be  clad  in  fact,  and 
can  not  be  otherwise  presented.  The  cave  and  the  conversion  of  its 
dwellers  from  the  sight  of  shadows  to  the  sun ;  Er,  whose  soul  visited 
the  place  and  scenes  of  judgment,  where  also  unborn  souls  choose 
their  course  of  life;  the  two  steeds,  the  one  carnal,  the  other  spirit- 
ual; Diatima,  Aristophanes's  tale  of  the  origin  of  the  sex;  the  develop- 
ment of  the  cosmos  in  the  Timaeus ;  the  crises  of  reversion  of  all  cos- 
mic processes  in  the  Statesman;  the  culture  history  in  the  Protagoras; 
the  story  of  the  priest  of  Sais  and  the  lost  Atlantis;  the  other  world  in 
the  Gorgias  and  Phaedo,  all  show  consummate  pedagogic  art  in  the 
scientific  uses  of  the  imagination  which  Deuschle,  Westcott,  and  Vol- 
quarsden  have  helped  us  to  rightly  evaluate.  We  can  hardly  call  them 
taken  together  a  systematic  whole,  or  claim  that  each  expresses  a 
definite  and  unique  human  instinct,  as  enthusiasts  have  urged ;  but 
they  involve  a  clear  sense  on  Plato's  part  at  once  of  the  limitations 
of  reason  and  of  the  urgent  needs  of  faith.  Plato's  myths,  it  has  well 
been  said,  are  related  to  his  speculation  somewhat  as  legend  is  related 
to  history,  and  are  "  individual  expressions  of  universal  instincts." 
Although  the  facts  recorded  never  happened,  they  might  have  hap- 
pened many  times  ana  at  many  places.    They  are  not  prophecies,  nor 


CLASSICAL  IDEALS  AND   CUSTOMS  255 

are  they  "  a  Greek  apocalypse."  They  are  not  allegories,  myths  in  the 
common  sense  of  that  term,  nor  pious  frauds.  The  folk-lore  features 
of  some  of  them  are  unified  and  overlaid  with  speculative  meanings. 
They  constitute  a  kind  of  Platonian  theology,  quite  distinct  from  his 
philosophy,  with  wondrous  power  to  allay  doubt.  Had  there  been  a 
Greek  revelation  we  might  almost  expect  it  to  take  some  such  shape. 
So  artistic  a  soul  as  Plato's  must  fill  even  the  gaps  of  his  scheme  of 
things,  where  philosophy  failed,  with  poetry.  With  his  doctrine  of 
reminiscences,  these  additions  were  not  unlike  restorations  of,  e.  g., 
the  Acropolis,  or  broken  statues  in  a  continuity  as  true  as  the  human 
mind  can  yet  devise.  They  are  what  we  wish  to  believe,  and  are 
therefore  a  broader  and  deeper  expression  of  humanity  and  our  com- 
mon nature  and  mind  than  science  or  history  has  yet  attained,  and 
their  moving  and  edifying  power  is  so  broadening  to  the  feelings  and 
instincts  that  they  may  claim  to  be  part  of  the  true  Bible  of  the  heart, 
with  power  to  make  it  more  effective  for  good. 

The  action  of  the  best  of  these  myths  has  a  sweep  that  parables 
and  allegories  lack,  and  they  strike  deeper  into  the  subsoil  of  the 
soul  than  the  Platonic  doctrine  of  ideas.  Nothing  is  better  calculated 
to  half  reveal  and  half  conceal  the  great  ulterior  truths  of  life  and  mind 
that  beckon  us  on,  yet  bafifie  at  every  point.  They  are  utterly  differ- 
ent from  the  finished  answers  we  give  to  the  great  nascent  interests 
of  adolescence,  for  they  do  not  cause  a  sense  of  finality,  but  encourage 
the  mind  to  press  on.  The  best  things  are  just  beyond  the  solid  limit 
of  facts,  were  overpunctilious  agnosticism  stops,  and  further  growth 
in  mental  power  and  knowledge  may  advance  us  within  sight  of  still 
further  glimpses  and  make  the  future  seem  vaster  and  richer  than  the 
past  has  been.  This  very  attitude  constitutes  the  true  adolescence  of 
the  mind.  From  this  standpoint  and  with  this  conception  of  myth, 
very  different  we  grant  from  that  generally  held,  the  resolution  of  all 
Christology  into  myth  would  be  a  gain  and  mark  a  growth  in  the 
Christian  consciousness,  would  be  not  merely  its  revival  but  its  re- 
juvenation, and  the  tedious  and  paralyzing  problem  of  historical  valid- 
ity would  be  transcended  by  a  satisfying  conviction  of  eternal  and 
profound  psychological  truthfulness. 

Philosophy  was  the  culmination  of  ephebic  education  after  Soc- 
rates. After  the  Persian  war  the  entire  nation  turned  to  the  devel- 
opment of  independent  thought.  This  was  the  apex  of  education  to 
which  it  had  added  a  newer  story,  and  was  the  best  propaedeutic 
for  statesmanship.  The  method  of  lecture  and  conversation  was  well 
adapted  to  secure  participation,  and  both  the  personal  pomp  of  some 
of  the  sophists  and  the  great  simplicity  and  directness  of  Socrates 
were  extremes,  both  of  which  were  pedagogically  very  effective.  Or- 
ganized higher  instruction  was  established  first  with  the  founding  of 
the  Academy,  and  still  farther  advanced  by  the  Lyceum  and  the  Stoa, 
each  with  a  scholiarch  at  its  head  and  each  representing  a  large  vol- 
ume of  both  tradition  and  knowledge.  There  were  student  fraternities 
and  table  companions,  journeys  together,   rival  parties   urging,  one 


256  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

the  claims  of  Theseus  and  the  other  of  Hercules,  to  be  the  chief  na- 
tional hero  and  ideal  of  adolescence.  The  former,  represented  as  in 
the  bloom  of  eternal  youth,  and  as  the  center  of  some  of  the  most  in- 
spiring sagas,  was  especially  in  Attica  a  favorite  theme  of  school 
declamation.  The  ancient  student  associations,  the  Theseides  and  He- 
rakleidae,  no  doubt  resembled  in  many  respects  the  Nations,  Corps, 
Landsmannschaften,  orders,  fraternities  of  the  medieval  universities, 
at  least  in  spirit.  There  were  even  excesses,  hazing,  competition  of  so- 
cieties for  newcomers,  regulated  conflicts,  sometimes  real  terrorism, 
broils,  tricks,  pranks,  and  practical  jokes,  sometimes  dangerous  to  life, 
to  say  nothing  of  stipends,  pensions,  rules  concerning  students'  debts, 
and  for  the  regulations  of  drinking,  feasts,  and  deposition  ceremonials. 
Whether  Schwarz  is  right  in  the  opinion  that  some  student  initiation 
rites  now  in  use  are  directly  from  consecration  forms  of  the  ancient 
mysteries  or  not,  the  customs  of  students  have  changed  hardly  more 
than  their  nature  since  the  fourth  and  fifth  centuries. 

In  the  days  of  the  Roman  Empire,  youth  entered  upon  higher 
courses  of  study  at  sixteen,  and  studied  from  five  to  eight  years.  In 
Athens,  courses  began  in  the  fall  and  continued  with  brief  intervals 
till  the  middle  of  the  summer.  Some  teachers  devoted  all  their  ener- 
gies to  instruction  and  commenting  on  standard  writers,  and  others  to 
authorship,  addressing  chiefly  posterity.  Masses  of  manuscript  ac- 
cumulated, many  of  which  were  multiplied  by  the  transcriptions  of 
students.  The  methods  were  catechising,  disputation,  and  colloquy, 
lectures  in  the  form  of  both  monologue  and  dialogue,  esoteric  and 
exoteric,  but  no  very  definite  curriculum  was  established.  The  true 
education  of  mankind  in  both  virtue  and  knowledge  was  philosophy, 
and  although  its  three  parts — logic,  physics,  ethics — were  recognized, 
it  had  not  been  rounded  into  a  system  sufficiently  complete  to  be  the 
basis  of  a  uniform  course.  As  schools  multiplied,  however,  and  as 
the  field  of  practical  activities  at  the  same  time  increased,  philosophy 
slowly  seemed  inadequate  as  leading  to  and  detaining  the  mind  where 
there  was  everywhere  only  sky  above  and  sea  around  and  beneath,  and. 
law,  medicine,  and  nature  study  slowly  encroached  till  at  last  in  Rome 
came  the  formal  persecutions  of  the  philosophers  with  the  Christians. 
Gymnasiarchs,  sophronists,  paidonomoi,  and  ephebiarchs  were  all 
holders  of  established  offices  in  the  service  of  adolescent  youth,  with 
very  definite  but  now  not  very  well  known  duties.  The  last  phase 
of  the  Attic  ephebiate  coincided  with  the  degeneration  of  gymnastics 
and  the  corresponding  change  in  the  Hellenic  character,  of  which 
these  were  both  cause  and  effect.  The  luxury  that  developed  with  the 
Roman  baths  and  their  association  with  the  gymnasiums  was  one  cause 
of  its  degeneration.  Aberrant  practises  in  the  education  of  girls 
was  another.  "  Girls  who  studied  geometry  grew  ashamed  to  dance." 
and  women  became  erudite  when  the  subject-matter  of  learning  had 
become  formal  and  technical  and  had  lost  its  soul  in  dilettanteism. 
Religious  culture,  at  first  cardinal,  later  decayed,  and  toleration  taught 
to  hold  no  creed.    The  cult  of  Apollo,  which  marked  the  highest  point 


CLASSICAL   IDEALS   AND    CUSTOMS  257 

of  religious  consciousness  among  the  Greeks,  declined.  With  the 
acme  of  Roman  power  man  was  educated  not  as  man,  but  to  serve 
the  state,  and  slowly  but  surely  Greece  and  her  influence  faded.  More 
than  any  other  nation  she  represents  the  eternally  adolescent.  Hardly 
an  important  motive  in  her  history,  an  institution  in  her  whole  na- 
tional life,  a  monument  of  her  literature,  or  an  item  in  the  list  of  her 
very  errors  and  vices,  that  does  not  in  a  peculiar  and  incomparable 
sense  represent  more  or  less  directly  the  nature,  ideals,  and  needs  of 
adolescence,  so  that  to  exhaust  what  this  land  and  race  has  to  teach 
us  concerning  this  stage  of  life,  her  entire  story  must  be  retold.  Till 
Greece  can  be  reproduced,  fit  educational  environment  for  youth  will 
not  be  complete,  and  in  this  fact  we  have  a  new  justification  of  the 
advantages  of  the  study  of  classical  antiquity  for  youth  and  a  new 
unifying  standpoint  from  which  to  teach  it.  Without  some  knowledge 
of  her  poets,  dramatists,  rhetoricians,  historians,  philosophers,  and 
heroes,  modern  youth  is  robbed  of  some  of  its  opportunities,  and,  I 
would  add,  of  its  rights,  and  will  be  forever  less  complete  than  it 
would  otherwise  have  been.  Even  a  little  epitomized  and  general 
knowledge  of  the  best  of  what  is  here  offered,  if  properly  impressed 
at  the  fit  age,  has  a  quickening  power  that  is  simply  marvelous. 

Bodily  and  not  mental  training  was  the  center  and  beginning  of 
all.  In  Sparta,  the  care  and  development  of  the  body  was  the  chief 
business  of  life.  Greece  gives  us  a  new  creation  of  education  on  a 
physical  basis.  To  train  the  intellect  without  training  the  body,  not 
to  mention  its  education  at  the  expense  of  the  body,  would  have 
seemed  an  abomination  for  health,  morals,  and  religion.  To  sit 
much  was  bad,  and  "  to  have  the  hands  and  feet  soft  and  the  rump 
hard  from  use"  (Seneca)  was  a  disgrace.  The  great  games  were  in 
honor  of  the  gods.  All  who  threw  the  spear,  ran,  or  leaped  did  so  for 
the  greater  glory  of  deity.  The  very  nakedness  of  the  athlete  was  a 
symbol  of  sacrifice,  and  victory  was  by  special  divine  favor.  Youth 
were  more  temperate  and  less  passionate  than  if  obliged  to  sit  all  day 
in  closed  spaces.  One  strong  impulse  to  poetry  and  to  statuary  was  to 
perpetuate  athletic  victories  in  story  and  form.  The  mind  was  edu- 
cated so  that  it  could  take  care  of  and  control  the  body,  but  body 
training  was  the  best  mode  of  mind  building.  The  Greeks  held,  as 
the  Turners  claim,  that  man  is  whole  and  entire  only  when  he  plays. 
Games,  of  which  Grasberger  gives  a  list  of  scores,  many  of  which 
fitted  Greece  as  untransferably  close  as  some  games  of  the  great  Eng- 
lish schools  fit  their  form  of  grounds  and  buildings,  were  a  dominant 
passion  of  the  Greek  mind.  The  Trojan  heroes  intermitted  their  war- 
fare to  celebrate  them,  as  did  Xenophon's  Ten  Thousand  their  marches. 
They  were  played  in  old  age,  and  future  life  for  the  Greeks  provided 
for  games.  Play  is  the  poetry  of  life,  more  truly  humanistic  than  lit- 
erature itself.  The  history  of  motor  culture  shows,  as  we  saw  in 
Chapter  III,  that  the  neglect  and  decline  of  plays  and  sports  and  that 
of  physical  education  go  together.  National  growth  and  decay  rest 
upon  this  basis,  for  nations  rise  and  fall  as  the  body  is  well  devel- 
56 


258  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

oped  or  neglected,  and  the  stability  of  culture  depends  upon  the  same 
condition.  To  try  to  educate  the  mind  apart  from  the  body  is  an  ap- 
proach to  the  dark  ages  and  asceticism  where  this  basis  was  lost. 
Starting  with  the  physical,  education  naturally  passes  from  this  fun- 
damental to  the  more  accessory  mental  unfoldment.  Indeed,  the  best 
test  of  the  value  of  body  training  is  its  effect  on  the  higher  culture, 
for  which  it  opens  new  possibilities.  In  fine,  we  have  in  Greece  a 
new  creation  of  education  on  a  physical  basis  with  all  the  new  possi- 
bilities of  culture,  the  sense  of  which  was  never  so  well  developed  as 
in  this  land  of  its  origin,  where  also  the  higher  education  was  born. 
This  made  its  unity  and  harmony.  The  "  good  chest,  clear  complex- 
ion, short  tongue,"  which  was  Aristophanes's  characterization  of  the 
ideal  ephehos,  was  due  to  an  ideal  blending  of  nature  and  art,  im- 
agination and  reason,  passion  and  logic,  heredity  and  training.  The 
vitality  of  the  ideal  is  shown  by  its  persistence  as  the  chivalric  con- 
ception against  the  monastic  down  the  Middle  Ages.  The  knight's 
ideal  was  not  unlike  that  of  the  young  Greek,  "  to  fight  eye  to  eye," 
and  we  can  not  refuse  sympathy  with  the  hero  of  many  a  joust  who 
lamented  that  all  the  craft  and  prowess  of  the  best-trained  cavalier 
could  be  overcome  by  so  much  of  the  newly  invented  black  powder  as 
could  be  put  in  a  woman's  thimble. 

The  state  which  claimed  the  Greek  youth  at  eighteen  was  not  so 
much  a  camp  or  barrack  as  a  pedagogic  province,  such  as  is  described 
in  Wilhelm  Meister.  It  was  a  kind  of  university,  where  citizen- 
ship was  a  baccalaureate  degree,  and  its  great  men  a  faculty  of  sages 
not  so  remote  from  youth  as  not  to  be  its  inspirers  and  mentors.  Till 
Plato's  educational  state  and  Aristotle,  no  one  had  suggested  a  state 
program.  Lepelletier  has  urged  that  all  should  be  educated  by  com- 
pulsion, but  that  instruction  should  be  reserved  for  the  fit  few.  In 
Greece  nothing  was  obligatory.  There  was  no  danger  that  the  bud- 
ding soul  would  be  crushed  by  the  mass  of  literature,  science,  and  his- 
tory forced  on  unwilling  minds  by  a  kind  of  mental  rape,  for  bookish- 
ness  was  abhorred ;  but  nowhere  was  curiosity  so  intense,  all-sided, 
and  universal.  None  have  so  understood  or  so  loved  adolescent  youth 
as  the  Greeks,  so  bemoaned  the  death  of  those  rarely  endowed,  or  so 
admired  their  bodies,  so  sympathized  with  their  souls,  so  loved  to 
teach  and  incite  them  to  noble  deeds.  Even  military  duty  was  almost 
a  sacrament  for  members  of  the  ephebic  college.  All  this  freshness, 
zest,  enthusiasm,  and  naivete  of  youth  impelled  the  Greek  mind  to  live 
no  longer  in  a  world  of  twilight  knowledge,  but  to  push  on  to  en- 
lighten and  clear  up  mental  vision  by  the  greatest  effort  the  human 
spirit  has  yet  made  to  solve  anew  the  problems  of  life  and  death,  and 
which  has  added  new  dignity  to  human  nature.  All  is  to  serve  and 
advance  the  kingdom  of  man.  The  musician  who  did  not  strive  pri- 
marily to  make  men  better  by  his  art,  but  sought  merely  to  please  the 
many,  was  condemned.  Theocritus,  Virgil,  as  well  as  Plato  and  even 
the  popular  consensus  of  a  higher  state  of  the  human  race,  to  which 
ideal  our  Sabbath  was  originally  sacred,  the  customs  of  the  Satur- 


CLASSICAL  IDEALS  AND   CUSTOMS  ^59 

nalia,  the  glimpses  of  Hyperboreans,  ^Ethiopians,  and  all  the  Ar- 
cadias,  Golden  Ages,  and  millennia  seem  less  dreamy  and  more  pos- 
sible in  their  best  features  when  we  feel  most  deeply  the  vitality  of 
the  sudden  push  upward  toward  a  larger  estate  and  higher  dignity  of 
human  nature  nowhere  so  manifest  as  in  the  eternally  adolescent  of 
Greece. 

The  military  character  of  ephebic  education  in  ancient  Greece  and 
Rome  has  no  analogue  in  modern  times.  Fighting  involved  the  use 
of  arms  of  various  sorts,  and  strength  and  skill  in  close  personal  en- 
counter, which  decided  battles,  was  the  dominant  idea  in  the  palestra. 
The  ephebic  regimen  was  a  political  novitiate  and  also  a  school  of 
tactics,  fortifications,  camp  life,  and  of  parades  and  festivals.  It  was 
boy-breaking  to  civic  life.  Youth  were  watchmen  and  did  police 
duty,  were  guardians  of  the  sacred  mountains,  household  gods,  na- 
tional treasures  and  palladia,  and  had  patrol  duties,  often  changed, 
so  that  in  their  wanderings  much  geography  was  learned,  and  there 
was  much  night  duty  and  in  the  dark,  for  even  city  streets  had  no 
lights.  In  extreme  military  need  boys  of  sixteen  could  be  called  to 
actual  war,  and  in  general  the  duties  of  Greek  were  not  very  differ- 
ent from  those  of  Persian  youth  as  described  by  Xenophon,  although 
the  latter  held  hunting,  with  great  system  and  detail,  to  be  the  best 
preparation  for  war.  Most  smaller  Greek  states  had  athletic  excur- 
sions and  traveling  marches,  and  sometimes  even  mimic  warfare,  to 
season  the  body  and  soul  of  youth,  and  an  outdoor  life  of  action  was 
almost  universal.  Fighting  in  full  and  heavy  armor,  hoplomachy, 
which  Plato  praised  as  a  noble  art,  came  somewhat  later.  Only  while 
the  Greek  national  character  was  developing  was  the  institution  of 
the  ephebiate  seen  at  its  best,  and  with  the  beginning  of  the  decline 
it  at  once  began  to  show  signs  of  decay.  Special  military  exercises 
are  described,  as  stabbing  a  post,  shooting  with  the  bow,  hurling  spears 
of  various  sizes  and  forms,  slinging,  fort-fighting,  and  several  styles 
of  wrestling,  leaping,  and  running.  These  and  other  exercises  had 
often  as  their  goal  and  motive  future  participation  in  the  pentathlon, 
which  was  variously  composed  at  different  periods  of  Greek  history. 
There  was  also  special  training  in  swimming  and  nautics,  as  rowing 
and  sailing,  and  riding  and  driving,  preparatory  to  chariot-racing  in 
the  circus  and  mimic  battles. 

Music,  the  orchestral  culture  of  adolescence  in  Greece  which  sup- 
plemented the  athletic  training,  making  a  harmony  of  body  and  mind, 
began  in  ancient  times  with  the  culture  of  the  sages  and  the  lyre  and 
pipe.  Music  was  not  yet  independent  of  words,  but,  together  with 
gesture,  dance,  and  processionals,  reenforced  and  "  sweetened  "  speech. 

Among  the  Romans,  the  end  of  the  period  of  education  at  about 
seventeen  was  marked  by  a  change  of  costume.  Free-born  boys  and 
girls  wore  the  toga  prcctexta,  of  Etruscan  origin,  with  a  broad  pur- 
ple stripe,  with  the  bulla  aiirca,  a  spherical  ornament  made  of  two 
concave  gold  plates  and  containing  an  amulet.  Later  the  children  of 
the  rich,  or  bullati,  also  wore  it.     It  was  suspended  by  a  band  around 


26o  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

the  neck,  and  was  a  symbol  of  honor  and  fidelity.  About  the  end  of 
the  sixteenth  year  the  bulla  was  laid  aside  and  the  all-white  toga  of 
manhood,  toga  pura,  toga  virilis,  vestis  pura,  was  assumed  in  its  place. 
Just  when  the  change  should  be  made  was  determined  chiefly  by  the 
father.  Caligula  assumed  it  in  his  nineteenth  year,  Nero,  Commodus, 
and  Caracalla  in  the  fourteenth,  etc.  The  age  of  eighteen  was  plena 
pubertate.  Only  in  the  days  of  the  empire  did  the  Roman  jurists  fix' 
the  lower  limit  of  puberty  at  the  end  of  the  fourteenth  year  for  boys 
and  of  the  twelfth  for  girls.  The  ceremonial  was  usually  at  the  fes-i 
tival  of  Liberalia,  March  17th.  In  his  new  toga  libera,  the  juventus' 
laid  off  before  the  Lares  of  his  house  the  insignia  pueritice,  especially 
the  bulla,  which  was  hung  up  over  the  hearth  as  a  gift  to  the  house- 
hold gods.  Next  morning  the  youth,  now  called  vesticeps  or  investis, 
accompanied  by  relatives  and  friends,  went  to  the  Forum.  This  was 
a  symbol  of  his  first  public  act,  and  was  called  tirocinium  fori.  The 
procession  went  to  the  capitol,  sacrificed  to  Jupiter  and  Liber,  and  the 
name  of  the  tiro  was  inscribed  in  the  tribal  list  of  citizens  by  an  aedile 
acting  for  a  tribune.  After  an  offering  the  day  was  closed  by  a  re- 
past, often  elaborate,  more  or  less  public,  and  with  some  of  the  features 
of  a  wedding  feast.  Rich  people  gave  gifts  and  entertainments  to 
the  people.  With  this  ceremony  all  instruction  provided  by  the  parents 
ended,  and  further  education  was  left  entirely  to  the  youth  himself. 
The  father  was  no  longer  responsible  for  his  acts,  but  with  complete 
freedom  came  now  also  full  legal  responsibility.  Adults  no  longer 
talked  with  the  former  prescribed  reserve  in  his  presence;  he  could 
frequent  all  public  places,  and  participate  in  games  before  forbidden. 
The  chief  choice  was  now  between  a  military  or  a  legal  or  forensic 
career.  In  the  first  case  the  military  service  by  elite  youth  was  not 
that  of  common  soldiers  but  of  companion  or  contubernalis  in  a  gen- 
eral's cohort,  although  even  here  rhetoric  and  declamation  had  some 
place.  For  the  other  career  private  apprenticeship  and  instruction 
with  some  jurist  or  statesman  for  at  least  a  year  was  customary.  A 
blunt-pointed  spear  was  given  as  a  symbol  of  the  right  of  might  and 
of  property,  and  was  carried  especially  on  parades  and  in  triumphs. 
As  in  the  Middle  Ages,  the  bestowal  of  a  horse  was  a  token  of  eleva- 
tion to  knighthood,  and  deprivation  of  it  a  sign  of  expulsion ;  so  with 
the  spear  among  Roman  youth.  The  sacrament  was  the  regular  oath 
for  entrance  to  the  army,  and  the  jusjurandum  was  a  camp  oath  made 
on  special  military  occasions.  The  strictness  of  military  discipline 
for  these  Roman  youth  was  great,  and  they  must  faithfully  serve  the 
emperor  as  if  he  were  a  god.  To  be  a  Roman  soldier  was  a  high  honor. 
The  members  of  the  old  legions  were  full  Roman  citizens,  and  fidelity 
to  the  standard  here  cultivated  later  shaped  the  idea  of  a  soldier  of 
Christ  in  the  Church  militant. 

III.  Of  the  practices  of  medieval  knighthood  we  know 
little,  but  it  is  plain  that  they  were  quite  as  much  classic  as 


CLASSICAL  IDEALS  AND   CUSTOMS  ^6 1 

Christian  in  spirit.  From  the  eleventh  century  through  the 
feudal  period,  lords  opened  schools  in  their  castles  for  the  sons 
of  their  vassale.  From  the  age  of  about  seven  to  fourteen  they 
attended  ladies,  and  were  taught  obedience  and  courtesy  as  well 
as  games,  music,  and  religion.  The  young  boy  often  chose  a 
lady  for  his  particular  attention,  so  that  his  first  thoughts  were 
those  of  love,  honor,  bravery,  and  gallantry.  The  page  was 
made  a  squire  at  the  age  of  fourteen,  and  then  had  to  attend  his 
lord  in  battle  or  tourney,  and  keep  near  him  to  help  or  protect. 
After  seven  years  of  this  work,  at  the  age  of  twenty-one,  he 
w^as  knighted  with  solemn  and  imposing  ceremonies.  A  day 
and  night  were  spent  in  fasting,  prayer,  confession,  and  watch- 
ing, and  in  the  morning,  after  a  bath,  the  candidate  was 
dressed  in  new  white  robes — a  satin  vest,  embroidered  in  gold, 
and  a  leather  collar  over  his  coat  of  mail.  The  Holy  Sacra- 
ment was  given,  and  then  he  was  taken  to  the  church  and  ex- 
amined by  the  priest.  If  found  worthy,  he  took  "  vows  to  be 
a  brave,  loyal,  generous,  just,  and  gentle  knight,  a  champion 
of  the  Church,  a  redressor  of  the  wrongs  of  widows  and  or- 
phans, and  a  protector  of  ladies  " ;  then  the  priest,  after  bless- 
ing his  sword,  hung  it  about  the  new-made  knight's  neck.  The 
ceremony  was  completed  by  handing  him  his  spear,  helmet, 
shield,  and  spurs.  Then  the  prince  or  king  who  gave  the  honor 
of  knighthood  to  the  youth  struck  him  on  the  neck  with  the 
flat  of  his  sword,  saying,  "  In  the  name  of  God,  St.  Michael, 
and  St.  George,  I  make  thee  a  knight;  be  valiant,  courteous, 
and  loyal." 

The  youth's  mind  was  saturated  with  tales  of  knight- 
errantry,  of  King  Arthur  and  the  Knights  of  the  Round  Table, 
and  the  Quest  of  the  Holy  Grail,  and  taught  the  old  Teutonic 
love  of  women,  arms,  and  the  gods.  This  system  constituted 
perhaps  the  brightest  spot  in  the  dark  ages,  produced  charac- 
ters like  Bayard  and  Sidney,  and  the  ideal  of  a  gentleman, 
until  the  invention  of  gunpowder  and  the  appearance  of  Don 
Quixote  gave  it  its  death-blow. 

IV.  The  Jewish  and  Christian  religions  have  always 
recognized  the  critical  nature  of  this  epoch  and  its  peculiar  temp- 
tations and  invoked  the  aid  of  transcendental  motives  before  in- 
telligence and  self-control  are  able  to  cope  with  the  strong  new 


262  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

instincts  that  now  spring  into  life.  Hence  a  religious  majority  is 
celebrated  in  the  early  teens,  when  the  young  become  members 
of  the  religious  community  as  well  as  of  the  home,  and  parents 
seek  divine  and  ecclesiastical  cooperation  in  the  further  nurture 
of  their  offspring.  The  ideas  and  rites  that  follow,  which  I 
have  described  sympathetically,  have  not  only  a  profound  re- 
ligious but  also  an  anthropological,  psychological,  and  peda- 
gogic interest. 

(A)  The  Old  Testament  tells  us  little  concerning  the  special  train- 
ing of  adolescents.  When  the  open  vision  had  been  sealed  up  because 
of  the  wickedness  of  Israel,  the  office  of  prophet  was  first  established 
in  the  youth  Samuel,  who  was  thrice  called  in  the  night,  who  fore- 
told the  swift  destruction  of  Eli  and  his  house,  and  became  the  pio- 
neer and  in  a  sense  the  founder  of  the  school  of  the  prophets  in  which 
the  ancient  Hebrew  spirit  reached  its  highest  expression.  The  picture 
of  Jesus  in  adolescent  years  discussing  the  highest  themes  with  the 
doctors  in  the  temple  suggests  at  once  the  care  of  Jewish  training  and 
the  characteristic  gravitation  of  the  soul  at  this  age  to  fundamental 
religious  and  philosophical  questions  and  insights. 

While  the  Jews  have  always  attached  the  greatest  importance  to 
the  early  training  of  youth  in  their  sacred  writings,'  the  oldest  form 
of  confirmation,  the  Bar  Mitzvah  or  son  of  the  commandment,  did  not 
become  current  before  the  fourteenth  century,  but  is  still  observed  by 
the  majority  of  Jews  the  world  over.*  Up  to  the  age  of  thirteen  the 
father  is  responsible  for  his  son's  acts,  but  now  by  this  ceremony  he 
attains  his  religious  majority.  In  a  special  form  of  benediction  the 
father  renounces  or  transfers  responsibility  from  himself  to  the  child. 
The  ceremony  is  simple.  The  Sabbath  after  his  thirteenth  birthday 
the  youth  appears  at  the  reader's  desk,  wrapped  in  his  talith,  and  pro- 
nounces the  ritual  benediction  of  the  prayer-book.  If  he  is  a  student 
of  the  torah  or  law,  and  is  advanced  enough,  he  reads  a  few  chapters 
•in  Hebrew  and  the  prophetic  portion  of  the  day,  and  if  a  student  of 
the  Talmud,  he  discourses  on  some  knotty  point  of  his  own  selection, 
either  at  the  close  of  the  service  in  the  synagogue  or  at  home  after- 
ward in  the  presence  of  the  rabbi.  In  any  case  he  then  becomes  a 
member  of  the  congregation,  wears  his  own  phylacteries  at  morning 


*  See  titles  on  the  History  of  Education  among  the  Ancient  Hebrews  in  my 
Bibliography  of  Education,  pp.  6-7. 

'  I  am  chiefly  indebted  for  this  account  to  Rabbi  L  M.  Wise,  Rabbin  G.  Gott- 
heil,  of  Temple  Emanuel,  New  York ;  and  also  to  Rabbin  D.  Philipson,  of  Cin- 
cinnati, I.  S.  Moses,  and  J.  Stolz,  of  Chicago,  C.  Fleischer,  of  Boston,  and  others; 
also  to  a  somewhat  copious  literature  of  articles,  most  of  which  they  have  named, 
and  to  many  manuals  in  current  use. 


CHURCH   CONFIRMATION  263 

service,  and  may  be  called  to  the  desk  to  read  the  law  or  say  the  bene- 
diction. Girls  attain  their  legal  majority  a  year  earlier,  but  although 
they  are  carefully  trained  the  event  is  marked  by  no  ritual.  The  age 
and  the  rites  are  based  on  Oriental  ideas  and  conditions. 

This,  however,  all  the  reformed  and  many  conservative  Jews  now 
regard  as  a  soulless,  worn-out  tradition  of  rabbinism ;  they  hold  that 
the  age  should  not  be  fixed,  but  that  it  depends  on  the  capacity  of  the 
child,  and  should  be  generally  later,  setting  thirteen  as  a  suitable  min- 
imum age.  The  new  forms  of  confirmation  were  first  practised  at 
Cassel,  in  1810,  and  have  since  spread  for  several  decades,  not  with- 
out much  opposition,  as  a  servile  imitation  of  Christianity  and  for- 
eign to  the  spirit  of  Judaism.  At  first  the  new  ceremonial  was  per- 
formed not  in  the  synagogue,  but  in  the  schoolhouse,  not  by  the 
rabbi,  but  by  the  teacher,  and  on  boys  only ;  it  was  first  performed  in 
America  by  Dr.  Max  Lilienthal  in  New  York  in  1846.'  It  is  now  not 
a  ceremony  but  a  kind  of  official  conclusion  of  the  training  of  the 
Sabbath-school,  the  first  public  religious  act  of  the  child,  inducting 
him  to  full  and  complete  membership  of  the  synagogue  and  to  a  re- 
ligion that  is  not  mere  legalism,  a  ceremony  of  acts,  but  "  a  religion 
of  the  spirit  whose  mission  is  to  realize  the  prophetic  ideals  of  one 
God  and  one  mankind."  It  is  thus  an  impressive  ceremonial,  whereby 
the  confirmants  make  a  self-actuated  profession  of  belief  and  declare 
their  purpose  to  uphold  the  principles  of  Judaism. 

The  earlier  stages  of  preparation  for  confirmation  are  represented 
by  graded  classes,  held  on  Sabbath  mornings  and  sometimes  during 
week-days,  generally  limited  to  children  of  members  of  the  congrega- 
tion, who  enter  at  from  eight  to  ten  years  of  age.  Each  of  the  four 
or  five  grades  in  the  best  Jewish  schools  has  its  own  room,  the  chil- 
dren are  marked  and  promoted  from  one  section  to  another,  pass  oral 
and  sometimes  written  examinations,  and  in  all  other  respects  the 
methods  and  principles  are  those  of  the  public  schools.  Part  of  this 
time  is  devoted  to  the  Hebrew  language,  as  a  bond  uniting  a  dispersed 
people  with  each  other  and  with  their  antiquities.  The  rabbi  him- 
self commonly  devotes  much  attention  to  the  school.  Sometimes  sub- 
stantial prizes  are  offered  to  stimulate  competition.  The  first  year's 
work  in  the  best  schools  is  largely  the  biographies  of  the  heroes  of 
the  Old  Testament,  the  history  of  which  is  followed.  The  last  week  or 
two  is  devoted  to  post-Biblical  history,  mainly  of  the  Jews,  but  includ- 
ing Christianity  and  Mohammedanism,  and  incidentally  considerable 
general  European  history  through  the  Christian  centuries,  with  some 
attention  to  secular  Jewish  literature.  The  Old  Testament  is  taught 
intensively  and  well,  but  mainly  as  literature,  and  the  chief  services 
of  the  Church  are  also  taught  in  the  Hebrew  language.  The  relative 
absence  of  dogma  is  a  chief  feature  of  the  work.  The  chief  doctrines 
taught  are:  God,  his  unity,  wisdom,  goodness,  justice,  and  fatherhood; 

'  See  Dr.  David  Philipson :  Confirmation  in  the  Synagogue,  Cincinnati,  1890, 
and  Rabbi  I.  M.  Wise:  Essence  of  Judaism, 


264  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

man's  duty  to  confess,  obey,  and  love  him ;  the  immortality  of  the  soul, 
and  duties  to  our  fellow-men,  to  self,  and  country. 

Confirmation  classes  are  formed,  a  few  months  before  the  cere- 
mony, of  children  whose  mental  and  moral  maturity  is  deemed  suffi- 
cient. Here,  besides  a  general  review,  the  higher  meaning  of  the 
chief  movements  of  Scripture  is  impressed,  and  also  the  nature  of 
Abraham's  call,  the  significance  of  Moses's  life  and  legation,  the  mes- 
sage of  the  prophets,  the  idea  of  revelation,  the  meaning  of  the  Jewish 
idea,  its  relation  to  its  future,  the  festivities  and  the  Ten  Command- 
ments ;  passages  of  Scripture  and  ritual  are  memorized,  and  then, 
sometimes  after  a  special  examination,  the  postulants  are  ready  for 
the  ceremonial.  These  months  are  a  season  of  probation,  and  any 
serious  misconduct  is  followed  by  relegation  to  the  next  lower 
class. 

The  day  set  apart  for  the  ceremony  of  confirmation  is  the  Feast 
of  Pentecost,  on  which  the  synagogue  commemorates  the  revelation  of 
the  law  on  Sinai,  and  also  the  establishment  of  the  covenant  of  Israel 
with  God  to  be  his  chosen  people.  Confirmation  is  treated  as  a  re- 
newal of  that  covenant.  The  children  come  and  sit  with  their  parents 
during  a  special  service,  considerably  varied  in  different  synagogues. 
Later  they  pass  to  the  vestry  and  file  in  with  the  rabbi  and  school 
officers,  to  music.  The  sacred  scroll  of  the  law  is  taken  from  the  taber- 
nacle and  read.  Then  follow  impressive  responses,  prayers,  exhorta- 
tions, and  sermon,  and  sometimes  flower  offerings,  symbolic  of  those 
of  slain  victims  upon  the  altars  of  old ;  and  then,  with  benediction  and 
chant,  the  purpose  of  which  is  to  confirm  the  ancient  vow  of  Horeb 
to  serve  God  alone,  the  children  are  returned,  past  the  open  ark  one 
by  one,  to  their  parents,  who  are  told  to  lay  on  their  heads,  in  sacred 
blessing,  the  hands  that  toiled  for,  guarded,  and  nursed  them  through 
infancy  and  illness.  This,  in  the  services  where  it  occurs,  is  perhaps  the 
most  touching  and  impressive  ceremony  of  the  year.  The  afternoon  is 
sometimes  spent  with  orphans  in  the  asylum,  for  one  or  more  of  whom 
each  class  had  perhaps  assumed  the  responsibility,  where  they  are  en- 
couraged to  express  the  first  fruits  of  the  new  life  and  feelings  of  the 
day  in  some  act  of  charity,  perhaps  making  presents  of  dresses  like 
their  own,  so  that  the  difference  between  poor  and  rich  is  no  longer 
seen,  etc. 

These  ceremonials  have  occasionally  of  late  suggested  to  some  the 
dangers  of  pomp  and  display,  and  have  evoked  protests  that  this  is 
not  an  entertainment  or  exhibition,  with  brilliant  receptions,  vulgar 
display  of  presents,  and  extravagant  dress.  Such  perversions  seem, 
however,  to  be  exceptional,  and  the  predominant  purpose  is  to  work 
on  the  inner  and  not  the  outer  sense,  to  appeal  to  the  heart,  and  to 
start  religious  currents  in  the  life  and  mind.  Vows  at  this  tender  age 
are  generally  disapproved.  No  creed  is  formulated,  for  Judaism  is  the 
"  least  dogmatic  of  all  religions,"  but  the  higher  vocation  of  man  is 
to  be  felt  and  striven  toward  as  a  dim  and  distant  goal.  While  this 
ceremony  is  not  passed  even  by  all  the  children  of  the  congregation, 


CHURCH   CONFIRMATION  265 

it  is  earnestly  advocated  for  every  Jew  by  birth  who  has  not  apos- 
tatized by  deliberate  choice. 

In  recent  years  post-confirmation  classes  for  further  work  are  often 
formed  for  still  older  children.  It  is  felt  that  while  childhood  is  re- 
ceptive and  credulous,  and  puberty  is  a  period  of  doubt  and  reaction, 
that  there  is  a  higher  and  later  standpoint  of  ripe,  reasoned,  and  set- 
tled conviction  beyond  cult  and  form,  and  that  it  is  a  mistake  to  leave 
children  in  the  "  Flegeljahre,"  when  not  only  doubt  but  temptation 
is  strongest.  Such  classes  already  exist  in  some  places  as  an  integral 
but  kind  of  post-graduate  department  of  the  Sabbath-school.  Here 
the  history  of  other  ancient  Oriental  nations  is  studied,  with  some- 
thing about  antiquities  and  excavation,  some  philosophy  of  religion 
and  comparative  religion,  Milton,  and  modern  Jewish  literature,  with 
a  view  to  counteract  the  crude  infidelity  which  in  our  age  is  so  often 
rankly  rife  in  callow  adolescents.^ 

(B)  Confirmation  is  one  of  the  seven  sacraments  of  the 
Catholic  Church,  by  which  the  Holy  Ghost  is  received,  which 
it  is  a  sin  for  any  parent  to  neglect,  and  in  which,  some  think, 
centers  the  very  heart  and  soul  of  the  best  that  is  in  Catholi- 
cism. 

It  is  also  often  called  a  mission,  and  its  inspiration  in  most  Catho- 
lic treatises  on  the  subject  is  directly  traced  to  the  sayings  of  Jesus : 
"  Suffer  little  children  to  come  unto  me,  and  forbid  them  not :  for  of 
such  is  the  kingdom  of  God " ;  "  Out  of  the  mouth  of  babes  and 
sucklings  thou  hast  perfected  praise  " ;  "  Except  ye  be  converted  and 
become  as  little  children,  ye  shall  not  enter  into  the  kingdom  of 
heaven  " ;  "I  thank  thee,  O  Father,  Lord  of  heaven  and  earth,  that 
thou  hast  hid  these  things  from  the  wise  and  prudent,  and  hast  re- 
vealed them  unto  babes  " ;  "  Whoso  shall  receive  one  such  little  child 
in  my  name  receiveth  me  " ;  "  Whoso  shall  offend  one  of  these  little 

1  In  a  curious  and  learned  book,  Leopold  Low  (Die  Lebensalter  in  der  Jiidi- 
schen  Literatur ;  Szegedin,  1875,  p.  457)  compiles  from  ancient  Talmudic  and 
other  sources  "an  account  of  how  the  Jews  regarded  and  treated  each  stage  of  life, 
and  gives  quite  a  full  account  of  how  the  Katan  or  boy  became  a  Gadol  or  attained 
a  kind  of  preliminary  majority  at  puberty.  The  ages  of  six,  thirteen  or  fourteen, 
twenty  and  thirty-six  were  especially  marked  stadia  toward  maturity.  In  early 
times  puberty  was  determined  by  individual  signs  of  ripeness,  but  legalistic  tenden- 
cies later  tended  to  fix  an  age  and  were  attracted  to  fourteen  as  twice  the  sacred 
number  seven.  The  Mishna  and  Gemara  differed  somewhat,  but  in  general  the 
boy  of  this  age  began  to  acquire  property  rights,  could  make  contracts,  not,  how- 
ever, unannullable,  and  the  goods  he  could  own  were  indicated.  He  could  give 
testimony  as  a  witness  but  was  not  fully  responsible  at  law  till  twenty.  The  ritual 
college  prescribed  new  functions  in  the  synagogue,  and  full  religious  accountability 
was  slowly  developed  as  a  progressive  emancipation. 


266  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

ones  which  beHeve  in  me,  it  were  better  for  him  that  a  millstone  were 
hanged  about  his  neck  and  that  he  were  drowned  in  the  depth  of  the 
sea  " ;  "  Take  heed  that  ye  despise  not  one  of  these  little  ones ;  for  I 
say  unto  you,  That  in  heaven  their  angels  do  always  behold  the  face 
of  my  Father  which  is  in  heaven."  The  divinity  of  childhood  as  sug- 
gested in  such  passages  is  interpreted  by  the  Church  to  imply  a  some- 
what mystic  power  of  deep  internal  appropriation  of  symbols,  rites, 
and  even  dogma,  more  akin  to  Wordsworth  than  to  the  modern  meth- 
ods of  secular  pedagogy. 

The  age  of  confirmation  differs.  In  Italy,  where  the  mind  develops 
very  early,  the  lowest  age  at  which  it  may  be  received  is  fixed  at 
seven.  In  France  and  Belgium  children  can  not  be  confirmed  before 
ten.  In  this  country  eleven  or  twelve  may  be  called  the  minimum  age. 
There  must  be  no  time  lost  with  the  children.  Early  impressions  sink 
deepest.  As  soon  as  they  are  able  to  receive  the  eucharist  with  a 
fair  degree  of  appreciation  the  sacrament  should  be  administered. 
Indeed,  the  priest,  who  alone  has  the  power  to  admit,  while  having 
some  discretion,  is  generally  thought  negligent  if  children  of  sixteen 
or  seventeen  in  his  parish  are  not  confirmed,  except  for  special  cause. 
Stated  preparation  is  prescribed  for  deaf-mutes  and  even  for  the 
feeble-minded,  for  whom  a  so-called  "  fool's  catechism  "  of  the  simplest 
and  most  essential  truths  is  provided.  Those  who  do  not  honor  their 
parents,  refuse  to  attend  mass,  eat  flesh-meat  on  Friday,  steal  or  are 
unchaste,  should  be  kept  waiting,  lest  they  profane  the  holy  table. 
Childish  lies,  obstinacy,  or  lack  of  devotion  should  not  bar  them  from 
the  chief  source  of  help  against  their  faults,  which  might  be  aug- 
mented by  delay. 

The  essential  preparation  for  first  communion  and  confirmation  is 
a  knowledge  of  the  catechism.  In  insisting  upon  this  as  basal,  the 
voice  of  the  Church  has  been  practically  unanimous  from  the  time  of 
Origen  and  the  famous  catechetical  school  of  Alexandria,  and  from 
Augustine,  who  consecrated  the  first  years  of  his  episcopate  to  com- 
posing his  treatises  on  catechizing,  down  to  Fenelon  and  Bossuet,  and 
even  to  the  present  time.  While  there  have  been  periods  of  decline, 
and  eminent  prelates  have  sometimes  failed  to  see  its  dignity  and  im- 
portance, men  like  Gerson,  chancellor  of  the  University  of  Paris, 
found  in  catechizing  children  the  chief  source  of  comfort  in  their  de- 
clining years,  and  by  a  decree  of  the  Council  of  Trent  every  pastor 
was  ordered  to  administer  the  catechism  for  children  with  care,  at 
least  on  Sundays  and  other  holy-days.  This  was  speedily  ratified  and 
detailed  by  provincial  councils  and  synods  throughout  the  world.  Car- 
dinal Bellarmine  devoted  himself  with  ardor  to  this  work  in  person. 
St.  Ignatius  bound  himself  with  a  vow  to  this  office,  and  each  Jesuit 
priest  still  acts  for  forty  days  as  catechist  when  he  begins  his  charge. 
Xavier,  too,  thus  began  his  great  mission,  and  Romilion  and  the  found- 
er of  the  Ursulines  devoted  themselves  to  it.  The  work  was  reformed 
in  the  seventeenth  and  in  part  recreated  in  the  nineteenth  century,  but 
the  catechetical  traditions  have  been  strong  and  constant,  and  there 


CHURCH   CONFIRMATION  267 

has  always  been  a  body,  never  so  large  as  now,  of  devoted  nuns  and 
priests  who,  as  Plato's  Republic  first  suggested,  renouncing  family 
ties,  have  turned  that  same  rich  and  deep  tide  of  affection,  which  most 
spend  on  spouse  and  offspring,  to  this  holy  apostolate  of  childhood  and 
youth,  as  their  sweetest  and  dearest  life-work  in  a  way  that  has  not 
only  supplemented,  but  quickened,  instructed,  and  elevated  parental 
love,  and  helped  to  build  up  the  holy  city  of  "  Man-Soul  "  in  the  heart. 
It  is  to  this  long-circuiting  and  sublimation  of  the  sexual  and  parental 
instinct  that  I  ascribe  the  entirely  unique  character  that  pervades  the 
labor  and  writings  of  the  great  child-lovers  in  Catholic  Christendom, 
and  which  merits  the  reverent  and  prolonged  attention  of  all  who 
study  other  systems  than  their  own,  to  realize  ideals,  to  learn  their 
strength  and  their  virtue  rather  than  to  conform  old  prejudices  by 
listing  the  more  superficial  defects,  perversions,  and  failures. 

The  catechism  must  be  learned  with  great  verbal  accuracy,  be- 
cause it  is  the  standard  of  religious  knowledge.  It  contains  sublime 
answers,  that  children  can  be  made  to  feel  the  sense  of,  "  to  every 
question  of  interest  to  man."  It  is  a  high  philosophy  of  life,  so  fit 
and  admirable  that  not  one  syllable  of  it  must  be  changed,  although  it 
is  seasoned  with  much  of  explanation  and  illustration.  It  is  often 
begun  festively,  and  the  work  is  interposed  with  song  and  story.  By 
the  "  billet "  system  children  sometimes  appear  dressed  as  angels,  and 
recite  the  answers  as  if  they  were  just  revealed  from  heaven.  The 
best  catechetical  tradition  of  the  Church  has  been  carefully  preserved, 
and  is  even  now  being  developed  more  vigorously  than  for  some  cen- 
turies. There  are  several  Catholic  catechisms,  but  they  differ  only 
in  the  amount  of  matter  included,  ranging  from  elementary  work, 
containing  a  few  topics,  to  those  of  Deharbe,  Jouin,  Gaume,  and 
Schouppe,  which  are  for  the  last  year  of  study  or  for  the  post-con- 
firmation classes,  now  strongly  advocated,  and  often  formed.  The 
catechism  of  the  Third  Plenary  Council  of  Baltimore  is  the  American 
standard,  and  is  a  pocket  volume  of  seventy-two  pages.  First  are 
ten  chief  prayers,  to  which  some  would  devote  the  entire  primary 
year.  The  chief  topics  in  order,  taught  by  questions  and  answers,  are: 
the  end  of  man,  God,  unity  and  trinity,  creation,  first  parents,  the  fall, 
sin,  incarnation,  redemption,  the  passion,  death,  and  ascension,  the 
Holy  Ghost,  the  Church  and  its  marks,  and  each  of  the  sacraments  in 
detail,  viz.,  baptism,  confirmation,  eucharist,  penance,  unction,  holy 
orders,  and  matrimony.  Then  follow  mass,  prayers,  each  of  the  Ten 
Commandments  in  detail,  the  last  judgment,  hell,  purgatory,  and 
heaven.  Sometimes  the  catechumens  are  stimulated  by  marks,  rank, 
prizes,  examinations  and  charts,  the  bell  and  blackboard,  and  the  vast 
repertory  of  the  many  thousand  lives  of  the  saints,  those  arsenals  of 
virtue,  the  best  of  which  are  often  calendared  one  or  more  for  each 
day  in  the  year,  is  sometimes  utilized.  The  central  theme  of  cate- 
chetical inculcation  and  also  of  early  influences  of  the  Church  is  sin 
and  the  divine  and  human  instrumentalities  by  which  its  results  are 
removed.    Confirmation  is  a  renewal  by  children  of  the  vows  made  for 


268  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

them  by  others  in  infancy  at  baptism,  which  meant  purification  from 
ancestral  sin/ 

This  work  is  done  less  comprehensively  than  in  countries  where 
there  are  no  parochial  schools,  and  it  must  be  limited  to  Sunday. 
Often  the  work  is  more  or  less  graded.  When  the  work  of  the  regu- 
lar teachers  approaches  completion,  special  confirmation  classes  are 
formed  of  those  thought  fit,  and  the  priest  takes  the  children  for  a 
few  months  of  review,  and  more  intensive  and  extensive  instruction, 
often  twice  a  week.  Just  preceding  the  rite  itself  as  a  special  prep- 
aration for  first  communion,  comes  the  retreat,  by  which  children  are 
withdrawn  into  the  sanctuary  of  the  soul,  and  which  seeks  for  a  sea- 
son of  from  two  to  four  or  five  days  to  snatch  them  from  the  outward 
life  and  from  association  with  other  children,  to  bring  them  face  to 
face  with  God  and  self,  and  to  impress  them  with  the  sense  that  some- 
thing serious  and  momentous  is  transpiring  within.  The  catechism 
has  been  learned,  and  the  soul  is  tender  and  ripe  for  the  deepest  im- 
pressions as  never  before  or  after.  It  has  many  varieties,  but  in  a 
true  retreat,  by  a  good  leader,  the  children  devote  the  best  part  of  the 
morning,  afternoon,  and  evening  to  receiving  the  strongest  impres- 
sions of  sin,  death,  salvation,  and  judgment,  but  without  undue  fatigue 
or  fear.  Prayers,  admonition,  meditation,  and  sometimes  the  noting 
of  their  impressions  and  experiences  in  individual  books  (a  method 
said  to  be  full  of  suggestion  for  the  instructors  and  of  great  present 
and  even  greater  subsequent  value  to  the  child,  in  keeping  alive  the 
freshness  and  purity  of  first  religious  emotion),  special  hymns,  the 
sentiments  of  which  are  impressed  and  explained  beforehand,  care- 
fully selected  and  told  stories  of  saintly  heroes  of  virtue,  and  alle- 
gories, are  all  directed  to  produce  a  silent  revolution  of  the  soul  or  a 
veritable  conversion.  They  are  told  that  Jesus  is  now  passing,  knock- 
ing at  their  hearts,  nearer  than  ever  before  or  after;  that  they  must 
choose  between  good  and  evil,  and  declare  in  their  hearts  eternal  war 
with  sin.  The  exercises  begin  Sunday,  and  last  till  confirmation  day, 
which  is  Thursday.  The  battle  with  sin  in  the  soul  becomes  most  in- 
tense on  Tuesday,  especially  in  the  afternoon,  when  sometimes  the 
crucifix  is  draped  in  black  and  death  is  impressed  as  the  doom  of  all ; 
there  are  tears  and  warnings,  lest  each  child  may  not  make  a  true 
communion,  and  the  sermonettes  to  them  are  most  austere  and 
penitential.  The  suffering  and  death  of  Christ  is  made  objective, 
vivid,  and  impressive,  and  the  sentiment  of  pity  which,  deepened  to 
pathos,  is  one  of  the  most  powerful  sentiments  of  the  soul,  which 
after  Emperor  Otho's  death  prompted  many  to  slay  themselves  for 
sheer  compassion,  the  Church  knows  best  how  to  utilize  for  good.    The 

^  T  have  corresponded  with  many  eminent  American  Catholic  prelates,  to  whom 
I  am  much  indebted,  and  have  examined  many  manuals  in  several  languages,  espe- 
cially those  by  Rev.  T.  L.  Kinkead,  M.  Noel,  Mons.  Dupenloup,  Rev.  D.  J.  Scholt, 
I.  Reuter,  S.  I.  Ratistinae,  Father  Thurston;  and  other  works  by  Rev.  A.  G, 
Mortimer,  L'Abbe  Laden,  M.  J.  Lavelle,  etc. 


CHURCH   CONFIRMATION  269 

director  is  sad  and  overwhelmed,  lest  their  hearts  be  not  really  hum- 
bled, broken,  and  contrite.  Eternal  salvation  is  at  stake,  and  the  hor- 
ror of  a  sacrilegious  communion  must  be  deeply  felt.  Each  child  files 
up  and  kisses  the  crucifix,  but  at  the  evening  service,  after  all  have 
received  absolution,  all  is  joy,  and  the  service  is  beautiful  and  grand. 
Past  sins  are  pardoned,  and  they  then  and  there  begin  a  nevv^  life. 
Something  divine  has  passed  over  the  soul,  and  each  is  restored  to 
goodness. 

Just  before  the  ceremony  of  confirmation  every  child  must  make 
a  general  confession,  covering  all  it  can  recall  of  its  past  life.  Con- 
fession is  usually  the  Catholic  child's  first  personal  contact  with  the 
Church,  and  is  commonly  advised  as  early  as  seven  or  eight,  because 
he  can  then  sin  and  repent.  While  he  must  rather  die  than  betray 
the  secrets  of  adults,  a  good  confessor  must  keep  the  confidences  of 
this  tender  age  also  strictly  inviolate,  and  may  be  a  beneficent  spir- 
itual father  of  childhood  if  he  has  the  rare  gift  of  keeping  in  sym- 
pathetic rapport  with  it.  Always,  and  of  course  especially  now,  at 
this  chief  confession  of  a  lifetime,  he  will  strive,  first  of  all,  while 
exerting  the  utmost  care  to  ask  no  questions  that  may  suggest  error  or 
sin  not  previously  known,  to  encourage  each  child  to  unburden  his 
conscience  as  honestly  and  unreservedly  as  possible.  To  acknowledge 
a  fault  is  to  get  it  outside  the  better,  inmost  self,  to  begin  to  loosen 
a  burden,  and  to  molt  the  old  ego.  If  frank,  the  besetting  sins  are 
seen,  and  the  process  of  alienation  begins.-  Real  regret  is  almost  sure 
to  follow,  and  care  is  taken  that  it  be  poignant,  but  not  excessive  or 
morbid,  for  remorse,  always  a  feeling  of  doubtful  utility,  is  not  for 
this  age.  Wrong  is  deplored,  because  not  only  odious  to  a  sinless 
heavenly  Father,  but  as  in  the  face  of  infinite  goodness  and  love 
toward  each  person.  After  dealing  discreetly  and  tenderly  with  the 
nascent  conscience,  judging  considerately  causes  and  occasions  of  er- 
ror, and  generating  not  only  repentance  but  good  resolution,  penances 
are  imposed.  These  are  sometimes  a  given  number  of  repetitions  of 
prayers,  learning  hymns,  refraining  from  dessert  for  a  time,  a  brief 
daily  season  of  self-communion,  acts  of  self-sacrifice  or  service,  that 
the  fresh  impulses  to  right  may  find  some  expression  before  they  fade. 
Penance,  too,  must  be  administered  with  great  wisdom  and  adapta- 
tion to  the  nature,  needs,  and  surroundings  of  the  individual  child. 
Lastly  comes  the  priestly  absolution  from  past  sins,  and  the  candi- 
date, pure  and  white  of  soul  indeed,  is  ready  for  the  ceremonial  sac- 
rament. 

The  day  of  first  communion  and  confirmation,  on  which  children 
are  to  receive  God  in  the  eucharist,  and  to  first  taste  the  bread  of 
angels  at  the  divine  banquet  of  paschal  communion,  marks  the  epoch 
when  God  takes  possession  of  their  chastened  souls.  The  ceremonial 
is  a  very  special  one  for  Church  and  family.  It  must  be  brilliant,  and 
with  much  outer  pomp.  Synods  have  declared  that  it  must  be  "  cele- 
brated with  all  possible  solemnity,"  for  children's  senses  are  at  their 
keenest,  and  they  need  external  show.     After  final  instruction  con- 


270  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

cerning  their  part  and  bearing  during  the  ceremonial,  they  enter  the 
church  in  solemn  procession  and  kneel  in  a  line,  the  girls  in  white,  as 
a  symbol  of  their  new  sinlessness,  on  the  left  of  the  sanctuary,  and 
the  boys,  in  their  best  and  darkest  clothes,  on  the  right.  There  are 
sometimes  certificates  of  confession.  There  are  veils  suggesting  be- 
trothal to  Christ  and  the  Church,  candles  reminiscent  of  the  catacombs 
where  the  Church  was  cradled,  and  symbols  of  the  true  light  of  truth, 
their  very  wax,  according  to  some  liturgists,  being  an  allegory  of  the 
virginity  of  bees  and  of  flowers,  and  the  flame,  of  both  the  glory  and 
suffering  of  Christ,  and  the  altar,  which  has  always  been  a  table  on 
a  tomb. 

Only  a  bishop  can  administer  confirmation,  and  he  makes  episcopal 
visitations  for  this  purpose  to  each  parish,  at  intervals  varying  some- 
what with  its  size.  The  pontifical  vestments  are  the  miter  or  duplex 
crown,  the  mozetta,  symbolizing  the  light  on  Moses's  brow  when  he 
came  from  Sinai,  the  amice  or  allegorical  shield,  the  tunic,  which  re- 
calls the  seamless  robe  woven  for  Jesus  by  his  mother  Mary,  that  was 
not  rent  by  the  earthquake  of  the  crucifixion,  and  for  which  the  sol- 
diers cast  lots,  the  cincture  of  continence  and  self-control,  the  stole, 
since  the  eighth  century  representing  immortality,  and  always  to  be 
put  on  with  a  stated  prayer,  and  the  cope,  the  significance  of  which 
has  been  lost;  he  carries  the  crozier  or  pastoral  staff,  the  symbol  of 
his  authority.  He  lays  aside  his  miter,  and  turning  from  the  altar 
raises  his  hands  in  benediction.  He  then  explains  the  nature  of  the 
sacrament,  invokes  all  to  make  good  use  of  its  graces,  and  prays  from 
the  ritual  that  the  Holy  Ghost,  the  descent  of  which  is  the  chief  and 
central  end  of  the  ceremony,  may  rest  upon  the  confirmed,  as  at  Pen- 
tecost, with  all  its  fulness  of  gifts.  Then,  approaching  the  first  boy 
in  the  line,  he  dips  his  right  thumb  in  a  golden  vessel  held  by  a  min- 
istrant  and  containing  chrism  of  oil  and  balm,  the  consecration  of 
which  by  the  bishop  forms  one  of  the  ceremonies  of  Holy  Thursday, 
and  anoints  each,  in  the  form  of  a  cross,  on  the  forehead,  to  indi- 
cate that  he  must  openly  profess  and  practise  the  faith,  never  be 
ashamed  of  it,  and  die  rather  than  deny  it,  saying,  Signo  te  signo 
crucis  et  confirmo  te  chrisinate  saliitis  in  nomine  Patris  et  Filii  et  Spir- 
itiis  Sancti.  Then,  making  the  sign  of  the  cross  over  the  person,  he 
gives  him  a  slight  blow  on  the  cheek  to  suggest  that  he  must  be  ever 
ready  to  suffer  all  things  for  the  sake  of  Christ,  saying  at  the  same 
time.  Pax  tecum.  The  assistant  wipes  the  oil,  while  the  bishop  passes 
to  the  next.  Like  baptism,  confirmation  calls  for  sponsors,  but  of  late  in 
America  it  is  customary  to  have  but  two,  a  male  adult  for  all  the  boys 
and  a  female  for  the  girls.  The  sponsor  stands  behind  and  lays  his 
hand  on  the  right  shoulder  of  each  during  this  rite.  While  this  cere- 
mony is  often  performed  with  low  mass  and  hymns,  it  is  better  with 
the  choir  and  organ  of  high  mass,  and  comes  after  the  three  Kyries, 
the  Gloria  in  excelsis  Deo,  and  Credo,  with  the  offertory  and  preface ; 
sometimes  the  Veni  Creator  Spiritus  is  here  sung,  and  then,  after 
the  Sanctus,  and  the  elevation  of  the  sacred  Host  and  the  consum- 


CHURCH   CONFIRMATION  27^ 

mation  of  the  eternal  miracle  of  transubstantiation,  the  acts  of  con- 
firmation are  recited  by  the  children,  who  at  the  supreme  moment  go 
forward  and  partake  of  the  blessed  eucharist,  receiving  God  into  their 
hearts  entire,  although  under  but  the  one  form  of  bread,  when  the 
Agnus  Dei  is  sung.  Sometimes  another  mass  of  thanksgiving  is  cele- 
brated immediately  afterward  by  another  priest.  The  catechists  then 
lead  the  children  out  of  the  church,  where  their  parents  await  and  em- 
brace them  with  tears,  while  priests  and  teachers  return  sadly  to  pray 
alone  before  the  deserted  and  silent  altar.  Often  they  are  sent  out 
later  in  the  day  to  do  works  of  charity  while  the  dew  of  consecration 
is  fresh  on  their  souls. 

Many  accessories  are  modified,  and  in  large  places  supplementary 
services  are  held  in  the  evening.  Vespers  and  often  the  Magnificat 
are  intoned  with  responsions,  a  sermon  is  addressed  to  the  children, 
admonishing  them  to  renew  their  baptismal  vows,  perhaps  the  for- 
mula of  consecration  is  recited  by  boys  selected  beforehand,  and  all 
are  formally  recommitted  to  their  parents,  who  are  charged  to  keep 
them  as  pure  and  religious  as  at  that  moment.  Souvenirs  and  often 
symbolic  presents  are  given,  very  tastefully  illustrated  diplomas  or 
certificates  picturing  the  ceremonies  of  baptism,  first  communion,  and 
confirmation,  and  there  may  be  supplementary  services  next  day. 

The  young  communicant  has  now  received  the  baptism  of  fire,  as 
formerly  of  water,  and  is  under  renewed  and  greatly  increased  obliga- 
tion to  observe  fasts  and  festivals,  to  frequent  confessions,  which 
every  good  Catholic  must  attend  at  least  annually,  and  is  in  a  position 
to  receive  by  grace  the  seven  gifts  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  which  are  wis- 
dom, understanding,  counsel,  fortitude,  knowledge,  piety,  and  fear  of 
God,  that  he  may  bear  in  their  due  season  the  twelve  fruits  of  the 
spirit,  which  are  charity,  joy,  peace,  patience,  benignity,  longanimity, 
goodness,  mildness,  fidelity,  modesty,  continency,  and  chastity,  the 
names  of  which  have  been  memorized  in  early  childhood,  illustrated 
later  in  Bible  stories  and  lives  of  the  saints,  and  if  the  proper  stage 
of  higher  scholastic  study  is  reached  are  found  still  later  to  be  the 
basis  of  instruction  in  the  systematic  theological  ethics  of  Aquinas. 

To  receive  the  sacrament  with  the  consciousness  of  unforgiven 
sin  would  be  a  sacrilege,  and  for  its  worthy  and  fruitful  reception  the 
subject  must  be  in  a  state  of  grace.  Although  confirmation  and  the 
work  of  the  Sunday-school,  all  of  which  leads  up  to  it,  is  the  palla- 
dium of  the  faith  which  no  child  of  Catholic  parents  must  omit, 
there  is  a  growing  sentiment,  especially  in  this  country,  that  effective 
as  all  this  is,  the  children  must  not  be  left  at  the  dawn  of  adolescence 
without  further  guidance,  and  hence  in  many  places  societies  of  per- 
severance have  been  instituted,  where  studies  of  the  ecclesiastical  year. 
Church  history,  selected  points  of  canon  law,  hymnology,  written  ac- 
counts of  festivals,  and  a  better  understanding  of  the  orders,  insti- 
tutions, and  rites  of  the  Church  are  imparted,  and  each  engages  in 
works  of  beneficence  and  additional  retreats.  Some  have  lately  advo- 
cated so  great  an  innovation  as  Sunday-school  libraries,  and  urged 


272  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

that  whereas  the  Church  has  hitherto  been  far  more  prominent  than 
the  Scriptures,  a  graded  course  be  conducted  in  first-hand  study  of 
both  the  Old  and  New  Testaments,  which  are  usually  reserved  from 
direct  use  by  children,  at  least  till  these  post-communion  classes,  which 
should  be  attended  till  marriage.  The  age  of  temptation  to  sin,  it  is 
well  said,  is  not  ended  but  just  beginning,  and  the  influence  of  re- 
ligion so  well  inaugurated  should  be  sustained  till  character  is  set- 
tled. Sometimes  these  are  called  Christian  academies,  and  there  are 
first  aspirants,  then  candidates,  then  auditors,  and  then  full  acade- 
micians, a  title  especially  prized  in  France;  there  are  conferences, 
debates,  and  honors,  and  various  confraternities,  sodalities,  and  clubs. 
Precedents  of  these  abound,  for  St.  Sulpice,  St.  Charles  Borromeo,  St. 
Vincent  de  Paul,  and  many  others,  were  devoted  to  this  work  in  the 
past,  and  young  people  attended  up  to  the  age  of  twenty  or  even  twen- 
ty-five. 

In  1884  the  three  hundredth  anniversary  of  the  foundation  of  a 
Society  of  the  Annunciation,  which  has  multiplied  in  all  Catholic 
lands  under  the  title  of  Sodalities  of  the  Blessed  Virgin,  was  observed. 
These  are  for  adolescents,  and  there  are  branches  for  either  sex.  The 
papal  bull  creating  them  refrained  from  prescribing  details  of  either 
plan  or  purpose,  so  that  there  are  many  local  differences.  Their  gen- 
eral purpose  is  to  quicken  piety,  charity,  and  personal  purity  of  heart 
and  life  by  increasing  devotion  to  the  Holy  Mother,  who  asks  the 
young  to  join  their  hearts  day  by  day  to  a  more  perfect  likeness  of 
her  divine  Son.  They  are  especially  designed  for  youth  from  fourteen 
to  twenty,  but  there  are  branches  for  older  youth  in  colleges,  and  even 
for  children  who  are  younger.  Constant  war  against  passion,  an  an- 
nual retreat,  self-examination,  cheerfulness,  temperance,  and  religious 
offices  are  prescribed,  and  they  have  a  special  devotional  manual  and 
litany. 

(C)  In  the  Greek  Russian  Church,  confession  takes  the 
place  of  first  communion  and  confirmation,  and  occurs  at  about 
the  age  of  eight.  The  many  reHgious  ceremonies  of  in- 
fancy in  Russia  require  sponsors,  one  of  which  is  usually  a 
boy  or  girl  of  fourteen  or  fifteen,  and  this,  as  it  is  a  solemn 
office,  involves  full  Church  responsibility. 

At  the  age  of  about  twenty-four  hours  the  infant  is  visited  by  the 
priest,  who  names  it  after  the  saint  on  or  near  whose  day  it  was  born, 
holds  it  before  the  sacred  pictures,  and  has  the  sign  of  the  cross  made 
over  it  and  prayers  read.  In  the  christening  ceremony,  at  the  age  of 
eight  days,  the  young  godfather  participates,  and  provides  and  puts 
on  the  neck  of  the  infant  a  tiny  gold  cross,  which  must  never  leave 
it.  Baptism  must  be  administered  at  the  age  of  forty  days.  First, 
the  priest,  in  cope,  blows  in  the  face  of  the  naked  infant  three  times, 


CHURCH   CONFIRMATION  273 

crosses  it  on  the  brow,  lip,  and  breast,  and,  laying  his  hand  on  its 
head,  reads  the  prayer  of  exorcising  the  devil  and  all  his  hosts  from 
the  body  and  soul.  The  priest  then  asks  the  infant  if  it  renounces 
the  wicked  one,  and  the  sponsor,  looking  to  the  west  where  the  sun 
sets  in  darkness,  answers,  "  I  have  renounced  him."  They  then  blow 
and  make  the  gesture  of  spitting  at  man's  great  enemy  in  token  of 
hate  and  horror.  The  Nicene  Creed  is  thrice  repeated,  and  the  spon- 
sors say  in  responses  that  their  young  charge  has  confessed  and  be- 
lieves in  Christ.  After  prayers  the  parents,  even  though  they  be  the 
Czar  and  Czarina,  leave  the  room,  in  token  that  the  child  is  entirely 
left  to  its  sponsors  and  godparents.  Then,  in  full  canonicals,  the 
priest  blesses  the  water  by  blowing  on  it,  moving  his  hand  through  it, 
and  crossing  its  surface  with  a  feather  dipped  in  oil,  symbolic  of 
peace  and  previously  consecrated,  and  after  a  first  anointment  the 
child  is  deftly  plunged  thrice  completely  under  the  water.  Baptism 
of  water  is  immediately  followed  by  that  of  the  spirit  or  the  anoint- 
ing proper,  which  has  its  own  litany  and  ritual.  During  the  mass,  a 
small  quantity  of  wine  is  passed  with  a  spoon  into  the  child's  mouth 
and  the  lips  wiped  by  an  assistant.  Eight  days  later  the  hair,  the  only 
offering  an  infant  can  make,  is  ceremoniously  cut  in  four  places  in  the 
form  of  the  cross.  All  these  rites  are  detailed  and  performed  with 
music  and  prayer,  paid  for  with  small  fees  to  the  priests,  and  if  the 
mother  wishes  to  be  churched,  the  baby's  face  is  pressed  against  a 
silver-covered  picture  at  the  altar,  and  from  behind  the  screen  the 
words  are  chanted,  "  The  servant  of  God,  A.  B.,  is  admitted  to  the 
Church  of  Christ."  The  sponsors  then  assume,  at  least  formally,  a 
serious  responsibility,  and  must  therefore  set  worthy  example  and  give 
wise  counsel. 

Communion  in  one  kind  is  observed  semiannually  thereafter  by 
each  child,  who  attends  church  and  learns  prayers,  which  are  far  more 
numerous  than  those  of  the  English  Church,  and  more  difficult  in  the 
Slavonic  dialect,  also  the  Lord's  Prayer,  the  Nicene  Creed,  the  Ten 
Commandments,  hymns,  and  stories  from  the  Old  and  later  from  the 
New  Testament.  The  expressions  of  piety  are  so  formal  and  so  many 
that  the  children,  who  are  imitative,  and  who  are  brought  up  in  an 
atmosphere  charged  with  them,  seem  exceptionally  religious,  and 
the  parents'  constant  fear  of  their  remorse  and  of  its  consequences 
to  their  offspring,  should  they  die  unshriven,  is  so  great  that  the 
pressure  of  the  home  for  early  consummation  of  church  membership 
has  crowded  the  first  confession  and  full  communion  in  both  kinds 
to  the  unusually  early  age  customary  here.  The  significance  of  these 
infant  rites  here  is  that  there  is  much  reason  to  believe  that  many  if  not 
most  of  them  were  once  pubescent,  and  have  been  gradually  removed 
to  an  earlier  age,  like  circumcision  among  the  Jews.  The  priest  comes 
to  the  house  twice  a  week  for  a  month  or  two,  where  there  are  chil- 
dren at  the  ages  of  from  seven  to  ten,  to  explain  the  simple  catechism, 
teach  the  rudiments  of  sacred  history,  and  interpret  the  child's  prayers 
and  hymns.  This  special  preparation  may  begin  at  Christmas  and 
57 


274  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

last  till  Lent,  during  which  the  ceremony  must  occur.  When  the 
feasting  week  of  carnival  festivities  changes  to  the  Lenten  period, 
when  no  food  ever  so  remotely  connected  with  animal  life  can  be  par- 
taken, there  are  three  days  of  devotional  preparation,  with  early  rising 
and  frequent  daily  church  services.  On  Friday,  after  vespers,  each 
child  goes  alone  behind  a  screen  in  the  church  corner,  where  the  priest 
awaits  him,  and  after  prayer  exhorts  that  the  confession  be  complete, 
questioning  each  touching  the  chief  sins  of  childhood ;  some  confessors 
are  indulgent,  others  severe,  and  most  have  special  lines  of  misdeeds 
for  which  they  question.  After  this,  if  the  confessor  does  not  find 
any  of  the  one  hundred  and  fifteen  crimes  and  overt  sins  which  debar, 
and  a  real  desire  to  lead  a  new  life  is  apparent.,  the  priest  lays  his 
hand,  with  the  end  of  his  cope  beneath  it,  on  the  novitiate's  head,  as 
a  token  that  he  is  now  under  the  protection  of  the  Church,  and  pro- 
nounces absolution,  praying  God  to  pardon,  as  his  minister  now  does. 
Each  is  signed  with  the  cross,  kisses  the  crucifix,  and  leaves  a  fee  and 
a  candle.  This  is  usually  in  the  evening,  and  the  penitents  bathe,  re- 
tire early,  and  take  no  food  till  after  communion  at  matins  next  day. 
In  the  morning,  not  only  children  but  parents  array  themselves  in 
their  best,  new  dresses  for  the  occasion  being  customary,  and  kiss 
every  member  of  the  household  as  a  token  of  good-will.  At  church, 
the  sacred  elements  are  brought  in  with  a  solemn  liturgy,  the  re- 
cipient repeats  slowly  after  the  priest  the  articles  of  belief,  stating  the 
nature  and  meaning  of  the  sacrament,  and  a  morsel  of  bread,  moistened 
with  wine,  is  placed  in  his  mouth  with  a  spoon.  He  then  rises  and 
passes  to  the  reader's  table,  takes  more  wine  and  water,  to  rinse  and 
clear  his  mouth,  and  eats  a  tiny  loaf,  from  the  side  of  which  the  part 
used  in  communion  had  been  cut  with  the  sacred  spoon.  At  home, 
congratulations  and  feasting  follow,  with  vespers  later  and  final  mass 
next  day. 

(D)  Confirmation  by  first  communion  is  required  of  all 
children  of  the  Episcopal  Church  in  England  and  America. 
Girls  are  rarely  confirmed  under  twelve  or  boys  under  fourteen, 
and  the  average  age  is  probably  a  year  or  more  older.  It  is 
one  of  the  most  solemn  duties  of  parents  to  bring  their  children 
to  what  is  one  of  the  central  rites  of  the  Church.  Both  the 
official  requirements  and  the  ceremonials,  as  found  in  the 
prayer  and  service  book,  are  simple  and  brief,  so  that  what 
may  be  called  the  minimum  of  both  the  preparation  and  the 
initiation  ceremony  itself  is  somewhat  slight  and  formal.  This 
not  only  leaves  room  for  a  wide  range  of  individual  practise, 
but  all  the  degrees  of  difference  between  the  extremes  of  High 
and  Low  Church  views  are  expressed  in  the  many  manuals  and 
guides  for  confirmation. 


CHURCH   CONFIRMATION  275 

The  order  of  the  Church  demands  only  the  memorizing  of  the 
Creed,  the  Lord's  Prayer,  the  Ten  Commandments,  and  the  shorter 
catechism.  The  latter  sets  forth  that  the  sponsors  at  the  baptism  in 
infancy  also  gave  the  child  its  name,  and  promised  that  it  should  re- 
nounce the  devil,  worldly  pomp  and  sinful  lust,  believe  the  articles 
of  faith,  and  keep  God's  will  and  law.  These  vows  the  child  now 
assumes  for  himself  with  solemn  affirmation.  In  twelve  questions 
and  answers,  the  nature  of  the  two  sacraments  necessary  to  salvation 
by  baptism  and  the  Lord's  Supper  is  set  forth.  The  minister  of  every 
parish  is  required  to  instruct  and  examine  on  these  essentials,  which 
are  often  greatly  amplified  by  those  who  devote  themselves  to  this 
work  with  zeal. 

The  order  of  confirm?.tion  requires  the  presence  of  the  bishop,  be- 
fore whom,  as  he  sits  near  the  Holy  Table,  the  candidates  stand.  The 
preface,  stating  the  purpose  of  the  rite,  is  first  read,  while  the  con- 
gregation stand.  The  minister  then  presents  the  children,  and  the  les- 
son is  read  from  Acts,  on  the  gift  of  the  Holy  Ghost  by  the  laying  on 
of  hands.  The  solemn  question  is  then  put  by  the  bishop :  "  Do  ye 
here,  in  the  presence  of  God  and  of  this  congregation,  renew  the  sol- 
emn promise  and  vow,  that  ye  made  or  that  was  made  in  your  name 
at  your  Baptism;  ratifying  and  confirming  the  same;  and  acknowledg- 
ing yourselves  bound  to  believe  and  to  do  all  those  things  which  ye 
undertook  or  your  Sponsors  then  undertook  for  you?  "  and  the  momen- 
tous words,  "  I  do,"  are  pronounced  audibly  by  every  candidate.  The 
bishop's  prayer  that  follows  is  for  the  daily  increase  of  each  of  the 
gifts  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  after  which  he  lays  his  hands  upon  the  head 
of  each,  saying,  "  Defend,  O  Lord,  this  thy  Child  with  thy  heavenly 
grace;  that  he  may  continue  thine  forever;  and  daily  increase  in  thy 
Holy  Spirit  more  and  more  until  he  come  unto  thy  everlasting  king- 
dom. Amen."  After  this  follow  the  collects  and  benediction.  It  is 
earnestly  expected  that  every  newly  confirmed  person  shall  attend  the 
Lord's  Supper  without  delay. 

At  the  High  Church  extreme,  the  instruction  for  first  commun- 
ion is  elaborate  and  chiefly  ecclesiastical,  the  manuals  prescribing  a 
knowledge  of  the  seven  daily  offices  of  the  psalter  from  matin  to  com- 
pline, and  some  historical  matters,  but  especially  and  in  great  detail, 
of  the  liturgy  as  celebrating  the  eucharist,  which  is  the  chief  act  of 
worship,  because  it  commemorates  the  sacrifice  of  Christ,  which  is  the 
central  fact  in  Christendom.  Unlike  the  Roman  Church,  the  modern 
English  tractarian  invites,  on  the  part  of  the  communicant,  a  high 
degree  of  metaphysical  activity,  to  which  the  mind  of  bright  adoles- 
cents is  often  so  prone.  "  It  is  well,"  says  Ewer,^  "  for  the  class 
to  understand  distinctly  what  the  doctrine  of  transubstantiation  is  as 
distinguished  from  transaccidentation,  and  to  know  why  as  Anglican 
Catholics  we  decline  to  admit  its  truth."  Hence,  it  is  explained  at 
length  that  Christ  is  not  impanated  in  the  sacred  species.     His  body, 

1  Manual  of  Instruction  for  Classes  preparing  for  Communion,  p.  24. 


a;^  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

soul,  and  divinity  are  not  to  be  divided,  as  by  the  Roman  theory  of 
communion  in  one  kind,  but  are  wholly  present  in  the  bread  and  wine. 
Their  res  ipsissima  is  not  present  under  the  outward  form,  the  acci- 
dents of  which  remain  unchanged.  The  presence  is  real  and  objective, 
not  local,  but  supra-local.  While  the  phenomenal  color,  form,  taste, 
smell  and  weight  of  the  bread  and  wine  remain  unchanged,  the  noume- 
nal  "  thing  in  itself  "  of  the  holy  emblems  is  not  absent,  but  actually 
although  mystically  present.  Water  must  be  always  mingled  with  the 
wine  to  symbolize  the  union  of  divine  and  human.  While  the  body 
assimilates  natural  food,  the  process  here  is  reversed,  and  the  recipient 
is  himself  assimilated  and  transformed  into  the  higher  divine  life,  and 
the  self  of  Christ  is  identified  with  his  own. 

The  liturgy,  which,  like  the  Roman,  constitutes  the  august  rite  of 
mass,  is  traced  back  to  the  apostles,  and  represents  the  perpetual 
obligation ;  it  is  at  the  same  time  historically  commemorative  both 
of  the  Last  Supper  of  our  Lord  and  of  the  later  stages  of  his  life, 
his  death,  and  his  ascension.  When  the  celebrant  enters,  he  may  medi- 
tate of  Jesus's  entrance  into  the  garden;  when  he  bows  over  his  se- 
crete, he  may  think  of  Jesus's  falling  on  his  face  in  prayer;  when  he 
salutes  the  altar,  of  the  treacherous  kiss ;  when  the  sacred  vessels 
are  unveiled,  of  Jesus  spoiled  of  his  garments ;  at  the  prayer,  of  Jesus 
scourged ;  at  the  lavabo,  of  Pilate  washing  his  hands ;  when  he  kneels, 
of  Jesus  falling  under  the  cross ;  at  the  hymn,  of  his  death ;  at  the 
"  Our  Father,"  of  his  resurrection  ;  at  the  Gloria,  of  his  ascension  ;  and 
at  the  benediction,  of  the  descent  of  the  Holy  Ghost.  In  the  service 
something  goes  up  to  God,  though  our  thanks  be  no  more  than  the 
burnt  offering  of  a  grain  of  chafif,  and  something  descends  from  God 
to  man,  for  the  eucharist  is  a  fountain  of  grace.  To  eat  and  drink 
unworthily  and  without  discernment  is  damnation.  We  must  there- 
fore lift  up  our  hearts  and  hunger  for  the  meat  that  perisheth  not. 
We  were  grafted  into  the  true  vine  in  baptism,  but  now  the  intus- 
susception is  complete,  and  every  scion  shoots  as  with  spring-tide. 

While  the  Greek  Church  permits  only  leavened  and  the  Roman 
only  unleavened  bread,  the  Anglican  Church  allows  either.  The  com- 
municant may  stand  or  kneel,  but  never  sit;  must,  as  in  most  of  the 
churches  since  the  apostles,  only  partake  of  it  fasting,  that  it  may  sen- 
sibly affect  body  as  well  as  soul ;  must  receive  the  bread  in  the  hollow 
palm,  supporting  it  with  the  other,  and  forming  a  cross,  consume  the 
smallest  particle,  to  avoid  desecration,  and  offer  some  form  of  solemn 
and  adoring  salutation.  The  priest  only  can  place  the  elements  on 
the  altar,  because  it  is  a  sacrificial  act,  and  can  not  be  properly  under- 
taken by  either  the  sexton  or  a  woman.  An  odd  number  of  collects 
should  be  read,  because  the  Lord's  Prayer  has  an  uneven  number  of 
petitions;  the  pro-onaphona  must  be  said  on  the  epistle  side  of  the 
altar ;  the  protasis  must  commemorate  some  special  attributes  of  God, 
and  the  apodosis  must  ask  a  special  blessing  for  the  exercise  of  the 
same  attributes. 

Careful  self-examination,  repentance,  new  resolutions,  and  the  cul- 


CHURCH   CONFIRMATION  ^77 

tivation  of  faith  and  charity,  and  sometimes  even  penance,  should  pre- 
cede. Afterward  communion  ought  to  be  partaken  at  least  thrice 
yearly,  and  some  partake  weekly  with  advantage.  Spiritual,  as  dis- 
tinct from  actual  or  sacramental  communion,  can  be  more  frequent. 
The  former  is  like  opening  a  door  from  a  dark  into  a  light  room ;  the 
latter  is  like  bringing  in  the  light.  The  former  is  the  slow  rise  of  a 
tide  keeping  pace  with  a  river,  and  damming  it  so  that  it  rises  higher 
and  sets  back ;  the  latter  flows  up  and  flushes  the  river  as  with  a  tidal 
wave  and  with  complete  intermingling  of  waters. 

(E)  The  Lutheran,  the  mother  of  Protestant  churches,  and 
also  the  largest  of  them  all,  claiming  seven  million  adherents 
in  America  and  fifty  million  in  the  world,  confirms  over  three 
hundred  thousand  children  a  year  in  Prussia  alone,  and  expects 
all  Lutheran  parents  to  cooperate  in  the  preparation  for  this 
rite.  Save  in  a  few  essentials,  the  polity  of  the  Church  varies 
widely,  the  Scandinavian  organization  being  episcopal,  the 
German  consistorial,  and  the  American  synodical;  the  age, 
preparation,  and  details  of  confirmation  also  vary  much.  The 
Lutheran  ideal  is  the  Bible  in  the  vernacular  actively  taught, 
and  hymns  fervently  sung  in  every  household,  especially  with 
children.  Piety  is  first  of  all  a  family  matter.  This  Church, 
for  the  first  time  in  history,  sought  to  bring  each  indi- 
vidual into  immediate  personal  relation  with  the  divine.  In 
its  service,  preaching  became  again  very  prominent,  and  the 
congregation  took  active  part  in  worship,  especially  in  song. 
Its  liturgy  is  regarded  as  a  form,  unchanged  for  a  millennium, 
by  which  communion  with  God  is  sought  as  a  bond  between 
the  Christian  past,  present,  and  future,  between  the  Church 
militant  and  triumphant,  visible  and  invisible. 

The  Lutheran  children  do  not  look  forward  to  conversion.  If  they 
have  been  baptized  in  infancy  and  daily  nurtured,  they  must  not  be 
assumed  to  be  unregenerate,  but  as  already  in  a  state  of  grace.  The 
germs  of  a  spiritual  life  were  early  planted,  and  have  grown  with 
their  growth,  and  they  need  no  violent  change  or  drastic  religious  ex- 
perience. Religion  is  a  growth,  not  a  conquest;  but  adolescence  is 
the  critical  season  of  development,  during  which  special  care  is  need- 
ful. Even  confirmation  is  not  indispensable,  and  although  it  has  spir- 
itual sanction  and  is  almost  a  matter  of  course,  it  is  not  authorita- 
tively enforced. 

In  Europe,  confirmation  at  fourteen  or  fifteen  is  the  rule,  as  it  is 
wherever  there  are  good  parochial  schools  to  look  after  both  pre- 


278  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

paratory  and  subsequent  training.  Where  these  are  lacking,  as  they 
still  are  generally  in  this  country,  where  there  are  yet  but  about  three 
thousand,  the  age  is  commonly  from  fifteen  to  twenty.  It  is  preceded 
by  one  or  two  winter  courses  of  instruction  by  the  pastors,  who  some- 
times hear  the  catechumens  in  a  Sunday-school  class  by  themselves, 
with  extra  work  outside,  for  from  four  to  six  months,  for  one  or  two 
years,  with  from  one  to  three  sessions  weekly — some  rules  prescribing 
one  hundred  hours  in  all.  The  essential  subject-matter  is  Luther's 
smaller  catechism,  which  is  chiefly  an  exposition  of  the  Lord's  Prayer, 
the  Ten  Commandments,  the  sacraments,  and  the  Augsburg  Confes- 
sion, which  is  the  oldest  Protestant  creed.  Lutheran  and  general 
Church  history  are  often  added,  and  doctrinal,  devotional,  and  eccle- 
siastical matters  frequently  dwelt  upon  in  the  manuals  most  in  use. 
The  form  of  instruction  is  catechetical,  by  questions  and  answers, 
and  considerable  verbal  memorizing  is  required,  but  the  pastor  seeks 
chiefly  to  reach  the  heart. 

The  Lutheran  Church  rediscovered  the  Bible,  causing  a  renaissance 
of  its  study,  and  reversed  former  methods  by  making  the  sacred 
book  and  not  the  Church  and  its  institutions  basal ;  in  its  teaching 
no  religious  body  insists  more  strongly  that  Scripture  contains  the 
very  words  of  God,  or  is  more  impatient  of  the  higher  criticism. 
Luther,  at  Worms,  with  his  hand  on  the  open  Bible  and  saying, 
"  Here  I  stand,  I  can  not  do  otherwise.  God  help  me,  Amen,"  which 
Froude  calls  the  finest  scene  in  modern  history,  fitly  became  the  Spir- 
itual father  of  a  Church  which  has  sought  to  mold  its  creeds,  the- 
ology, liturgy,  hymns,  and  life  more  closely  after  the  Bible  than 
any  other,  that  can  accept  no  theories  of  a  fallible  authenticity  of  its 
divine  oracles,  or  a  human  and  merely  exemplary  Saviour,  and  that  is 
proud  that  it  has  no  heresy  trials,  although  originating  in  the  same 
fatherland  where  most  heresies  have  sprung.  With  this  cardinal 
principle,  we  should  expect  great  stress  to  be  laid  upon  direct  Bible 
teaching.  While  this  is  done  more  than  in  the  Catholic  or  perhaps 
even  Anglican  preparations  for  first  communion,  it  is  mostly  by  way 
of  memorizing  proof  texts  for  sacraments  and  creed. 

Toward  revelation  the  chief  Lutheran  doctrine  is  faith  that  makes 
for  justification,  and  not  reason  that  makes  skeptics.  Faith,  the 
mightiest  of  all  words  in  the  soul's  lexicon,  is  the  key  to  man's  lost 
paradise ;  it  conditions  and  is  larger  than  conduct,  is  the  source  of 
all  the  authority  of  conscience,  the  chief  of  all  the  duties,  and  has 
done  all  the  real  miracles  in  history;  it  is  the  best  criterion  of  the 
vigor,  health,  and  maturity  of  the  soul,  and  man's  only  possible  ground 
of  salvation.  Faith  enlarges  the  soul  of  the  individual  to  the  dimen- 
sions of  the  race,  enabling  him  to  be  a  citizen  of  all  times  and  a  spec- 
tator of  all  spiritual  events,  and  is  the  organ  by  which  we  see  and 
apprehend,  not  facts  of  sense  or  proof  of  intellect,  but  the  true  mys- 
teries or  sacraments  of  instinct  and  feeling.  By  it  Christ's  propitia- 
tory and  vicarious  sacrifice  is  imputed  to  us. 

The  focus  of  the  Lutheran  theology  is  the  doctrine  of  communion 


CHURCH   CONFIRMATION  279 

that  Christ's  body  and  blood  are,  as  the  Augsburg  Confession  says, 
"  truly  present  under  the  form  of  bread  and  wine."  Some  manuals 
for  first  communion  teach  that  the  divine  elements  are  invisible,  or 
inseparable,  yet  unmixed  with  the  actual  food  elements,  or  that  the 
latter  participate  in  the  former,  as  Plato  made  real  things  partici- 
pate in  ideas,  or  that  they  inhere,  as  the  schoolmen  made  attributes 
inhere  in  substance ;  the  union  is  called  not  carnal  but  sacramental, 
or  they  say  that  there  is  not  a  real  change  but  a  means  of  change, 
while  the  doctrines  of  both  transubstantiation  and  consubstantiation 
are  rejected.  Faith  is  said  to  appropriate  the  passion  and  merits  of 
the  divine  sacrifice  in  an  inexplicable  way. 

Instruction  especially  preparatory  to  first  communion  is  also  given 
concerning  the  Church  festivals,  as  Luther  especially  advised,  viz., 
Christmas,  Circumcision,  Epiphany,  Easter,  Ascension,  and  Pentecost, 
St.  Stephen's  Day,  and  October  31st,  which  is  the  day  Luther  nailed 
up  his  ninety-five  theses.  There  are  also  lectionaries  for  minor  fes- 
tivals, and  of  saints  in  the  Lutheran  Christian  year,  to  bring  the  bio- 
graphical element  to  pedagogical  efficiency.  Confirmation  day  is  on 
Palm  Sunday.  All  Lutheran  churches  hold  confession  to  be  a  fit  pre- 
paratory discipline  for  first  communion.  This  is  not  imposed  as  a 
necessity,  but  taught  as  a  privilege,  is  general  rather  than  explicit  and 
detailed,  and  all  sins  need  not  be  enumerated.  All  Lutheran  pastors 
can  give  absolution  for  confessed  sins,  though  this  is  not  absolute, 
only  exhibitory.  The  disciplinary  value  of  this  is  high,  for  it  relievr^s 
the  conscience  and  evokes  advice  and  comfort  where  most  needed. 
Luther  places  these  rites  next  to  the  sacraments  themselves. 

Confirmation  being  preparatory  to  first  communion,  there  is  usually 
a  public  examination  of  the  children,  held  in  the  church  immediately 
preceding  the  ceremony  or  on  the  Sunday  before,  in  order  to  see  if 
even  the  least  gifted  have  been  trained  to  enough  knowledge  of  the 
fundamental  doctrine  of  the  Church  to  partake  of  the  sacraments  prop- 
erly. They  stand  before  the  altar,  girls  in  white  and  boys  in  black, 
and  are  addressed  by  the  pastor ;  then,  after  the  Lord's  Prayer,  the 
confirmants  are  asked  to  renounce  the  devil  and  fleshly  lusts  and  ac- 
cept the  Apostles'  Creed.  They  assent  to  this,  and  vow  to  remain 
true  to  God,  the  Church  and  its  doctrine,  and  the  congregation  unites 
in  solemn  prayer  for  them.  They  then  kneel  at  the  altar,  and  the 
pastor  places  his  right  hand  on  the  head  of  each,  invoking  the  fear  of 
God  and  hope  of  eternal  life;  they  are  then  exhorted  to  partake  of  all 
the  blessings  of  church  membership,  and  renew  and  assume  for  them- 
selves the  obligations  of  their  baptism.  Scripture  by  the  congrega- 
tion and  a  benediction  conclude  the  service,  after  which  each  child  is 
given  a  certificate  or  diploma  of  confirmation  as  a  memento. 

The- Lutheran  Church  has  only  lately  begun  the  special  work  for 
young  people  after  confirmation.  In  New  York  city  the  "  Young  Peo- 
ple's Union  "  was  founded  about  ten  years  ago  for  this  purpose,  and 
in  the  western  part  of  the  State  associations  for  young  men  have  been 
extending  for  some  years.    These  are  now  united  in  the  Luther  League 


28o  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

of  that  State,  with  its  own  journal  of  that  name.  In  Pennsylvania, 
the  Luther  Alliance,  and  among  the  Germans  the  Young  Men's  Asso- 
ciations and  the  Young  Ladies'  Societies,  are  inter-church  organiza- 
tions for  the  same  end.  Elsewhere  central  associations  are  formed.  A 
National  Union,  of  which  all  these  are  members,  is  now  formed.  The 
problems  of  this  Church  for  older  adolescents  are  somewhat  unique, 
and  few  religious  bodies  have  so  suffered  from  proselyting,  which  has 
been  a  spur  to  this  new  effort. 

The  savage  and  Christian  rites  each  need  a  volume,  for 
neither  have  yet  been  gathered.  Here  we  are  at  the  ethnic 
beginnings  of  education,  all  of  which  have  developed  from 
such  initiations.  While  the  Church  sees  clearly  its  moral 
dangers,  as  primitive  races  relatively  fail  to  do,  both  assume 
a  short  and  sharp  rather  than  a  prolonged  period  of  transition 
and  lay  stress  on  external  and  outwardly  impressive  cere- 
monials. It  was  reserved  for  ultra  and  especially  American 
Protestantism,  as  the  next  chapter  shows,  to  enter  the  soul  at 
pubescence  and  attempt  to  prescribe  and  normalize  its  states 
and  changes.  The  crying  need  of  a  broader  comparative  study 
of  all  these  regimens,  inner  and  outer,  to  determine  on  the 
basis  of  a  larger  knowledge  the  better  formulation  of  the  pro- 
portion of  elements,  and  their  maximal  moral  utilizations,  is 
already  apparent,  as  is  the  higher  standpoint  to  which  we  must 
rise  above  all  preference  of  race,  sect,  and  creed  if  we  would 
discharge  all  our  duty  to  youth. 


J^  r-  n.      1 T  ,.,r,V,^^..    1    '.Unrw  ▼ 


0^  pyeuc 

Santa  B.-irbara  Teachers  Library. 
S-aptV  (Jiilce,  Coiirl  Flou-se, 
CHAPTER    XIV 


THE  ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION 

Conversion  under  the  New  England  theocracy — Jonathan  Edwards — Revivalism 
— Statistics  and  opinions  of  evangelists  as  to  age  of  most  frequent  conversions 
— Successive  changes  of  heart — The  Symposium — Twelve  parallels  between 
religious  and  sexual  phenomena — Great  luminousness  yet  partiality  of  these 
analogies.  I.  Conversion  as  a  normal  and  universal  process  of  growth — Pas- 
sage from  an  autocentric  to  an  heterocentric  basis.  IL  Aggravation  of  this 
natural  transition  by  a  sense  of  sin — The  Seven  Deadly  Sins  of  the  Church — 
Impossibility  of  real  counter  conversion  or  devotion  to  evil — Craving  for  pen- 
alty and  confession — Sense  of  sin  as  hereditary  most  of  all  exasperating — -Re- 
lations of  sin  to  melancholia — Rhythm  of  depressive  and  exalted  states — The 
reconstruction  after  abnormal  anxiety  perhaps  on  a  lower  plane — Increased 
instability  due  to  sexual  aberration — The  solutions  of  Gautama  and  of  Jesus. 
III.  Doubt — Crude  ideas  of  childhood — Pain  of  rectification — Superiority  of 
Catholicism — Havoc  of  dogma  and  need  of  larger  ideas  of  (a)  soul  and  (d) 
Scripture.  IV.  External  norms  of  conversion — Insect  world — Spring — Dawn 
— Plato's  cave — The  story  of  the  Cross  and  its  effect — Conversion  in  literature, 
history,  and  philosophy.  V.  Degradations  and  fourfold  perversions  of  con- 
version— Causes  and  illustrations — Wide  range  of  individual  variations.  VI. 
Conversion  as  the  philosophy  of  religion  and  history,  and  the  germ  of  educa- 
tional systems — Classification  of  definitions  of  religion — The  wretchedness  of 
primitive  man — Tragic  guilt  and  the  soteriological  function  of  heroes — Pity  and 
sympathy  basal  for  morals  and  religion — Characteristics  of  religious  genius — 
Bible  supplemented  by  other  ethnic  religions — Mission  pedagogy — Alien  faiths, 
like  the  Old  Testament  propaedeutic  to  the  New,  to  be  fulfilled  and  not  de- 
stroyed— The  higher  Christianity  of  the  future. 

Whether  or  not  it  be  a  restoration  of  apostolic  concep- 
tions, the  modern  idea  of  a  re-birth  as  essential  to  the  salva- 
tion of  the  sonl  hereafter  is  chiefly  a  Puritan  and  more 
specifically  a  New  England  orthodox  Congregationalist  idea. 
Despite  the  examples  of  Paul  and  Augustine,  conversion  in 
the  Middle  Ages  and  in  Catholicism  meant  adoption  of  a  creed 
and  submission  to  the  authority  of  the  Church,  while  early 
Methodism,  which  did  more  than  any  other  denomination  to 
develop  the  personal  regenerative  formula  and  motive,  came  in 
a  little  later.  The  origin  of  the  idea  that  there  must  be  a 
change  so  radical  and  transforming  that  it  can  be  definitely 

281 


282  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

recognized,  and  yet  wrought  chiefly  on  and  not  by  the  subject 
of  it,  and  that  may  profoundly  reconstruct  character  and  con- 
duct, can  be  fully  traced  in  the  history  of  what  might  be  called 
a  culture  epoch,  beginning  about  1735,  which  is  of  profound 
interest  and  significance  for  the  psychologist.^  The  New  Eng- 
land theocracy  permitted  only  church  members  to  hold  civil 
office.  To  qualify,  each  must  receive  the  Lord's  Supper,  and  a 
clergyman  who  withheld  it  upon  request  was  liable  to  prose- 
cution. The  law  admitted  all  who  had  been  baptized,  learned 
the  creed  and  catechism,  and  had  not  committed  "  scandalous 
crime."  The  Church  had  such  influence  that  it  often  attracted 
the  bad  as  well  as  the  good  into  it.  Piety  declined  under  this 
system,  and  men  never  converted  in  the  modern  sense  entered 
the  ministry.  Arminianism  was  wide-spread,  and  under  the 
free-thinking  influences,  culminating  later  in  the  French  Revov 
lution,  skepticism  was  on  the  increase.  The  majority  who  at- 
tended and  supported  the  Church  thought  that  they  could 
achieve  their  own  salvation  by  good  works  which  lay  within 
the  power  of  their  own  wills. 

Jonathan  Edwards  first  and  alone  seems  to  have  grasped 
the  whole  situation,  and  was  peculiarly  fitted  by  character 
and  learning  to  meet  it.  The  alliance  of  the  French  Jesuits 
with  the  dreaded  Indians  intensified  the  hatred  for  popery. 
Unbelief  was  sufficiently  wide-spread  to  suggest  the  appeal  to 
philosophical  principles  in  justification  of  biblical  standpoints 
and  theological  doctrines  which  he  was  so  well  fitted  to  make, 
and  there  is,  I  think,  abundant  evidence  that  he  deliberately 
decided  to  attempt  a  new  use  of  the  great  Protestant  prin- 
ciple of  justification  by  faith  alone,  to  insist  on  God's  abso- 


'  Tracy:  The  Great  Awakening ;  Boston,  1841.  R.  Baird:  Religion  in  America ; 
1856;  especially  chap.  vi.  H.  F.  Uhden  :  The  New  England  Theocracy.  W. 
H.  Conant :  On  Revivals  in  Colleges,  1859.  J.  Edwards :  On  Revivals  and  the 
Distinguishing  Marks  of  a  Work  of  the  Spirit  of  God,  Narratives  of  Surprising 
Conversions,  and  Thoughts  on  the  Revival  of  Religion  in  New  England,  1740.  Gil- 
lies :  Memoirs  of  Whitefield,  and  Philips's  Life  and  Times  of  Whitefield.  The  two 
Lives  of  Wesley,  by  Moore  and  Southey  respectively.  W.  B.  Sprague :  Lectures 
on  Revivals;  New  York,  1833.  S.  P.  Hayes:  An  Hist.  Study  of  the  Edwardean 
Revivals  ;  Am.  Journ.  of  Psy.,  October,  1902,  p.  550  ft  set/.  See  also  Porter's  Lec- 
ture on  Revivals,  Finney's  Autobiography  and  Lectures  on  Revivals.  Earle : 
Bringing  in  the  Sheaves.  Fish's  Handbook  of  Revivals.  Hervey's  Handbook 
of  Revivals. 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        283 

lute  sovereignty  and  "  just  liberty  of  election,"  and  to  teach, 
in  place  of  the  current  conception  of  human  initiative,  the  no- 
tion that  all  persons  not  specifically  converted  are  sinners  that 
"  have  merited  and  now  deserve  instant  damnation,"  that  this 
is  wholly  just,  and  that  there  is  nothing  to  do  but  to  call  upon 
God  for  mercy  through  Christ.  The  only  indication  that  God 
is  disposed  to  withhold  eternal  punishment  is  the  fact  that  he 
gave  his  Son  to  die  for  men,  and  this  alone  can  be  pleaded  in 
prayer.  All  the  virtues  of  the  unregenerate  man  are  vileness 
and  but  filthy  rags,  giving  absolutely  no  claim,  and  he  must 
be  entirely  resigned  to  his  own  condemnation  to  hell  as  the 
only  course  possible  to  a  just  and  sovereign  God,  If  he  is 
saved,  it  will  be  an  act  of  pure  and  spontaneous  goodness  on 
the  part  of  Deity,  and  the  belief  that  this  act  of  mercy 
will  extend  to  him  is  faith.  Salvation  comes  to  seem  too  good 
for  sinners,  while  their  approval  of  the  excellence  of  God's  jus- 
tice made  them  "  almost  call  it  a  willingness  to  be  damned  " 
(Tracy,  p.  15),  and  they  were  brought  to  feel  that  "  the  glory 
of  his  justice  should  not  be  sacrificed  for  their  sakes."  First 
there  comes  the  "  legal  distress,"  which  may  continue  some 
time,  and  then  supervenes  a  holy  repose  of  soul,  a  sacred  dis- 
position to  fear  and  love  God,  and  to  hope  for  blessings  and 
salvation  from  both  sin  and  its  penalty,  and  a  new  aspiration 
for  holiness,  which  not  at  first  but  later  is  fully  recognized  as 
divine  grace  redeeming  the  soul  and  working  not  only  par- 
don but  progressive  sanctification. 


Edwards  did  not  hesitate  to  appeal  to  fear.  "  If  we  should  suppose 
that  a  person  saw  himself  hanging  over  a  great  pit,  full  of  fierce  and 
glowing  flames,  by  a  thread  that  he  knew  to  be  very  weak  and  not  suf- 
ficient to  bear  his  weight,  and  knew  that  multitudes  had  been  in  such 
a  circumstance  before  and  that  most  of  them  had  fallen  and  perished, 
and  saw  nothing  within  reach  that  he  could  take  hold  of  to  save  him, 
what  distress  would  he  be  in  !  How  ready  to  think  that  now  the 
thread  was  breaking,  that  now  this  minute  he  should  be  swallowed  up 
in  those  dreadful  flames,  and  would  he  not  be  ready  to  cry  out  in  such 
circumstances?  How  much  more  those  that  see  themselves  in  this 
manner  hanging  over  an  infinitely  more  dreadful  pit  or  held  over 
it  in  the  hand  of  God,  who  at  the  same  time  they  see  to  be  exceed- 
ingly provoked !  No  wonder  they  are  ready  to  expect  every  minute 
when  this  angry  God  will  let  them  drop,  and  no  wonder  they  cry  out 
at  their  misery,  and  no  wonder  that  the  wrath  of  God,  when  mani- 


284  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

fested  but  a  little  to  the  soul,  overbears  human  strength."*  Else- 
where '  Edwards  insists  that  "  there  is  nothing  that  keeps  wicked 
men  at  any  one  moment  out  of  hell  but  the  mere  pleasure  of  God." 
The  unconverted  belong  to  the  devil,  and  he  is  ready  to  seize  them 
the  moment  God  permits.  God  is  more  angry  "  with  many  now  in 
this  congregation  "  than  with  many  now  in  the  flames  of  hell.  He 
tells  his  people  that  some  of  them  will,  within  a  year,  remember  this 
discourse  in  hell.  "There  will  be  no  end  to  the  exquisite,  horrible 
misery.  The  inhabitants  of  heaven  and  all  the  universe  will  look  on 
and  praise  God's  justice.  No  prayer  will  mitigate  God's  hate  and 
contempt,  for  he  can  no  longer  pity.  You  would  have  gone  to  hell 
last  night  had  he  not  held  you  like  a  loathsome  spider  over  the  flames 
by  a  thread.    Every  moment  of  delay  accumulates  wrath." 

Before  1835  revivals  had  often  occurred  in  America  and 
elsewhere,  but  they  were  spasmodic,  and  their  methodology 
had  not  been  well  developed.  Stern,  doctrinal,  and  extreme  as 
Edwards  was,  he  lacked  and  would  surely  disapprove  the  ex- 
travagance of  some  methods  of  modern  revivalism.  The  three 
hundred  who  joined  his  church  as  the  result  of  the  six  months 
of  awakening  in  Northampton,  manifested  a  more  radical 
change  than  had  hitherto  been  insisted  on.  Henceforth  re- 
pentance was  urged  as  the  chief  and  immediate  duty  and  the 
supreme  necessity  of  life.  It  was  described  as  giving  the 
heart  to  God,  accepting  the  covenant  or  the  promises,  becom- 
ing reconciled  with  Christ,  laying  hold  on  salvation,  awaken- 
ing out  of  sleep,  a  change  of  heart  or  getting  a  new  one,  giv- 
ing up  self,  dropping  a  body  of  death,  fleeing  from  wrath  to 
love,  turning  lest  we  die,  passing  from  death  to  life,  from  the 
power  of  Satan  to  God,  escaping  hell  and  securing  heaven, 
changing  from  doubt  to  belief,  admitting  the  Holy  Spirit,  con- 
forming the  will  to  divine  law,  the  fire  and  hammer  breaking 
the  flinty  rock,  having  a  visitation  from  on  high,  a  satisfac- 
tion of  the  mourners,  anxious  seekers,  etc. 

On  his  arrival  in  New  England  in  1740  Whitefield  com- 
plained that  "  tutors  neglected  to  pray  with  and  examine  the 
hearts  of  their  pupils,  and  that  most  schools  and  universities 
had  sunk  into  new  seminaries  of  paganism,  that  their  light 

'  The  Distinguishing  Marks  of  a  Work  of  the  Spirit  of  God  (applied  to  that  un- 
common operation  that  has  lately  appeared  in  the  minds  of  many  of  the  people  of 
this  land).      Boston,  1741. 

*  Sinners  in  the  Hands  of  an  Angry  God.     Works,  ed.  1807,  vol.  vii,  p.  486. 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        285 

had  become  darkness,"  etc.  Harvard  was  at  first  impressed; 
in  1 741  the  overseers  voted  to  meet  and  "  spend  some  time  in 
humble  thanksgiving  to  God  for  the  effusion  of  his  Holy 
Spirit."  Later,  when  he  declared  that  few  clergymen  were 
converted,  Wigglesworth  wrote  him,  pointing  out  the  dangers 
of  enthusiasm  and  censuring  the  "  furious  zeal  with  which 
you  had  so  fired  the  passions  of  the  people  and  which  hath  in 
many  places  burnt  into  the  very  vitals  of  religion,"  and  the 
"  sudden  and  temporary  turns  of  distress  and  joy."  During 
the  great  awakening  from  twenty-five  thousand  to  fifty  thou- 
sand persons  were  converted  and  joined  the  Church,  and  the 
piety  of  previous  members  was  greatly  increased.  The  fervor 
spread  to  all  evangelical  sects,  and  hundreds  of  new  churches 
were  founded.  Itinerant  evangelists  from  without,  with  in- 
decent haste  for  immediate  practical  results,  entered  churches 
and  rivaled  each  other  in  the  number  of  converts  they  won. 
Separatists,  like  Wheelock  and  Davenport,  arose.  Other 
parts  of  Scripture  and  doctrine  were  neglected,  and  exag- 
gerated and  surprising  narratives  of  individual  struggles  and 
experiences  multiplied ;  those  applying  for  church  membership, 
and  even  clergymen  seeking  ordination,  narrated  their  personal 
experiences  of  this  change  for  others  to  judge  of.  Nearly  all 
New  England  churches  which  did  not  become  Unitarian  came 
to  adopt  this  cult;  it  colored  all  the  theology  of  the  country, 
and  became  the  inexorable  condition  of  church  membership, 
and  all  was  ascribed  to  the  form  and  shape  of  this  special  first 
experience.  Believers  searched  other  hearts  and  their  own 
for  inward  sentiments,  for  Edwards's  "  new  idea  and  new 
feelings  that  did  not  come  through  the  senses,"  often  mis- 
taking the  vane  for  the  compass,  and  there  was  giving  of 
testimony  and  loquacity  about  experiences  of  unaccountable 
origin  and  abnormal  impressionability,  while  "  bodily  mani- 
festations," although  much  discussed  and  generally  disparaged, 
were  not  very  strongly  condemned,  Edwards  himself  having, 
from  the  trancoidal  states  of  his  wife,  some  sympathy  with 
them.  Tennent's  Log  College,  from  which  Princeton  grew, 
Dartmouth,  and  missions  established  among  the  Indians  by 
Brainerd  and  Sargent,  were  greatly  developed.  The  reaction 
was  inevitable,  as  revivalism  degenerated,  and  the  mean  be- 
tween enthusiasm  and  lukewarmness,  anarchy  and  despotism 


X 

c  / 


286  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

in  Church  government  was  sought.  In  all  this  history  there 
was  very  little  thought  of  any  relation  between  age  and  con- 
version. Old  and  young  were  affected,  and  no  statistics  of 
age  are  on  record. 

The  next  fifty  years  were  filled  with  wars  and  commotions, 
and  only  near  the  close  of  the  last  century  came  the  era  of 
modern  revivalism.  The  crimes  and  passions  of  man,  the  ex- 
cesses of  the  French  Revolution  and  the  skepticism  which  un- 
derlay it,  and  wild  and  vague  expectations  among  the  young 
of  a  new  order  of  things  with  Christianity  eliminated,  pre- 
pared the  way  for  a  new  awakening.  In  1797  many  churches 
in  Massachusetts  and  in  Connecticut  grew  more  earnest,  and 
the  feeling  slowly  spread.  In  1801  a  revival  of  great  in- 
tensity, which  was  characterized  by  many  irregularities  due  to 
the  rude  state  of  society,  spread  over  nearly  the  whole  State  of 
Kentucky. 

McMaster  describes  with  scant  respect  a  revival,  in  1800,  at  Red 
River,  Ohio.^  At  the  words  of  one  effective  preacher,  he  says,  faces 
were  wet  with  streaming  tears  at  a  pungent  sense  of  sin,  and  the  cries 
for  mercy  were  terrible  to  hear.  "  The  floor  was  covered  with  the 
slain.  Some  found  forgiveness,  but  others  went  away  spiritually 
wounded,  suffering  uncontrollable  agony  of  soul.  Men  fitted  their 
wagons  and  traveled  fifty  miles  to  camp.  Crops  were  left  half- 
gathered,  cabins  deserted,  and  camp-meetings  multiplied  as  the  rage 
spread."  Services  were  held  for  seven  days,  and  sometimes  all  night. 
A  girl  of  seven  preached  from  a  man's  shoulders  till  she  fell  ex- 
hausted, and  a  lad  of  twelve  exhorted  till  he  fell,  and  was  then  held 
up  and  continued  till  the  power  of  speech  was  lost.  The  flickering 
camp-fires  and  the  darkness  of  the  surrounding  forest,  the  sobs,  groans, 
and  shrieks  of  those  in  the  valley  of  the  shadow  of  death,  the  songs 
and  shouts  of  joy  of  those  who  had  found  eternal  joy  in  Beulah,  were 
too  much  for  the  excited  imagination,  and  circulation  was  affected 
and  nerves  gave  way;  in  the  "  falling  exercise"  many  dropped  to  the 
ground,  cold  and  still,  or  with  convulsive  twitches  or  clonic  contortions 
of  face  and  limbs,  and  at  Cove  Ridge  three  thousand  were  laid  in  rows. 
At  one  meeting  eleven  hundred  and  forty-five  wagons  were  counted, 
and  it  was  estimated  that  twenty  thousand  persons  were  present. 
Many  came  to  scoff,  but  remained  to  preach.  The  crowd  swarmed  all 
night  from  preacher  to  preacher,  singing,  shouting,  laughing,  some 
plunging  wildly  over  stumps  and  benches  into  the  forest  shouting 
"  Lost,  lost !  "  others  leaping  and  bounding  about  like  live  fish  out  of 
water ;  others  rolling  over  and  over  on  the  ground  for  hours ;  others 

•A  History  of  the  People  of  the  United  States,  vol.  ii,  p.  578  etseq. 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  CONVERSION        287 

lying  on  the  ground  and  talking  when  they  could  not  move;  and  yet 
others  beating  the  ground  with  their  heels. 

As  the  excitement  increased  it  grew  more  morbid  and  took  the  form 
of  "  jerking,"  or  in  others  it  became  the  "  barking  exercise,"  and  in 
yet  others  it  became  the  "  holy  laugh."  The  jerks  began  with  the 
head,  which  was  thrown  violently  from  side  to  side  so  rapidly  that 
the  features  were  blurred  and  the  hair  almost  seemed  to  snap,  and 
when  the  sufferer  struck  an  obstacle  and  fell  he  would  bounce  about 
like  a  ball.  Saplings  were  sometimes  cut  breast-high  for  the  people 
to  jerk  by.  In  one  place  the  earth  about  the  roots  of  over  fifty  of 
them  was  "  kicked  up  as  if  by  a  horse  stamping  flies."  One  scoffer 
mounted  his  horse  to  ride  away  when  the  jerks  threw  him  to  the 
earth,  whence  he  arose  a  Christian.  A  lad  who  feigned  illness  to  stay 
away  was  dragged  there  by  the  spirit  and  his  head  dashed  against  a 
wall  till  he  had  to  pray.  A  skeptic  who  cursed  and  swore  was  crushed 
by  a  falling  tree.  Men  fancied  themselves  dogs  and  gathered  about 
a  tree  barking  and  yelping — "  treeing  the  devil."  They  saw  visions 
and  dreamed  dreams,  and  as  the  revival  waned,  it  left  a  crop  of 
nervous  and  hysterical  disorders  in  its  wake. 

These  extremes  were  unusual,  and  were  condemned  by  all 
sane  religionists ;  but  the  revival  cult  was  established,  and,  on 
the  whole,  with  great  efficacy  for  good.  In  1802,  Yale  Col- 
lege was  visited,  and  the  salvation  of  the  soul  became  the  chief 
topic  of  conversation.  One-third  of  the  students  were  con- 
verted, and  during  the  next  forty  years  there  were  fifteen  re- 
vivals there.  Princeton  was  no  less  favored.  The  traditions 
of  revivalism  long  lingered,  and  are  yet  strong  in  some  of  the 
older  American  colleges.  Durfee  makes  the  early  history  of 
Williams  College  to  consist  chiefly  of  efforts  to  secure  the  con- 
version of  students.  Its  dark  periods  are  years  of  spiritual 
drought,  when  "  professors  were  hardly  distinguished  from 
the  great  body  of  the  unpenitent,"  and  he  describes  with 
great  personal  detail  the  seasons  of  awakening,  as  in  1825, 
when  there  were  "  twenty  converts  in  thirty  days."  Edward 
Hitchcock,  in  his  Reminiscences  of  Amherst,  says :  "  The  re- 
ligious history  of  Amherst  is  more  important  and  interesting 
than  anything  pertaining  to  it ;  "  he  enumerates  fourteen  re- 
vivals up  to  1863,  and  estimates  that  three  hundred  and  fifty 
began  their  religious  life  there.  It  was  very  hard  to  introduce 
the  study  of  morals  or  ethics  into  these  colleges,  for  it  implied 
distrust  of  the  Holy  Spirit.  Even  the  semi-theological  ethics 
of  Mark  Hopkins  was  a  dangerous  innovation  to  President 


288  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Griffin,  who  thought  conversion,  which  he  could  exhort  so 
powerfully,  was  better.  "  Works  "  were  filthy  rags,  and  Cot- 
ton Mather  was  appealed  to,  who,  in  his  diary  in  1716,  called 
ethics  "  a  vile  form  of  paganism  " — "  impietas  in  artis  formam 
redacta."  ^ 

Very  important  for  this  study  is  the  age  of  most  fre- 
quent conversions.  In  answer  to  a  request  for  information 
concerning  this  topic,  kindly  inserted  for  me  in  the  leading 
weekly  papers  of  the  Methodist,  Baptist,  Congregational,  and 
Presbyterian  denominations  at  various  times  during  the  last 
few  years,  several  score  of  valuable  replies  from  clergymen 
and  evangelists  have  been  received,  containing  individual  opin- 
ions, statistics  of  single  churches,  results  of  inquiries  made 
at  educational  institutions  and  at  religious  meetings. 

The  following  are  representative.  Revivalist  D.  L.  Moody  wrote 
me  that  he  thought  most  conversions  occur  between  the  ages  of  ten 
and  twenty;  that  he  had  noticed  no  difference  in  age  between  the 
sexes,  but  that  nearly  all  the  members  of  the  Northfield  school  are 
converted  before  they  enter.  Bishop  D.  A.  Goodsell  informed  me 
that  it  was  his  custom  on  crowded  occasions  of  admission  to  full  con- 
ference membership  to  ask  all  converted  at  or  under  fifteen,  ministers 
and  laity,  to  rise.  "  The  proportion  varies  but  slightly  in  different 
parts  of  the  country  among  whites,  about  three-fifths  of  all  present  ris- 
ing at  this  call.  I  then  ask  those  converted  between  fifteen  and  twenty 
to  stand  with  them.  There  are  then  few  left.  Recently  in  Newark 
and  Philadelphia,  in  audiences  of  seven  thousand  to  eight  thousand, 
this  preponderance  was  maintained  with  great  unanimity."     Rev.  E. 

E.  Abercrombie  writes  that  at  the  Holyoke  Conference,  held  in  April, 
1893,  in  an  audience  of  about  five  hundred  Christian  men  and  women, 
a  similar  test  showed  that  about  two-thirds  were  converted  before 
twenty.  Revivalist  E.  P.  Hammond  writes :  "  I  frequently  ask  audi- 
ences to  testify  at  what  age  they  were  converted,  and  I  find  that  most 
of  them  became  Christians  before  they  were  twenty."     Evangelist  G. 

F.  Pentecost,  now  of  Yonkers,  has  kept  no  statistics,  but  writes :  "  In 
an  experience  of  thirty  years  of  pastoral  and  evangelical  work  my 
observation  has  been  that  three-fourths  of  all  the  conversions  occur  be- 
tween the  ages  of  twelve  and  twenty,  the  proportion  of  male  to  female 
being  about  two  to  three.  Comparatively  few  are  converted  after  thirty 
years,  and  beyond  that  period  the  number  falls  off  very  rapidly.  My 
further  experience  is  that  the  best  after-results  in  life  and  service 
are  found  in  those  who  have  been  converted  early."  H.  K.  Carroll, 
of  the  Independent,  thinks  that  "  a  large  majority  "  of  conversions 

1  See  my  Hist,  of  Am.  College  Text-Books  in  Ethics,  etc.  Proc.  Am.  Anti- 
quarian See,  1894,  p.  137  et  seq. 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        289 

occur  "  before  or  soon  after  fifteen."  Dr.  J.  L.  Hurlbut,  who  has  a 
wide  knowledge  and  experience  in  the  Methodist  Episcopal  Church, 
writes  that  in  his  opinion  "  far  the  larger  number  profess  Christ 
under  twenty  years  of  age,  a  smaller  number  between  twenty  and 
thirty,  and  a  very  small  number  between  thirty  and  forty."  Editor  J. 
M.  Buckley,  of  the  Christian  Advocate,  who  has  knowledge  of  the 
very  rich  literature  of  the  Methodist  Church,  which  has  always  paid 
great  attention  to  the  conversion  of  children,  writes  that  "  all  our 
ministers,  except  a  very  few,  were  converted  before  they  were 
twenty,  and  the  large  majority  of  them  before  they  were  eighteen." 
Evangelist  M.  S.  Kees  often  takes  tests  which  show  that  "  the  great 
majority  "  of  converts  are  between  ten  and  twenty. 

President  Thwing,  of  Adelbert  College,  a  few  years  ago  addressed 
a  letter  asking  the  age  of  conversion  and  admission  to  the  Church  of 
each  member  of  the  quite  composite  American  Board  of  Foreign  Mis- 
sions, an  exceptionally  representative  body  of  Christian  men.  From 
149  replies  it  appeared  that  29  were  converted  "  very  young,"  21  be- 
tween eight  and  twelve,  26  between  twelve  and  fifteen,  and  132  before 
twenty.  At  a  large  meeting  Evangelist  B.  Fay  Mills  asked  all  who 
had  been  converted  under  twenty  to  rise,  and  over  1,100  rose.  The 
call  for  those  converted  between  twenty  and  thirty  brought  180  to 
their  feet ;  between  thirty  and  forty,  there  were  35 ;  between  forty  and 
fifty,  14  stood ;  between  fifty  and  sixty,  there  were  8.  He  writes  that 
not  only  by  far  the  most,  but  the  most  active  Christians,  are  converted 
in  the  teens.  At  a  recent  Sunday-school  convention  at  Hillsdale, 
Mich.,  98  workers  were  found  to  be  converted  at  or  before  twelve, 
41  between  twelve  and  twenty,  13  between  twenty  and  forty,  and  2 
later. 

Spencer'  states  that  out  of  every  1,000  cases,  548  are  converted 
under  twenty,  37  between  twenty  and  thirty,  86  between  thirty  and 
forty,  25  between  forty  and  fifty,  3  between  fifty  and  sixty,  and  i  be- 
tween sixty  and  seventy.  Rev.  Th.  Simms,  of  South  Manchester, 
Conn.,  writes  that  at  a  session  of  the  New  England  Conference,  Rev. 
C.  M.  Hall  found,  as  the  result  of  a  census  of  200  clerical  members 
of  that  body,  that  173  of  them  were  converted  before  twenty  years 
of  age.  89  before  fifteen,  and  17  at  or  under  ten,  the  average  for  all 
being  a  trifle  over  fifteen  years.  Dr.  Davidson  thought  more  con- 
verted before  thirteen  than  after  thirty.  Dr.  R.  E.  Cole,  of  Oakland, 
Cal.,  ascertained  the  ages  of  those  converted  during  a  three  weeks' 
series  of  revival  meetings  in  that  place  as  follows:  109  from  five  to 
ten,  372  from  ten  to  fifteen,  283  from  fifteen  to  twenty,  68  from  twenty 
to  thirty,  29  from  thirty  to  forty,  16  from  forty  to  fifty,  11  from  fifty 
to  sixty,  4  over  sixty. 

Rrockman  *    found    the    age    of   most    frequent    conversion    to    be 

'  Sermon  by  Rev.  Ichabod  Spencer,  D.  D. ,  vol.  i,  p.  392. 

''A  Study  of  the  Moral  and   Religious  Life  of  251  Preparatory  School  Students 
in  the  United  States.      Ped.  Sem.,  September,  1902,  vol.  ix,  pp.  255-273. 
58 


290 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 


seventeen;  from  thirteen  to  fourteen  the  increase  in  frequency,  and 
from  eighteen  to  nineteen  the  decrease,  was  greatest.  He  also  found 
in  244  students  that  seventeen  was  the  age  of  greatest  responsiveness 
to  reHgious  ideas. 

More  specific  are  the  data  presented  in  the  following  table : 


■0 

•d 

M 

J4 

c 
0 

c 

Age. 

0 

0 

u 

< 

3 
1 

Total. 

1 

(X, 

3 

a 

ct 

X 

1 

M. 

M. 

M. 

M. 

M.&F. 

F 

M. 

F. 

6.. 

4 

2 

6 

I 

9 

26 

7-- 

6 

9 

2 

17 

I 

24 

41 

8.. 

6 

9 

15 

2 

32 

I 

I 

40 

67 

9-- 

14 

4 

30 

2 

50 

3 

I 

51 

97 

10.. 

19 

9 

60 

2 

90 

5 

4 

70 

112 

II. . 

34 

12 

51 

4 

lOI 

9 

13 

5b 

81 

12.. 

53 

37 

96 

7 

193 

4 

18 

60 

85 

13-- 

43 

32 

108 

7 

190 

II 

18 

47 

64 

14.- 

62 

52 

161 

9 

284 

17 

10 

II 

34 

IS-- 

S6 

46 

214 

20 

336 

30 

4 

12 

25 

16.. 

93 

59 

289 

7 

448 

25 

16 

II 

16 

17.. 

89 

47 

298 

5 

439 

29 

6 

6 

5 

18.. 

71 

60 

300 

II 

442 

17 

3 

7 

9 

19.. 

57 

48 

265 

II 

381 

17 

I 

9 

8 

20.. 

49 

47 

222 

2 

320 

10 

.. 

2 

I 

21.. 

39 

34 

172 

0 

245 

8 

I 

5 

3 

22.. 

23 

15 

99 

2 

139 

9 

2 

3 

5 

23-- 

16 

II 

103 

6 

136 

II 

2 

4 

3 

24.. 

8 

4 

55 

I 

68 

10 

.. 

I 

3 

25-- 

6 

53 

59 

I 

6 

3 

26.. 

6 

27 

.. 

33 

3 

.. 

4 

3 

27.. 

I 

26 

27 

3 

3 

I 

28.. 

I 

756 

-- 

17 

18 

3 

-- 

4 

5 

526 

2,672 

100 

4.054 

228 

100 

445 

697 

The  first  four  columns  of  the  above  table  added  in  totals  represent  males.  The 
first  column  is  compiled  for  me  by  Librarian  Louis  N.  Wilson,  from  the  Alumni 
Record  (i869-'95)  of  Drew  Theological  Seminary,  which  states  the  age  of  con- 
version of  nearly  all  those  who  were  students  there  during  the  quarter  century 
comprised  in  the  report.  As  only  those  would  be  likely  to  enter  upon  a  course  of 
theological  study  who  were  converted  early  in  life,  the  ages  here  probably  average 
younger  than  those  of  male  converts  generally.  The  same  is  doubtless  true  of  the 
results  of  the  (Questionnaire  circulated  by  Luther  Gulick  among  members  of  the 
Y.  M.  C.  A.*  Mr.  Ayres's  column  was  compiled  for  me  from  the  M.  E.  minutes 
of  the  meeting  of  the  fall  of  1890  and  represents  clergymen ;  it  shows  an  age  of 
conversion  which  is  also  doubtless  too  young.     Dr.  Starbuck's'  column  is  based 


'The  Association  Outlook,  December,  1897. 
*A  Study  of  Conversion,   by  E.   D.  Starbuck. 
1897,  vol.  viii,  pp.  268-308. 


Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  January, 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION        29 1 

Coe's '  curves,  like  those  of  Starbuck,  are  quite  irregular.  In  one, 
where  ninety-nine  men  report  their  own  religious  awakenings  aver- 
aging two  each,  the  ages  of  most  frequency  are  thirteen,  seventeen, 
and  twenty;  fourteen,  e.  g.,  showing  hardly  half  as  many  as  thirteen. 
In  eighty-four  decisive  conversions  that  could  be  dated,  the  age  of 
seventeen  showed  most  frequency,  nearly  four  times  as  great  as  four- 
teen. Coe's  average  age  of  1,784  men  was  16.4  years.  In  fifty  men 
reporting  a  second  religious  experience,  Coe  shows  the  following  ages : 

Age 13    14    15     16    17    18    19    20    21    22    23    24    25    26    27    28 

Second  ex- 1^  200044111445221101 

penence.  )  -r      -t  -t      -r      j 

Hence,  he  suggests  a  premonition  at  thirteen  (the  first  adolescent 
awakening),  a  second  start  at  seventeen,  with  a  maximum  at  twenty, 
and  concludes  that  "  when  the  approaching  change  first  heralds  itself 
the  religious  consciousness  also  tends  to  awaken.  Again,  when  the 
bodily  life  is  in  most  rapid  transition  the  religious  instincts  likewise 
come  into  a  new  and  greater  life.  Finally,  when  the  fermentation  of 
youth  begins  to  settle  into  the  calmness  of  maturity,  once  more  religion 
makes  its  claim  to  be  counted  in  the  life."  On  the  basis  of  facts  so 
far  at  hand  this  latter  must  be  regarded  as  conjectural.  We  do  not 
know  whether  larger  numbers  would  round  the  curves  or  deepen  their 
indentations  for  certain  youthful  years,  so  it  is  unsafe  yet  to  infer 
how  the  ages  of,  e.  g.,  fifteen,  sixteen,  and  seventeen  differ  from  each 
other.  Again,  not  only  are  theological  students  usually  composed  of 
those  early  converted,  but  we  have  no  percentages  based  even  on 
church  attendance  of  any  religious  community,  race,  or  creed,  while 
the  curves  show  only  the  age  distribution  of  certain  miscellaneous 
or  homogeneous  groups  of  converts,  and  those  mostly  males.  They 
abundantly  demonstrate,  however,  the  great  religious  impression- 
ability of  the  middle  teens,  and  suggest  that  the  child  revivalist, 
Hammond,  whose  largest  percentage  of  conversions  for  both  sexes 
is  at  ten,  cultivates  precocity. 

on  only  fifty-one  cases,  and  I  have  followed  his  curves  in  presenting  percentages, 
so  that  the  numbers  in  his  column  are  almost  twice  too  large.  His  cases  were 
carefully  selected  from  a  larger  number,  representing  all  ages,  with  much  regard  to 
the  fulness  of  the  record.  The  column  of  Rev.  L.  A.  Pope,  of  the  Baptist  Church  of 
Newburyport,  Mass.,  includes  both  sexes  and  all  ages  in  his  church,  but  here  again, 
as  women  generally  preponderate  in  the  membership  lists  of  all  churches,  and  as 
they  seem  to  be  converted  e.arlier  than  men,  his  data  represent,  no  doubt,  an  age 
too  young  for  the  average  male.  Dr.  Starbuck's  column  for  females  is  based  on 
eighty-six  selected  cases,  here  presented  in  percentages.  The  last  two  columns  are 
compiled  from  the  covenant  book  of  Rev.  E.  P.  Hammond,  whose  speciality  is 
revival  work  with  children,  which  he  kindly  loaned  me  for  the  purpose.  They 
represent  the  converts  in  two  series  of  meetings  in  two  small  cities.  From  our  col- 
umns of  males,  it  appears  that  sixteen  is  the  age  of  most  frequency,  while  for  Ham- 
mond this  age  is  reduced  to  ten  for  both  sexes. 

^  Geo.  A.  Coe  :   The  Spiritual  Life,  New  York,  1900,  p.  39  et  scq. 


292  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Out  of  598  young  people,  Lancaster  found  518  who 
freely  reported  new  religious  inclinations,  mostly  between 
twelve  and  twenty,  and  he  concludes  that  "  religion  before 
this  age  was  a  mere  form.  Now  it  becomes  full  of  meaning. 
It  is  a  new  interest,  and  very  many  speak  of  it  as  a  sudden 
awakening.  It  is  often  spontaneous,  like  the  interest  in  art 
or  music,  or  the  love  of  nature.  Where  no  set  forms  have 
been  urged,  the  religious  emotion  comes  forth  as  naturally  as 
the  sun  rises." 

It  is  thus  no  accidental  synchronism  of  unrelated  events 
that  the  age  of  religion  and  that  of  sexual  maturity  coincide, 
any  more  than  that  senescence  has  its  own  type  or  religiosity.^ 

^  Much  as  I  detest  priority  claims,  I  can  not  resist  the  temptation,  in  view  of  the 
criticism  and  even  ridicule  to  which  I  was  at  first  subjected  for  it,  to  state  here  that 
I  know  of  no  attempt  to  demonstrate  that  adolescence  was  the  age  of  religious  im- 
pressionability in  general,  and  of  conversions  in  particular,  prior  to  the  second  of 
twelve  public  Harvard  lectures  which  I  gave  in  Boston,  February  5,  1881, 
which  was  in  good  part  based  on  data  I  had  collected  by  correspondence,  by  study 
of  the  records  of  the  Fulton  Street  (New  York)  noon  prayer-meeting,  and  upon  the 
analogy  between  the  changes  normal  at  this  age  and  these  specific  religious  expe- 
riences. This  conclusion  was  briefly  restated  in  an  article  printed  some  two  years 
later  in  the  Princeton  Review,^  and  has  been  amplified  with  a  growing  mass  of 
data  in  my  teaching  in  the  field  ever  since,  as  all  my  pupils  know.  At  least  five 
of  them — Burnham,*  Daniels,'  Lancaster,'*  Lueba,*  and  Starbuck,®  and  others — 
have  made  valuable  contributions  to  the  subject,  as  also  have  Coe,'  and  James.' 

^  The  Moral  and  Religious  Training  of  Children  and  Adolescents.  Reprinted 
in  the  Ped.  Sem. ,  June,  i8gi,  vol.  i,  pp.  196-210. 

*  The  Study  of  Adolescence.     Ibid.,  pp.  174-195. 

'The  New  Life:  A  Study  of  Regeneration.  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  October,  1893, 
vol.  vi,  pp.  61-106. 

*  Psychology  and  Pedagogy  of  Adolescence.  Ped.  Sem.,  July,  1897,  vol.  v, 
pp.  61-128. 

*  A  Study  in  the  Psychology  of  Religious  Phenomena.  Ibid.,  April,  1896, 
vol.  vii,  pp.  309-385. 

^A  Study  of  Conversion.  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  January,  1897,  vol.  viii,  pp. 
268-308.  Some  Aspects  of  Religious  Growth.  Ibid.,  October,  1897,  vol.  ix,  pp. 
70-124. 

''  The  Spiritual  Life. 

*  Varieties  of  Religious  Expression.  London,  1902.  So  partial  is  James's 
comprehension  of  this  relation  that  while  he  states  (page  199)  that  "conversion  is  in 
its  essence  a  normal  adolescent  phenomenon,"  he  still  so  far  illustrates  the  old  view- 
point as  to  say  (page  12)  "religious  life  depends  just  as  much  upon  the  spleen,  the 
pancreas,  and  the  kidneys,"  as  on  sex.  Although  the  most  brilliant  litterateur  and 
stylist  in  philosophy  since  Schopenhauer,  unless  it  be  Nietzsche,  whose  diathesis  his 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        293 

Nor  is  religion  degraded  by  the  recognition  of  this  intimate 
relationship,  save  to  those  who  either  think  vilely  about  sex 
or  who  lack  insight  into  its  real  psychic  nature  and  so  fail  to 
realize  how  indissoluble  is  the  bond  that  God  and  nature  have 
wrought  between  religion  and  love.  Perhaps  Plato  is  right, 
and  love  of  the  good,  beautiful,  and  true  is  only  love  of  sex 
transfigured  and  transcendentalized ;  but  the  Gospel  is  better, 
which  makes  sex  love  at  the  best  the  type  and  symbol  of  love 
of  God  and  man.  This  new  insight  into  the  parallelisms  be- 
tween religion  and  love  and  the  concomitant  or  complemental 
variations  of  these  two  is  perhaps  chief  of  the  many  contri- 
butions made  and  impending  by  modern  psychology  to  piety, 
and  is  one  of  the  most  sublime  and  fruitful  themes  of  our 
day,  which  Kant  would  very  likely  have  added  to  the  starry 
heavens  and  moral  law  within  as  a  third  object  of  supreme 
awe,  reverence,  and  interest.  As  Weismann  subordinates  the 
entire  soma  as  a  mere  servant  of  the  germ,  as  the  biology  of 
sex  makes  reproduction  the  consummation  of  life, — the  raison 
d'etre  of  all  the  secondary  sexual  qualities, — and  as  the  psy- 
chology of  sex  selection  finds  in  it  the  caput  Nili  of  all  the 
arts  of  animal  and  human  courtship,  the  most  unitary  and 
desiderated  as  well  as  the  most  intense  psychic  experience,  so 


so  resembles,  our  leading  American  in  this  field,  a  most  copious  and  judicious  quoter 
and  such  a  masterly  describer  of  his  own  even  flitting  and  evanescent  subjective 
psychic  processes,  with  both  person  and  page  invested  with  such  irresistible  charm, 
his  method,  and  many  if  not  most  of  his  positions  here,  seem  to  do  no  less  violence 
to  fact  than  do  his  dicta  concerning  sex.  Most  of  the  cases  and  experiences  which 
constitute  so  large  a  part  of  his  volume  are  abnormal  and  some  teratological,  from 
which  true  religion,  I  believe,  saves  its  followers.  These  pathological  varieties  of 
religious  experience  can  explain  piety  itself  no  more  than  the  mental  and  physical 
freaks  of  hysteria  explain  true  womanhood,  the  Wiertz  museum  explain  art,  or  the 
effects  of  music  on  the  insane  show  its  real  nature.  That  God  is  proven  by  an  hal- 
lucinatory sense  of  presence,  that  the  religion  of  the  healthy-minded  is  mind  cure, 
that  immortality  is  demonstrated  by  ghostly  telepathy,  and  that  the  lurid  experiences 
of  pious  Streberthnm,  saturated  by  affectation,  impressionism,  and  the  passion  to 
be  unique  and  interesting,  described  in  colors  laid  on  with  a  trowel  and  all  marked 
by  an  abandon  and  superlativeness  that  throws  scientific  caution  and  moderation  to 
the  winds,  and  which,  at  the  best,  are  only  a  few  of  the  most  superficial  phenomena 
of  the  adolescent  ferment — this  seems  to  me  the  babel  of  Babylon  or  of  Walpurgis 
night,  and  not  the  music  of  the  heavenly  city.  True,  the  psychopathic  temperament 
has  advantages,  but  they  are  at  best  only  literary,  and  it  is  itself  essentially  both 
anti-religious  and  anti-scientific.  Many  if  not  most  of  these  "experiences"  are 
the  yellow  literature  of  religious  psychology. 


294  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

religion  at  his  highest  potence  is  union  with  God,  to  which 
everything  in  the  rehgious  Hfe  leads  up  as  its  goal  or  makes 
its  point  of  departure.  Love  is  the  greatest  thing  in  the  world 
for  both  the  religionist  and  the  amorist.  Its  praise  is  in  su- 
perlatives, for  all  else  is  dross.  We  must  love  with  all  our 
mind,  might,  and  strength.  Both  furnish  in  their  sphere  the 
strongest  motive  both  to  assert  and  to  renounce  the  will  to 
live.  They  are  exalted  and  degraded  together,  and  the  best 
work  of  each  is  to  keep  the  other  pure.  Religion  is  at  its  best 
when  its  earthly  image  is  most  spotless  and  untarnished,  and 
love  is  at  its  best  where  religion  is  purest  and  most  undefiled. 
Just  as  this  relationship  seems  to  degrade  religion  only  to 
those  whose  ideals  or  cults  of  love  are  low  or  undeveloped, 
so  those  who  dispraise  religion  have  not  realized  how  indis- 
pensabh  it  is  to  perfect  love.  How  central  this  thought  was 
in  the  mind  of  Jesus  many  parables  and  sayings  attest.  True 
piety  is  earthly  love  transcendentalized,  and  the  saint  is  the 
lover  purified,  refined,  and  perfected.  To  have  attained  this 
insight,  to  have  organized  it  into  life,  cult,  and  a  Church,  is  the 
supreme  claim  of  Jesus  upon  the  gratitude,  reverence,  and  awe 
of  the  human  heart.  No  such  saving  service  has  ever  been 
rendered  to  our  race,  and  we  can  see  no  room  in  the  future 
for  any  other  to  be  compared  with  it.  His  diagnosis  of  the 
chief  danger  that  threatened  our  race  was  sure  and  true,  and 
the  remedial  agencies  are  the  best  yet  in  sight. 

Perhaps  few  masterpieces  in  literature  have  been  so  much  wiser 
than  the  author  himself  knew  than  the  Platonic  Symposium.  The 
guests  decide  not  to  drink,  and  they  dismiss  the  flute  girl  and  devote 
themselves  to  post-prandial  discourse  concerning  love.  Phaedrus  al- 
most chants  of  it  as  a  mighty  god,  creating  order  out  of  chaos,  quicken- 
ing the  sense  of  honor  and  dishonor  in  youth,  irresistible  in  war  if 
men  who  are  lovers  stand  side  by  side,  sending  Orpheus  to  Hades  to 
rescue  his  love,  etc.  Pausanias  distinguished  the  older  and  baser 
Aphrodite  of  the  body  from  the  purer  Eros  of  the  soul.  The  gods 
allow  lovers  all  liberties,  and  at  their  very  perjuries  great  Zeus  smiles. 
Aristophanes,  assuming  that  love  is  the  greatest  and  best  thing  in 
the  world,  invents  the  serio-comic  myth  of  primeval  androgynous 
monsters  with  four  hands  and  four  feet,  back  to  back,  terrible  in  wars 
against  the  gods.  To  humble  their  pride,  they  were  spht  like  a  sorb 
apple  or  an  egg  with  a  hair,  and  the  skin  gathered  in  a  knot  at  the 
navel.'  The  two  halves,  man  and  woman,  have  ever  since  desired  and 
sought  their  other  moiety,  and  would  be  molten  over  again  into  one 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION        295 

as  of  yore.  Agathon  sings  of  a  deity  who  sets  her  feet,  not  like  Ate, 
upon  hard  skulls,  but  walks  on  the  soft  hearts  of  man,  who  has  taught 
mankind  arts  and  medicine,  and  is  the  pilot,  defender,  savior,  and 
glory  of  gods  and  men.  Last  of  all,  Socrates  describes  procreation  as 
the  principle  of  immortality  in  mortals.  It  is  for  immortality  that 
even  animals  die  for  their  offspring.  But  if  the  conceptions  of  the 
body  are  so  loftily  interpreted,  what  shall  we  say  of  those  of  the 
soul  ?  Love  is  of  the  mind  and  not  of  the  body,  of  ideas  and  not  of 
physical  forms.  It  would  bring  to  the  birth  fair  thought  to  improve 
the  young  and  infect  them  with  the  passion  for  beauty  in  all  and  not 
in  one,  till,  as  the  soul  draws  near  the  eternal  sea  of  beauty  and  is 
smitten  with  the  boundless  love  of  wisdom,  ever  using  all  kinds  of 
beauty  as  stepping-stones  up  to  absolute  knowledge,  it  forgets  food 
and  drink  and  the  body,  pants  with  ecstasy,  is  absorbed,  translated, 
and  would  lose  itself  in  contemplation  and  close  in  again  with  its 
divine  source.  The  pangs  of  philosophy  and  those  of  love  unite,  rea- 
son and  passion  fuse.  Truly,  before  this  mystic  idealism,  we  may  well 
feel  that  current  conceptions  of  love  are  either  a  very  rudimentary 
bud  or  else  a  crumbling  ruin,  but  yet  that  the  purest  love  and  the 
highest  truth  were  created  for  each  other,  and  that  if  the  world  is  at 
root  real  and  sane,  it  will  culminate  in  their  union. 

Christianity  gives  a  yet  higher  interpretation  of  love — the 
greatest  power  of  the  soul  fixed  upon  the  greatest  object,  God, 
and  next  to  him,  man.  Those  both  pray  and  serve  best  who 
love  most.  To  the  Christian,  God  himself  is  love,  and  without 
the  Pauline  charity  or  love,  all  is  sounding,  brass  or  tinkling 
cymbals.  The  very  end  and  essence  of  both  moral  and  re- 
ligious culture  is  to  conceive  and  cultivate  love  in  the  purest, 
loftiest,  and  most  all-comprehending  way.  We  saw  in  Chap- 
ter VI  how  often  in  fact  the  sting  of  sin  lies  in  the  sphere  of 
sex,  and  phallic  worship  shows  how  religion  itself  can  grovel. 
If  true  love  is  the  religion  of  the  flesh,  true  religion  is  the  love 
of  the  spirit. 

Some  of  the  similarities  and  covariants  of  religion  and  love  best 
seen  at  adolescence  may  be  enumerated  as  follows : 

I.  Both  suggest  death,  and  may  not  only  risk,  but  court,  fly  to, 
despise,  and  triumph  over  it.  In  the  subordination  of  this  life  to 
the  next  and  to  posterity,  both  alike  are  reductives  of  individuality. 
To  modern  biology  the  soma,  or  all  that  can  become  a  corpse,  is  a 
set  of  thanatic  organs  which  the  deathless  germ  plasma  has  developed 
as  its  tool,  and  is  a  specialized  and  therefore  a  degenerate  thing  com- 
pared with  the  genetic  elements,  which  are  continuous  from  the  first 
form  of  life  to  the  last.     They  seem  to  whisper  to  the  soul  of  youth 


296  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

//  that  he  is  only  a  link  in  an  endless  chain  that  connects  his  forebears 
with  posterity.     Instead  of  the  latter,  religion  now  tells  of  the  post- 

'  mortem  self,  and  that  the  present  life  is  cheap  and  mean  as  immor- 
tality is  slowly  brought  to  light.  Greatly  as  the  fear  of  death  is  now 
increased,  it  also  fascinates,  and,  as  we  saw,  even  the  suicide-curve 
rises  sharply.  Scott  ^  found  that  of  over  two  hundred  cases,  eighty- 
nine  had  brooded  on  death  during  the  early  teens,  as  if  this  back- 
ground thought  was  needed  to  bring  out  the  resources  of  love.  Plato 
taught  that  the  philosopher  who  is  in  love  with  general  ideas  is  really 
seeking  death,  so  enamored  is  he  of  the  transcendental.  Some 
religions,  not  satisfied  with  accepting  death  with  joy  as  the  inevitable, 
court  annihilation  or  would  be  dissolved  into  a  mere  diffusive  power 
to  get  in  closer  rapport  with  the  universe ;  so  love  in  its  extreme 
hyperbole  prompts  its  victim  to  wish  to  become  the  air  that  surrounds, 
the  breeze  that  fans,  or  the  ornament  that  adorns  his  beloved.^ 

2.  True  love  and  religion  both  make  the  soul  highly  sensitive  to 
nature.  The  flowers,  the  stars,  the  wind,  the  sea,  all  remind  the  love- 
sick swain  of  his  Dulcinea;  but  to  the  religious  soul  they  are  mere 
asseverations  and  texts,  and  not  substitutive,  because  the  mistress 
appears  sensibly,  while  God  is  hidden.  All  the  poetry  and  metaphors 
of  love  show  the  great  importance  of  its  scene-setting  in  nature,  and 
of  the  subtle  symbolism  and  the  rich  material  of  comparison,  that 
pervades  her  whole  domain.  What  could  the  amorist  do,  as  we  saw 
in  Chapter  XII,  without  the  moon,  the  azure  sky  which  reflects  his 
mistress's  eyes  or  the  depth  of  her  soul,  the  breeze  that  takes  messages, 
the  snow  that  mirrors  her  purity;  when  she  is  absent,  how  tender  his 
heart  becomes  toward  all  these  items  of  the  environment  with  which 
she  has  been  associated,  either  in  his  experiences  with  her  or  in  his 
fancy.  So,  too,  religion  glorifies  nature.  Stars  sing  of  God's  love, 
the  firmament  shows  his  work,  the  spring  his  bounty,  the  world  is 
full  of  his  design  and  provision,  everything  that  pleases  under  the 
sky  is  a  token  of  special  providence  to  the  newly  reborn  lover  of  God, 
who  is  assured  that  nothing  ill  can  befall  him  for  he  is  in  his  Father's 
house.  It  is  He  who  makes  the  birds  sing  or  the  sparrow  fall ;  who 
arrays  the  lilies,  and  endows  animals  with  their  wondrous  instinct; 
that  numbers  our  hairs,  names  the  stars,  and  makes  the  most  common 
joys    of   life   and    the    simplest   bounties    of    nature    mementoes    and 

'  Psychology  of  Puberty  and  Adolescence.      Proc.  of  the  N.  E.  A.,  1897,  p.  848. 

*  Anger,  too,  may  now  prompt  such  feelings  as  in  lovers'  quarrels.  A  girl  of 
fifteen,  offended  by  those  she  loves,  goes  to  her  room,  locks  herself  in,  lies  on  the 
bed,  folds  her  arms  across  her  breast,  breathes  quietly,  imagines  that  she  is  dead, 
that  the  family  rush  in,  regret  that  they  parted  in  anger,  kiss  her  passionately,  the 
neighbors  gather  and  say,  "  Poor  girl,  to  have  died  so  young!  "  and  the  coffin 
is  heaped  with  flowers;  she  knows  the  text  of  the  clergyman  and  what  he  will 
say;  the  lid  is  screwed  down,  and  only  when  the  clods  begin  to  fall  on  the  coffin 
does  she  feel  better,  and  gets  up  and  goes  down-stairs  with  every  trace  of  bad  feel- 
ing removed. 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION        297 

keepsakes,  so  that  in  the  normal  soul  love  of  nature  and  love  of  God 
are  inseparable. 

3.  Both  have  their  fanaticisms.  The  medieval  knight  wore  the 
color  or  the  favor  of  his  chosen  one,  sang  her  praises  as  fairest  and 
best  in  the  world,  and  if  another  dared  dispute  and  assert  the  super- 
lativeness  of  his  own  mistress,  only  the  wager  of  battle  could  decide. 
So  races  have  fought  for  their  faith,  and  required  autos  da  fe  of 
others,  and  the  conqueror  has  forced  the  conquered  to  unwillingly 
confess  the  supremacy  of  his  Deity  and  do  homage  to  him.  There 
is  but  one  supremely  good  and  beauteous  to  whom  all  must  bow.  Allah 
is  one  and  above  all,  Jehovah  is  God  and  there  is  no  other,  have  been 
battle  cries ;  and  the  Lord  from  heaven  has  looked  down  with  com- 
placency upon  the  slaughter  of  those  who  denied  him,  and  has  given 
strength  to  the  arm  of  his  defender  and  shown  some  special  sign  of 
favor  when  the  victory  was  won.  Proclaim  Jesus,  preach  the  glory 
of  his  life  everywhere  till  the  world  shall  acknowledge  it,  is  the  en- 
thusiasm of  the  courtship  methods  of  militant  Christianity. 

4.  Lovers,  almost  from  the  lowest  creatures  that  are  sexed,  are 
nest-builders.  They  make  bowers  not  only  for  their  young,  but  for 
their  mates,  or  a  cottage  for  two,  the  greater  the  love  the  smaller  it 
may  be,  decorated  with  abundant  flowers,  keepsakes,  mementoes,  and 
manifold  ornaments;  this  is  the  way  in  which  love  expresses  its  in- 
stincts of  shelter,  protection,  and  symbiosis  or  life  together.  If  not 
this,  there  are  trysting-places  hallowed  by  association,  and  where  for 
either  alone  thoughts  of  the  other  are  most  vivid,  and  consecrated 
by  memories.  So  religion  builds  its  towers,  altars,  chapels,  dolmens, 
stonehenges,  cathedrals,  and  shrines,  where  God  comes  down  to  dwell 
and  meet  the  worshiper.  These  are  richly  dight  with  the  products 
of  man's  esthetic  faculties,  so  akin  is  beauty  to  both  piety  and  love. 
The  temple,  too,  must  be  symbolic  of  its  inhabitant ;  its  arches  must 
be  lofty;  its  spire  must  point  upward;  the  light  must  speak  with  all 
the  symbolism  of  color;  and  its  permanence  must  suggest  the  per- 
durable, if  not  the  eternal. 

5.  Religion,  like  love  and  the  sea,  ebbs  and  flows,  and  modes  of 
abnegation  are  as  characteristic  as  those  of  aggression  and  assertion. 
The  uncertain  lover  may  wear,  perhaps  exhibit,  himself  with  every 
token  of  depression,  humiliation,  and  despair;  neglect  his  toilet,  seek 
solitude,  and  may  mutilate  himself,  or  court  death  either  to  excite 
pity  or  in  sheer  despair  of  winning  his  mistress's  favor.  Erotic  litanies 
abound  in  expressions  of  love-melancholy,  a  passion  to  serve,  to  be 
humiliated  by  the  loved  one.  There  are  expressions  of  absence  of  all 
worth  by  comparison  with  her  merits.  So  the  religionist  immolates 
and  disfigures  his  body,  offers  up  his  possessions,  magnifies  all  his 
sins  and  shortcomings  as  if  there  were  no  good  in  him,  and  all  to 
win  divine  sympathy  or  favor,  and  in  the  hope  that  infinite  goodness 
will  be  drawn  out  to  gloriously  supplement  every  imperfection.  Per- 
haps all  hope  vanishes,  and  even  death  is  sought  because  life  is  in- 
tolerable without  divine  as  without  human  love. 


298  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

6.  The  soul  is  especially  cadenced  in  both  love  and  religion  by 
rhythm,  which  is  potent  for  both.  The  lover  vents  his  passion  in 
poetry  and  song,  perhaps  becomes  for  a  time  a  serenading  troubadour, 
and  many  a  dull  soul  has  broken  into  verse  as  many  birds  do  into 
song  only  once  in  life,  and  that  at  the  mating  season.  The  dance  in 
many  races  originated  in  the  service  of  religion,  and  when  it  lapses, 
is  prone  to  fall  to  the  service  of  passion.  The  Christian  Church 
largely  sang  and  marched  its  way  into  the  hearts  of  the  pagan  world 
of  the  West.  Music  is  the  language  of  the  feelings  as  speech  is  of 
the  intellect,  and  the  theme  of  by  far  the  most  music  of  the  world  is 
either  love  or  religion.  The  melodies  of  the  one  often  strangely  fit  the 
words  of  the  other,  while  song  and  hymns  have  always  been  one  of 
the  potent  aphrodisiacs  of  religious  affection,  and  will  remain  so  as 
long  as  man  is  thumic  or  pectoral  and  must  have  emotion. 

7.  Not  only  do  both  abase,  but  both  exalt  the  self.  The  accepted 
lover  is  proud,  ecstatic,  and  fearless,  and  counts  himself  the  happiest 
of  men.  There  are  no  human  ills  or  dangers  that  he  has  not  the 
strength  to  cope  with.  He  respects  his  own  virtue,  beauty,  and  grace, 
because  he  is  the  chosen  one  among  many.  So  the  soul  new-born  to 
religion  walks  on  air,  his  face  shines  with  the  joy  of  acceptance,  and 
his  sense  of  freedom  from  guilt  brings  purity  and  faith  that  he  can 
prevail  with  God,  with  whom  he  stands  in  a  specially  favorable  rela- 
tion, and  perhaps  has  some  private  insight  or  revelation.  This,  too, 
is  the  germ  of  most  of  the  exalted  types  of  religious  insanity. 

8.  Both  animal  and  human  courtship  have  their  most  varied  and 
accurately  prescribed  forms  of  etiquette  and  ceremony.  They  con- 
sist often  of  a  series  of  acts  so  exceptional,  even  in  animals,  as  to 
almost  seem  like  the  customs  and  manners  of  another  world.  The 
manner  of  approach,  address,  the  modes  of  winning  favor,  of  soliciting 
marriage,  gifts,  tonsure,  and  dress,  are  elaborated  with  superfine 
punctilio ;  violation  of  usage  in  minor  details  often  gives  offense  and 
endangers  alienation.  So  in  wooing  the  favor  of  the  divine,  there  are 
elaborate  rituals,  litanies,  modes,  postures,  costumes,  forms  of  phrase, 
times  and  places  to  be  scrupulously  observed,  and,  often  a  cycle  of 
more  or  less  formalized  acts  for  prayer  and  charity,  and  a  repetition 
of  phrases  and  ceremonial  righteousness  generally. 

9.  The  late  painful  studies  of  sexual  aberration  show  us  that  almost 
any  act  or  object  can  be  focused  on  by  those  who  are  perverted  or 
impotent,  to  inflame  the  body  and  soul  with  lust.  Long  lists  of  non- 
phallic  erotic  fetishes  could  be  made  out  from  the  literature — which 
shall  be  nameless  here — rings,  tresses,  handkerchiefs,  and  every  article 
of  dress  or  ornament,  any  one  of  which  may  and  has  become  the 
only  object  capable  of  arousing  genesic  states.  The  very  name 
assigned  them,  amatory  fetishes,  is  significant.  So  in  the  history  of 
religions,  men  have  made  idols  of  almost  every  object  in  nature  which 
has  been  focused  on  to  arouse  crude  and  perverse  religious  feelings 
and  sentiments.  There  is  almost  nothing  that  has  not  been  wor- 
shiped, and  there  is  a  long  catalogue  of  even  scatological  religious 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION        299 

rites.  Nearly  every  act  and  attitude  have  somewhere  been  regarded 
as  w^orship,  and  also  have  elsewhere  been  used  as  passional  provoc- 
atives. In  both,  the  normative,  central  experience  is  undeveloped  or 
weakened  and  lost,  and  something  more  eccentric  has  been  uncon- 
sciously seized  upon  by  the  soul,  which  must  have  something  to  wor- 
ship and  to  love,  however  unworthy.  Thus  there  is  a  correspondence 
that  works  out  in  great  detail  between  amatory  fetishism  and  the 
several  forms  of  idolatry,  which  resemble  each  other  in  many  aspects 
of  their  symbolisms. 

10.  We  are  told  that  by  the  methods  of  sexual  selection  the  female 
has  made  the  male  according  to  her  own  tastes,  that  man  is  always 
passing  woman's  examination,  that  not  only  a  large  portion  of  his 
conduct  that  is  addressed  to  her,  but  very  much  which  is  not  con- 
sciously so,  does  not  escape  her  keen  observation  and  unconscious 
merit-marking;  and  so  conversely  in  other  and  manifold  ways  man 
has  made  woman.  Psychology  is  lately  learning  more  and  more  of 
the  wide  range  and  great  power  of  this  intersexual  biotonic  stimulus. 
This,  too,  has  its  religious  analogue  in  the  relations  of  man  to  God. 
Each  in  a  sense  and  to  a  degree  makes  the  other  in  his  own  image. 
Man  is  ever  unconsciously  drawn  into  likeness  of  the  object  of  his 
worship,  who  is  always  an  exemplar,  whose  perfections  he  would  imi- 
tate and  emulate. 

11.  Nor  must  it  be  forgotten  that  many  of  these  analogies  are 
best  seen,  not  from  the  masculine,  but  from  the  feminine  side.  The 
Christian  loves  as  the  woman  does,  quite  as  much,  if  not  more  than  as 
the  man  does.  There  is  quiet,  retirement,  fond  contemplation  of  the 
image  and  perfections  of  the  dear  one.  There  is  passivity,  inward- 
ness, and  virtues  cultivated  in  secret  seen  by  Heaven  alone  in  order 
to  draw  down  its  benison  or  its  favor.  Heavenly  love  brings  its  griefs, 
sorrows,  disappointments,  and  anxieties,  its  hope  deferred,  its  hours 
when  nothing  is  possible  but  placid  resignation  that  can  not  act  or 
strive. 

12.  Once  more,  love  and  religion  are  analogous  in  that  both  can 
vivify  and  lend  the  immense  influence  of  their  vitality  to  almost  any 
and  every  act  or  object,  can  become  gross,  material,  eccentric,  and 
desiccated,  and  yet  in  periods  of  reawakening  can  slough  off  as  dross 
all  accretions,  withdraw  into  central  heights,  find  reenforcement  in 
involution,  and  from  thence  develop  newer  forms  of  objective  ex- 
pression. Perhaps  nearly,  if  not  quite,  all  forms  are  deciduous  and 
need  to  fall  away  at  times  and  be  replaced  by  the  new  growths  of 
spring-time.  The  soul  which  can  worship  or  kindle  love  in  every 
act  or  object  needs  to  break  away  and  fall  back  upon  its  own  resources 
at  times  appointed,  in  order  to  realize  and  increase  its  own  inner 
forces,  as  reproduction  brings  regeneration. 

Such  parallels  might  be  easily  multiplied.  Both  love  archaic 
phrases  that  are  conventionalized,  but  antiquated  and  absurd  if  scru- 
tinized in  the  light  of  modern  knowledge.  The  medieval  courts  of 
love  adjudicated  lovers'  quarrels  and  solved  knotty  points  of  manners 


300  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

as  if  they  were  holy  liturgy.  The  agape  or  love  feast  of  the  early 
Church ;  canticles  like  that  of  St.  Francis,  who  sang  that  he  burned, 
languished,  and  pined  of  the  wounds  of  love  divine,  would  swim  in 
love's  sweet  sea,  was  its  slave  bound  in  chains  of  strong  desire,  would 
die  bound  in  its  furnace  sunk  in  love's  sweet  swoon,  etc. ;  hymns  and 
songs  from  that  of  Solomon  down;  lives  of  celestial  erotomaniacs 
like  St.  Theresa ;  the  analogies  between  marriage  as  an  institution  and 
the  Church ;  the  circumstance  that  pathology  in  either  sphere  is  liable 
to  involve  that  of  the  other,  that  true  religion  is  far  harder  and  rarer 
in  childhood  and  senescence,  that  religion  is  the  chief  corrective  and 
regulator  of  degraded  love — each  of  these  might  be  heads  of  new 
chapters  showing  in  detail  their  unity. 

Using  this  key,  we  find  that  just  as  earthly  love  is  at  core  a  mo- 
ment of  ravishing  joy  which  created  all  the  widening  irradiations, 
made  all  the  gorgeous  plumage,  created  song  and  all  the  complicated 
phenomena  of  animal  courtship,  that  has  brought  into  being  the 
whole  range  of  secondary  sexual  qualities  and  their  uses,  and  made 
the  world  beauteous  with  color  and  odor,  as  well  as,  perhaps,  in- 
spired art  and  all  the  esthetic  world  for  man,  so  religion  has  as  its 
nucleus  rare  and  ravishing  moments  of  communion  with  the  highest 
experiences  which  abide  long  with  us  and  are  worth  a  life  of  toil  and 
sacrifice  to  attain,  but  which  irradiate  outward  into  a  good  life 
through  an  endless  range  of  rites,  creeds,  asceticisms,  and  cults  for 
the  body  and  for  the  soul,  perhaps  idolatrous  and  pagan  superstitions, 
and  fetish  worship;  yet  all  these  are  changing  habiliments  of  heav- 
enly love  put  on  and  taken  off  to  fit  the  exigencies  of  race,  culture, 
environment.  Both  have  their  transports  of  bliss  and  rapture;  both 
have  their  pangs  of  pain,  fear,  despair ;  both  alternate  between  a  feel- 
ing of  absolute  dependence  and  that  of  absolute  freedom,  between  the 
sentiment  of  the  eternal  worth  of  the  individual,  when  life  abounds 
and  may  be  violent,  seeking  to  take  the  kingdom  of  heaven  by  force, 
and  abject  Massochistic  humility  which  longs  to  be  servile  and  to  be 
passively  seized  and  borne  away  by  heteronomous  powers.  Both  love 
and  religion  delight  in  incense  and  swinging  censers  that  appeal  to 
the  sense  of  smell ;  both  are  liable  to  the  extremes  of  orgy  and  sub- 
sequent apathetic  reaction.  The  sarcous  and  celestial  erotics  both 
have  their  flagellations  and  their  penances,  and  their  beauteous  vest- 
ments. Both  have  their  prelude  of  danger,  uncertainty,  and  possible 
loss.  Both  are  borne  up  on  the  wings  of  music  and  song,  and  both 
have  their  intonation  and  enchantments.  Both  worship  and  pray,  and 
readjust  the  individual  will  to  that  of  the  adored  being.  Both  have 
their  manuals  of  devotion.  Both  hunger  for  a  larger,  fuller  life,  and 
have  their  pathology,  fetishism,  and  formalism,  their  hypocrisies,  their 
periods  of  revival,  and  their  methodisms. 

True  and  deep  religious  experience  is  almost  impossible  before 
adolescence,  and  disturbances  in  either  sphere  are  now  liable  to  affect 
the  other.  The  birthday  of  the  strongest  passion  is  the  day  of  the 
greatest  need  of  religion,  and  is  also  the  period  when  the  calentures 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        3°! 

of  both  are  in  greatest  danger  of  becoming  confused  one  with  the 
other,  so  that  devotional  and  passional  states  may  become  mutually 
provocative.  If  v^^e  see  how  the  lower  rouses  the  higher  in  some  of 
the  experiences  of  the  medieval  saints,  monks  and  nuns,  and  other 
ascetics,  we  also  see  how  the  appeal  to  the  higher  may  rouse  the  lower 
in  some  of  the  phenomena  of  modern  revivalism,  especially  at  camp- 
meetings.  Both  are  liable  in  youth  to  be  predominantly  emotional, 
and  the  contiguity  of  emotional  states  is  then  most  liable  to  produce 
extension  of  excitement  to  other  areas  by  contagion.'  Both  are  often 
at  their  best  and  purest  at  adolescence.  It  is  only  in  later  life  that 
their  spheres  become  more  distinct. 

On  the  other  hand,  their  differences  are,  as  the  world  better  knows, 
many  and  great.  The  object  of  divine  love  is  not  sensuous  or  transi- 
tory, but  spiritual  and  abiding.  Precious  as  is  the  love  of  persons  in 
itself  and  for  its  own  sake,  it  is  a  symbol  of  that  which  is  higher. 
If  up  to  a  certain  degree  of  fervor,  varying  greatly  with  individuals, 
each  strengthens  and  normalizes  the  other,  beyond  this  point  too  great 
intensity  of  either  interferes  with  the  other.  Some  may  put  all  the 
ardor  meant  for  husband  and  wife,  and  all  the  devotion  due  to  chil- 
dren, into  the  love  and  service  of  God  and  of  a  future  heavenly  state, 
while  nothing  so  emasculates  piety  as  base  or  excessive  eroticism. 
Plato,  Spinoza,  and  many  others,  have  shown  that  there  is  an  in- 
tellectual love  of  the  divine.  God,  however  conceived,  whether  as 
incarnate  or  as  the  Stoic  soul  of  the  world,  is  an  object  that  appeals 
to  very  different  sentiments  and  faculties,  and  in  a  very  different  way 
from  those  evoked  by  a  human  personality ;  prayer,  worship,  and 
service  take  on  new  qualities  and  directions,  and  where  the  Divine 
Being  be  conceived  as  of  the  same  sex  as  the  worshiper  or  unsexed, 
the  above  analogies  pale  in  significance. 

I.  In  its  most  fundamental  sense,  conversion  is  a  natural, 
normal,  universal,  and  necessary  process  at  the  stage  when 
life  pivots  over  from  an  autocentric  to  an  heterocentric  basis. 
Childhood  must  be  selfish  in  the  sense  that  it  must  be  fed,  shel- 
tered, clothed,  taught,  and  the  currents  of  its  environment  set 

^The  first  impulse  of  genius,  says  Lombroso,'  is  often  due  to  beauty  or  to  love. 
Petrarch  became  a  poet  when  he  was  fourteen,  upon  seeing  his  Laura.  Impression- 
ability in  general,  as  is  plain  for  many  cases,  is  now  at  its  apogee.  Youth  is  in  a 
state  of  latent  explosibility.  Effects,  especially  in  the  realm  of  religion,  are  often 
instantaneous,  like  a  sudden  revelation  disproportionate  to  their  causes.  Interme- 
diate states  come  to  the  front  temporarily  and  perhaps  permanently.  Emotionality 
is  extremely  unstable  and  easily  influenced.  The  sexual  psychopath,  especially  the 
fetishist,  is  often  made  so  by  a  single  vivid  impression  at  this  susceptible  age, 
when  special  incidents  are  not  only  vividly  and  permanently  impressed  upon  the 
mind,  but  become  formative  centers. 


1  Alienist  and  Neurologist,  April  and  August,  1902. 


302  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

toward  and  not  from  it.  Again,  infancy  is  generic  and 
abounds  in  rudimentary  physical  and  psychic  traits  com- 
mon to  many  forms  of  higher  animal  as  well  as  of  human  life. 
In  the  adolescent  infancy  of  the  soul  a  similar  totalizing  tend- 
ency appears  on  a  higher  plane.  Youth  seeks  to  be,  know, 
get,  feel  all  that  is  highest,  greatest,  and  best  in  man's  estate, 
circumnutating  in  widening  sweeps  before  it  finds  the  right 
object  upon  which  to  climb.  There  are  interpreted  antici- 
pations of  greater  joy  which  only  true  marriage  and  parent- 
hood of  body  and  soul  can  satisfy,  foregleams  of  heroic 
achievement  and  secret  "  excelsior  "  ambitions.  It  is  the  glo- 
rious dawn  of  imagination,  which  supplements  individual  lim- 
itations and  expands  the  soul  toward  the  dimensions  of  the 
race.  Some  girls  want  to  be  romantically  good  and  paragons 
of  piety  and  beauty.  Occasionally  a  criminaloid  boy  secretly 
resolves  to  commit  all  the  crimes  and  vices  ever  heard  of. 
The  mannerisms  and  affectations  of  superiors  are  put  on. 
There  are  dreams  of  leadership,  victory,  and  splendor  amid 
the  plaudits  of  an  admiring  world.  All  these  more  or  less 
flickering  and  iridescent  trailing  clouds  of  glory  usher  in  a 
new  inner  dawn,  when  everything  seems  turning  to  gold  at 
the  touches  of  fancy,  and  that  only  poetry  can  ever  describe, 
which  it  has  not  yet  adequately  done,  but  which  I  believe  it 
is  its  very  highest  function  to  do.  The  flood-gates  of  higher 
heredity  are  open.  Before  this  age  children  often  resemble 
one  parent  or  one  side  of  the  house,  etc. ;  but  now  the  traits 
of  body  or  soul  of  the  other  parent  or  side  appear,  and  the 
less  remote  forebears  are  heard  from,  a  vast  cloud  of  wit- 
nesses, so  that  it  is  no  wonder,  especially  where  ethnic  stocks 
are  mingled,  that  cross-fertilization  follows  its  law  and  pro- 
duces variety  within  the  individual  soul.  Hence  prepotent 
tendencies  of  diverse  kinds  clash  or  combine,  as  it  were,  at 
all  angles  and  with  all  degrees  of  mutual  arrest  or  reenforce- 
ment.  It  is  thus  well  for  adolescents  to  have  a  series  of  in- 
terests, fevers,  and  even  flings,  because  to  find  a  life  voca- 
tion in  the  first  new  field  that  opens  has  been  well  called  as 
dwarfing  as  for  a  plant  to  go  to  seed  from  the  first  pair  of 
cotyledons.  Now,  too,  come  the  reading  crazes,  the  first  at- 
tempts at  poetry,  dramatic  or  other  arts,  ideas  of  wealth, 
service,  fame,  and  vows  of  sublime  deeds.     No  age  has  such 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION        3^3 

many-sided  interests,  and  all  without  distraction.  Nothing' 
human  is  alien,  and  all  this  stretching  of  the  soul  to  larger 
dimensions  is  nature's  way  of  liberal  culture  to  full-orbed  per- 
fection. The  ego  would,  in  Guyau's  phrase,  expand  itself  to 
the  uttermost,  and  act  all  parts  in  the  Comedie  Humaine.  If 
unchecked,  in  later  life  these  ideals  tend  to  exploit  to  the  utter- 
most every  sense  and  all  experiences,  to  utilize  all  the  maxims 
of  expediency,  like  Marius  the  Epicurean,  or  to  maximize  in- 
dividuality, like  Goethe,  and  incline  more  to  the  best  Hellenic 
than  to  the  Hebrew  or  Christian  types  of  life. 

But  another  voice  is  soon  heard  in  the  soul,  which  says : 
Renounce  and  serve,  life  is  short,  powers  and  opportunities 
are  limited,  suffering  is  needful  to  perfection,  so  obey,  find 
the  joy  of  sacrifice,  get  only  to  give,  live  for  others,  subor- 
dinate the  will  to  live  to  love,  or  to  offspring.  Thus  the 
inevitable  hour  comes  when  all  these  vague  masses  of  ances- 
tral reminiscences  which  our  very  heredity  suggests,  and 
which  are  so  much  vaster  than  any  individual  life  can  express, 
must  submit  to  what  often  seems  the  injustice  or  even  the 
pathos  of  slowly  progressive  separate  personal  definiteness. 
The  larger  nahira  non  naturata  of  the  soul  must  gradually 
decline  to  dim  subliminal  regions,  and  the  hunger  for  a  more 
and  fuller  life  and  the  desire  to  have  the  broadest  possible 
experience  can  not  be  gratified  in  our  own  sublunary  exist- 
ence. This  suggests  posterity  as  well  as  ancestry,  or  else  an- 
other life,  as  a  kind  of  psychokinetic  equivalent  and  a  substi- 
tute where  these  promises,  bankrupt  here,  wi'll  be  redeemed. 
Hence  this  is  the  great  opportunity  for  the  teachers  of  religion, 
of  the  family,  and  of  social  life.  These  earlier,  tender  dreams 
nursed  in  secret,  the  incubation  of  which  inclines  to  reticence 
and  to  solitude,  which  should  be  not  only  respected  but  fa- 
vored, are  sure  to  pale  or  be  shattered  one  by  one  by  closer 
contact  with  the  real  world.  The  sense  of  imperfection  and 
incompleteness  which  inevitably  supervenes  is  one  cause  of 
the  mild  melancholy  so  symptomatic  of  this  climacteric  period. 
The  ulterior  law  of  service  and  self-sacrifice,  which  seems  at 
first  to  be  contradictory  of  all  that  has  preceded,  begins  to 
loom  up,  and  the  prolonged  period  of  readjustments  and  sub- 
ordinations begins.  Henceforth  the  race,  not  the  self,  must 
become  supreme. 


N 


304  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

All  are  thus  born  twice,  once  as  individuals  and  once  as 
representatives  of  the  species.  Quetelet  sagely  says  that  the 
best  measure  of  the  state  of  civilization  in  a  nation  is  the  way 
in  which  it  achieves  its  revolutions.  As  it  becomes  truly  civi- 
lized they  cease  to  be  sudden  and  violent,  and  become  gradually 
transitory  without  abrupt  change.  The  same  is  true  of  that 
individual  crisis  which  physiology  describes  as  adolescence, 
and  of  which  theology  formulates  a  spiritual  aspect  or  potency 
called  regeneration  and  conversion.  True  religion  is  nor- 
mally the  slowest  because  the  most  comprehensive  kind  of 
growth,  and  the  entire  ephebic  decade  is  not  too  long  and  is 
well  spent  if  altruism  or  love  of  all  that  is  divine  and  human 
comes  to  assured  supremacy  over  self  before  it  is  ended.  Later 
adolescence  merges  the  lower  into  the  higher  social  self.  Com- 
plex as  the  process  is,  a  pivotal  point  is  somehow  discernible 
where  the  ego  yields  to  the  alter.  Normal  and  imperceptible 
as  this  evolution  is  ideally,  the  transition  is  in  fact  the  chief 
antithesis  in  all  the  human  cosmos.  While  it  involves  trans- 
formation in  nearly  every  sphere  of  thought,  conduct,  and  sen- 
timent, it  may  occur  in  one  field  after  another,  and  be  so  slow 
in  each  field  as  to  occupy  the  longest  and  fullest  lifetime  and 
then  be  incomplete.  Indeed,  this  change  fills  and  alone  gives 
unity  to  history,  for  Christianity  marks  the  same  pivotal  point 
in  ethnic  adolescence  where  self-love  merges  in  resignation 
and  renunciation  into  love  of  man.  Religion  has  no  other 
function  than  to  make  this  change  complete,  and  the  whole  of 
morality  may  be  well  defined  as  life  in  the  interest  of  the  race, 
for  love  of  God  and  love  of  man  are  one  and  inseparable. 

Even  Huxley  says  the  cosmic  and  the  ethical  processes  are 
antagonistic  and  we  must  resist  the  former.  Perhaps  the  irenicon  or 
harmony  between  the  two  is  for  us  what  temperance  and  the  golden 
mean  were  for  Aristotle.  Seeley  thinks  Christianity  inadequate  and 
that  we  should  add,  as  it  were,  two  more  religions — that  of  the  beauti- 
ful and  that  of  the  true,  otherwise  we  shall  feel  "  that  the  great 
companion  is  dead,"  and  that  "  the  sun  shines  from  empty  heavens 
and  lights  a  sullen  earth,"  and  the  grudge  of  artists  against  morality, 
and  that  of  science  against  religion,  will  not  be  overcome.  One  of 
the  chief  functions  of  morals  and  religion  is  to  adjust  these  instincts. 
Happily  the  best  sense  of  the  world  revolts  at  both  extremes,  and 
if  they  were  really  irreconcilable  we  should  almost  despair  of  human 
nature.     It  is  incalculable  gain  that  we  now  see  that  they  are  not 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        3^5 

disparate,  but  only  belong  to  different  strata  of  the  soul,  and  culminate 
in  different  periods  of  life.  First,  life  is  ascendent,  and  then,  at  the 
period  of  involution,  no  one  is  harmonized  with  the  law  of  his  own 
being  who  does  not  feel  the  passion  of  surrender. 


II,  When  upon  this  background  of  normaHty,  which  is 
still  discernible  as  the  basis  of  our  unfallen  nature,  is  devel- 
oped the  pathology  of  sin,  both  the  struggles  and  changes  are 
profoundly  intensified,  especially  the  negation  motives.  How 
real  and  potent  this  factor  is,  especially  its  sexual  note,  we 
saw  in  Chapters  VI  and  VII.  From  vague  impulsions  toward 
completeness  and  a  moral  life  essentially  objective,  youth  is 
often  smitten  with  a  sudden  sense  of  wrong  within  as  if  con- 
science now  came  suddenly  into  function.  Introspection  di- 
vides the  soul  into  an  ethical  dualism.  Reflection  on  right 
and  wrong  in  both  the  concrete  and  abstract  brings  home  the 
fact  that  general  good-will  and  intention  coexist  with  evil  in 
thought,  word,  and  deed.  The  new  moral  world  into  which 
the  soul  now  breaks  is  a  vast  and  complex  one. 

Kozle  found  some  score  or  more  German  words  expressing 
childish  and  youthful  faults  than  those  specifying  the  seven 
hundred  and  forty-nine  diseases  standardized  by  the  English 
Pharmacological  Society,  Most  of  all  these,  as  well  as  the 
seven  deadly  sins,  the  candid  soul  can  detect,  at  least  in  germ, 
in  itself.  There  is  pride,  siiperbia,  by  which  man  fell  when 
the  Tempter  promised  him  that  he  should  be  as  God,  which 
boasts,  kills  sympathy,  leads  to  excessive  adornment  of  the 
body,  arrogance  of  wealth,  beauty,  talents,  and  birth,  and 
which  makes  meekness  and  humility  so  hard ;  avarice,  the  root 
of  evil,  that  makes  cruelty,  lust  of  conquest,  slavery,  covet- 
ousness,  and  gambling,  till  men  coin  and  sell  their  very  souls 
for  lucre,  although  it  is  happily  mainly  a  vice  of  the  old  and 
not  of  the  young,  and  can  be  best  safeguarded  in  youth  by 
teaching  that  wealth  is  but  a  means  to  higher  ends  and  that 
the  middle  station  between  poverty  and  riches  is  best ;  envy, 
or  pain  at  another's  good,  very  distinct  from  Nemesis  as  sor- 
row at  the  prosperity  of  the  wicked  and  joy  in  their  fall, 
which  prompts  murder,  slander,  gossip,  and  detraction,  and 
kills  love  of  merit  for  its  own  sake ;  appetite,  which  may  take 
the  form  of  gluttony,  for  which  the  later  Roman  Empire  was 

59 


306  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

so  notorious,  or  drunkenness,  next  the  most  insidious  vice  of 
modern  youth,  for  which  even  partial  pledges  not  to  treat  or 
drink  except  at  meals  may  save  many ;  wrath,  which  is  sinful 
if  in  excess  or  wrongly  directed,  and  easily  degenerates  to 
peevishness  and  irritability  at  trifles;  laziness,  sloth,  or  ac- 
cidie,^ psyche  torpor,  which  predisposes  to  discouragement, 
Weltschnierz  and  pessimism,  the  opposites  of  courage  and 
strenuousness ;  and  last  and  chiefly,  luxury  or  licentious- 
ness, which  prompts  insidiously  to  sin  in  thought,  word, 
and  deed. 

These  seven  sins,  which  the  Catholic  Church  thought  most 
virulent,  and  from  which  it  held  all  the  others  could  be  de- 
rived, which  were  often  elaborately  personified,  perhaps  as 
dancing  in  hideous  mien  about  a  "  lusty  juventus  "  or  con- 
tending with  the  seven  cardinal  virtues  as  to  which  of  them 
should  rule  him,  are  all  of  them  easily  found  if  the  soul  is 
once  morally  introverted  and  enters  upon  a  rigid  self-exami- 
nation to  inventory  them.  The  self-revelation  that  results  is 
often  appalling.  There  is  no  more  innocence,  but  self-accusa- 
tion and  indictment  in  countless  forms.  To  be  under  con- 
viction of  sin  was  the  first  of  the  old  formal  steps  that  ended 
in  conversion.  This  stage  has  its  familiar  litany.  There  is 
nothing  good  in  us,  all  is  corrupt,  we  are  dead  in  trespasses 
and  sin.  All  we  do,  think,  say,  feel,  is  evil,  to  which  we  are 
inordinately  prone.  At  first  we  hold  ourselves  personally  re- 
sponsible, and  later  realize  that  our  nature  is  corrupt,  that 
we  are  conceived  and  born  in  iniquity,  that  it  is  a  taint  that 
dates  from  the  origin  of  man.  We  are  sold,  led  captive,  en- 
chained, poisoned  to  the  heart  with  its  virus,  bound  to  a  body 
of  death  meriting  only  destruction.  The  descriptions  of  this 
stage,  sometimes  even  in  Puritan  environments,  have  been 
often  superlative  and  even  yellow,  so  that  if  the  emotional 
utterances  of  saints  concerning  their  own  ethical  state  were 
taken  literally  they  would  be  everywhere  cast  out  of  society 
as  moral  lepers. 

The  crude  psychology  of  the  Church  describes,  too,  a  kind 
of  counter  conversion  of  souls  that  glory  in  their  own  utter 
iniquity,  and  this  was  the  signature  of  diabolism  and  witch- 

*  James  Stalker  :  The  Seven  Deadly  Sins.     London,  I900. 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        3^7 

craft.  Evil  was  exultant,  accepted  as  good,  as  modern  litera- 
ture describes  monsters  who  would  exploit  and  exhaust  every 
possibility  of  vice  and  crime  and  diligently  extirpate  every 
virtue  and  even  semblance  of  it  they  could  detect  in  their 
own  souls.  The  sense  of  sin  is  the  most  intense  degree  of 
self-consciousness,  and  jaded  and  inverted  natures,  like  Bau- 
delaire's, have  found  the  extreme  of  moral  titillation  in  de- 
scribing an  au  rcboiirs  world,  where  all  that  was  worst  was 
regarded  as  best,  everything  most  holy  was  the  purest  vicious- 
ness,  and  flagitiousness  was  made  the  supreme  object  of  pious 
aspiration  and  endeavor.  Every  rupture  with  virtue  gave 
new  exultation,  and  lives  have  been  solemnly  devoted  to  sin, 
as  its  saints  and  apostles  have  vowed  to  cultivate  only  "  the 
flowers  of  hell."  Happily  there  are  not  two  different  king- 
doms in  the  moral  world  both  alike  primitive  and  organic, 
and  hence  this  is  psychologically  impossible.  The  morbid  tis- 
sue of  disease  is  a  product  of  growth  perverted.  It  develops 
only  by  the  momentum  of  normal  vitality.  There  are  no  in- 
dependent morbific  principles,  but  only  symptom-groups  of 
decay,  as  death  is  simply  the  absence  of  life,  and  all  persona- 
tions of  it  are  descriptions  of  the  realm  poetic,  so  that  deprav- 
ity can  never  from  its  very  nature  be  total,  so  essentially 
n^ative  and  self-destructive  is  it.  Goodness,  like  life,  tends 
to  survival,  and  evi[_is  self-annihilating.  Manicheism  Ts"as 
heterodoxal  to  evolution  as  it  has  been,  since  Augustine,  to 
Christianity. 

Thus  the  first  and  most  immediate  reaction  in  the  soul  to 
this  new  sense  of  sin  is  pain,  not  pleasure.  It  expresses  itself 
instinctively,  and  always  in  some  of  its  many  forms  of  regret 
—  penitence,  mourning,  grief,  compunction,  remorse.  It 
pricks,  stings,  burns,  wounds,  brings  restlessness  and  anxiety, 
a  sense  of  oppression,  as  under  a  heavy  load.  Psychalgia  is  in- 
tolerable, and  a  sense  of  pure  pain,  if  not  per  se  impossible,  as 
some  now  argue,  creates  a  tension  that  finds  vent  along  lines 
of  least  resistance,  which  varies  with  individual  diathesis. 
Sometimes  physical  symptoms  of  a  convulsive  or  hysteroid 
type  predominate,  or  the  involution  may  be  so  deep  as  to  in- 
hibit movement  and  cause  the  torpor  of  misery.  While  per- 
sonal and  avoidable  sins  are  most  prominent  in  consciousness, 
a  feeling  of  individual  responsibility  brings  a  sense  of  guilt 


3o8  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

into  the  foreground.  Penalty  is  merited  and  feared,  perhaps 
in  the  vague  form  of  nameless  apprehension  at  first,  slowly 
taking  on  the  definite  imagery  so  familiar  in  sterner  religious 
environments;  Deity  is  offended,  God's  wrath  and  hate  fan- 
cied, or  a  more  impersonal  justice  violated,  which  must  be 
not  so  much  appeased  as  compensated.  It  is  in  these  condi- 
tions that  penance  may  become  a  veritable  passion,  and  all 
forms  of  self-denial  and  mortification,  flagellations,  fasting, 
and  exposure  may  become  enthusiastic,  that  punitive  venge- 
ance be  meted  out  to  the  offending  body  or  soul.  The  heart 
cries  out  for  condign  punishment ;  because  merited  it  must  be 
immediate,  and  if  self-inflicted,  there  is  added  merit  and  a 
reenforcement  of  the  new  good  resolutions. 

Thus  the  fruits  of  a  sense  of  sin  are:  i,  pain;  2,  guilt; 
3,  craving  for  just  punishment;  and  now  4,  confession.  To 
proclaim  what  is  bad  in  us  is  to  exteriorize  and  alienate  it. 
The  soul  judges  and  condemns  what  was  a  vital  part  of  itself. 
The  fission  begins  when  we  realize  sin  in  our  inmost  selves; 
and  to  set  it  forth  in  words  openly  to  others  is  a  much  further 
and  often  very  costly  step  in  its  extradition.  The  psychology 
of  the  confession  that  leads  on  to  forsaking  is  deep  and  com- 
plex. It  exposes  the  penitent  to  censure  and  perhaps  con- 
tempt, upsets  the  good  name  rather  to  be  chosen  than  riches, 
brands  as  God's  convict,  and  thus  psychically  isolates,  and  is 
a  declaration  of  moral  bankruptcy  that  humiliates  ethical 
pride.  By  showing  others  how  vile  we  seem  to  ourselves, 
and  taking  them  behind  the  veil  of  conventionalities,  re- 
straints, and  hypocrisies  which  had  disguised  our  leprosy,  we 
find  at  once  a  certain  relief  proportionate  to  the  strain  these 
falsities  had  caused  us,  and  some  energy  is  freed  for  inner 
reconstruction.  Again,  the  social  pain  of  avow^al  of  evil  is  so 
poignant  and  perhaps  intolerable  that  it  prompts  to  rebuild  the 
reputation  we  have  shattered  or  impaired.  But  this  is  not  the 
most  or  best,  for  the  very  act  of  putting  our  sins  into  words 
and  acknowledging  them  to  others  means  that  the  long-fes- 
tering sores  have  suppurated  into  consciousness  and  are  now 
come  to  a  head,  broken  and  discharging,  and  healing  processes 
are  already  under  way.  Our  loathsomeness  is  itself  incipient 
recovery.  The  rash  and  tetter  of  evil  is  salvative,  and  thus 
again  we  see  that  consciousness  is  a  remedial  process,  a  thera- 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  CONVERSION        3^9 

peutic  agent.  The  more  vital  a  tissue,  organ,  or  function  the 
less  conscious  we  are  of  it,  and  the  weaker  or  more  decadent 
it  is  the  more  it  comes  to  the  front. 

A  fifth  symptom-group  in  the  pathology  of  the  sin-sick 
soul  is  very  grave,  though  not  universal,  when  culpability  for 
all  witting  and  unwitting  personal  sins  leads  on  to  a  sense 
of  hereditary  corruption,  and  we  feel  ourselves  victims  of  an- 
cestral vice.  This  presents  to  the  sense  of  responsibility  its 
oldest  and  hardest  problem,  and  has  been  the  incentive  to  the 
boldest  of  all  the  theoretical  constructions  of  speculative  the- 
ology. The  fact  that  we  suffer  for  the  sins  of  our  forebears  or 
mid-parents  back  to  Adam,  or  the  amphioxus  or  even  amoeba, 
challenges  every  instinct  of  distributive  justice,  and  has  led 
more  souls  to  negation,  revolt,  and  despair  than  any  other 
fact  in  the  moral  world.  Repudiate  all  idea  of  justice  and 
goodness  at  the  helm  of  things,  curse  and  die,  is  the  all  too 
obvious  suggestion  that  unnumbered  ingenuous  hearts  have 
taken.  This  is  also  the  tap-root  of  pessimism  and  sensuahsm. 
The  fall  of  man  in  the  first  was  a  mythopeic  postulate  to  ex- 
plain the  origin,  and  his  restoration  through  the  second  Adam 
was  a  Pauline  effort  to  explain,  by  a  parallelism  more  rhe- 
torical than  logical,  a  mode  of  extinction  of  the  inherited  taint 
of  Eden.  Here  in  our  biological  age,  returns  show  that  the 
youthful  seeker  after  righteousness  is  often  most  enmeshed. 
Tf  there  is  a  cure  as  vicarious  as  the  infection,  and  accessibler 
on  the  easfest  terms,  to  all,  then  there  is  no  injustice  to  the 
individual,  no  matter  how  contaminated  his  blood.  The  ben- 
ison  must  be  as  nearly  as  possible  the  exact  counterpart  of 
the  malison.  This  stupendous  problem  with  which  Paul 
grappled  has  yet  had  no  other  solution  in  the  world  save  the 
Oriental  one  of  resignation  and  renunciation. 

Our  Western  and  democratic  demand  to  be  judged  solely 
on  our  own  merits  or  demerits  is  a  product  of  overblown 
Titanic  heaven-storming  individuality;  and  its  demand  to 
open  the  debt  and  credit  account-book  of  life  with  a  clean 
page  is  itself  preposterous.  Even  if  we  could  conceivably  ap- 
ply antidotes  for  the  evils  we  ourselves  have  brought  upon 
our  own  nature,  we  can  never  hope  to  neutralize  those  of  all 
our  ascendents ;  while  the  very  age  of  the  human  race  as  now- 
conceived  and  our  long  prehuman  and  animal  pedigree  make  the 


310  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

defects  we  inherit  seem  far  more  inveterate  and  helpless  than 
they  ever  could  before. 

Harmatophobia  is  intensified  by  calamity  that  brings  out  the  next 
world,  prompting  self-stupration  and  the  misologism  that  loves  to 
see  reason  collapse  and  often  plunges  the  soul  into  deep  melancholy 
and  despair.  Horror  of  sin  may  make  self-mortification  a  frenzy. 
It  was  this  that  made  Loyola  and  his  disciples  develop  the  me- 
chanics of  devotion  or  self-immolation.  We  can  not  understand  the 
satisfaction  that  came  to  many  a  saint  by  never  eating  enough ;  hold- 
ing stones  in  the  mouth  during  Lent ;  saying  the  psalter  in  ice-water ; 
in  sleeping  between  corpses  in  a  cofiin  or  on  a  cross,  and  that  never 
enough;  exposing  himself  to  gnats;  wearing  crowns  of  thorns;  or 
the  fanaticism  that  in  the  fourteenth  century,  as  a  result  of  the 
black  death,  made  men  flagellants  and  developed  many  a  spiritual 
exercise.  Thus  the  Marquise  of  Penalta  was  slowly  possessed  by 
the  impulse  to  desert  her  adoring  lover  and  bare  her  back  to  daily 
scourging  by  her  maid.  Men  have  rivaled  each  other  in  austerities, 
self-torture,  and  even  martyrdom.  Recluses  cultivated  a  physical 
morality,  saying  the  Church  service  one  word  at  a  breath ;  meditating 
on  the  hidden  meanings  of  each  syllable;  thinking  of  saints  while  they 
ate;  fixing  the  eye  almost  to  the  point  of  catalepsy  on  skulls  or  sacred 
symbols ;  living  in  the  dark ;  kneeling,  lying,  praying  in  fantastic  atti- 
tudes, seeking  purity  and  expiation.  They  coquetted  not  only  with 
hunger  but  with  disease,  forgetting  that  the  first  makes  men  irritable, 
and  the  second  often  devilish.  In  Chartreuse,  inspired  by  St.  Bruno, 
they  vowed  silence  to  all  save  God  alone.  They  swore  poverty  and 
chastity ;  reduced  the  surface  of  contact  with  the  world  to  its  minimum 
to  attain  gnosis ;  "  held  the  flesh  to  be  the  devil's  knight,"  in  order  to 
put  off  the  old  man  and  his  deeds,  seeking  to  tame  the  carnal  wolf, 
to  guard  the  Lord's  flock.  They  hoped  to  be  perfect  through  suffer- 
ing, and  in  deliria  of  virtue  strove  for  self-mastery,  discipline,  and 
penitential  atonement,  for  this  world  is  inversely  as  the  other,  and 
all  this  pain  here  will  be  rewarded  by  eternal  joy. 

Although  Heinroth,  the  leading  German  authority  on  insanity  in 
his  day,  defended  with  great  philosophical  acumen  the  proposition 
that  all  mental  diseases  are  caused  by  sin,  and  Idler  and  Morel  were 
somewhat  inclined  to  the  same  opinion,  these  views  fell  into  general 
neglect.  More  recently,  however,  Kraussold '  has  sought,  with  the 
resources  of  expert  knowledge  of  insanity  at  his  command,  to  establish 
a  definite  connection  between  melancholy  and  a  sense  of  guilt,  and 
to  thus  effect  a  renewed  junction  between  medicine,  religion,  and  phi- 
losophy which  have  been  so  long  separated.  He  holds  that  the  self- 
accusations  so  common  in  melancholia,  and  which  have  so  long  been 
thought  to  be  imaginary,  are  often  true  and  rest  upon  a  basis  of  fact. 
Melancholiacs,  he  urges,  often  see  their  own  lives  truly;  their  self- 

'  Kraussold  :    Melancholic  und  Schuld.     1884. 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        3" 

reproaches  are  justified;  they  have  been  bad  and  sinned  away  their 
youth  or  manhood.  These  writers,  Hke  many  modern  pessimists,  in- 
cline to  the  "  luxury  of  woe  "  theory,  and  so  consider  mania  and  melan- 
cholia as  less  contrasted  on  the  alghedonic  scale  than  most  have 
deemed  them,  but  they  rightly  argue  that  it  makes  a  great  difference 
in  the  proper  treatment  of  each  case  whether  the  sin  is  real  or  is  the 
product  of  morbid  fancy.  Kraussold  suggests  that  such  cases  now 
prefer  to  consult  a  physician  rather  than  a  clergyman,  because  it  eases 
the  conscience  to  be  thought  more  sick  than  guilty.  He  made  a  com- 
mendable, if  but  partially  successful,  attempt  to  penetrate  the  extreme 
reticence  which  veils  in  such  obscurity  the  causes  of  depressive  states 
of  mind  in  order  to  find  in  specific  cases  the  sin  at  its  core.  Under 
the  stimulus  of  a  general  sense  of  guilt  patients  examine  all  their 
lives  and  fix  upon  some  petty  real  or  fancied  case,  where,  if  they 
had  done  differently,  dire  results  would  have  been  avoided.  This  is 
often  enormously  magnified  by  the  morbid  emotional  state  and  by 
friends ;  normal  associations,  habitual  memories,  and  lapses  of  thought 
are  powerless  to  reduce  the  hypertrophied  ideas  or  impressions.  Of 
all  delusions  of  depressive  states,  that  of  having  committed  some  sin 
or  error  that  is  physiologically  or  judicially  unpardonable,  some 
think  most  common,  and  this  is,  perhaps,  the  most  fit  and  adequate  ex- 
pression of  the  depressed  tone  of  consciousness.  Even  if  hypochon- 
driacal disease  or  loss  of  property  or  reputation  haunt  the  mind,  this  is 
often  thought  to  be  self-caused  and  therefore  culpable,  or  an  expression 
of  retribution. 

Although  it  is  so  extremely  difficult  to  get  at  the  mental  states 
of  melancholiacs  that  we  are  very  far  from  having  the  desiderated 
statistics  showing  what  percentage  of  cases  have  this  genetic  factor,  we 
may  ask,  Who  is  free  from  a  sense  of  sin,  error,  or  imperfection  ?  We 
all  have  our  weaknesses,  and  if  change  of  occupation  or  failure  in 
business,  or  isolation,  etc.,  free  our  thoughts  from  wonted  channels,  if 
disease  weakens  our  nervous  fiber,  and  especially  if  misfortune,  afflic- 
tion, or  sorrow  arouse,  as  they  always  do  (so  animistic  are  we  at  bot- 
tom toward  the  universe),  the  question,  "Was  this  deserved?"  then 
remembered  offenses  long  latent  in  memory  often  revive,  the  cate- 
gorical imperative  is  heard  from,  and  the  gnawings  of  conscience 
may  deepen  to  remorse.  Vain  and  wasteful  though  we  are  often 
told  regrets  are,  their  strength  is  one  of  the  great  factors  of  life.  Not 
only  grief,  but  atonement  for  the  past,  is  as  basal  as  the  struggle  for 
survival,  and  self-inflicted  penalties  of  every  conceivable  form  attest 
in  man  a  real  passion  for  punishment  as  a  means  of  purification  and 
deliverance,  which  in  abnormal  cases  vents  itself  in  fantastic  modes 
of  self-torture  and  even  suicide.  A  sense  of  justice,  one  of  the  most 
generic  expressions  of  the  social  instinct,  however  wrongly  inter- 
preted in  the  past,  always  impels  toward  reparation,  while  all  who 
are  sympathetically  acquainted  with  the  vicious  and  criminal  know 
that  the  "  heavenly  powers  "  are  very  real  and  often  all-dominant  in 
the  errabund  soul,  and  that  despair  may  rouse  some  minds  to  frenzy 


312  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

and  plunge  others  into  apathy.  Indeed,  a  sense  of  sin  is  only  shown 
to  be  more  vital  by  having  some  power  to  explain,  as  Jesus  did  to 
rule,  the  processes  of  those  bereft  of  reason. 

Kierkengaard,  a  theologian,  had  long  before  undertaken  to  treat 
the  psychology  of  sin  and  conversion  as  resting  essentially  on  the 
feeling  of  anxiety  of  which  psychiatry  now  makes  such  comprehensive 
use.'  Older  writers — Cullen,  Boerhaave,  Aretee,  Trales,  and  others — 
have  noted  the  tendency  of  depressive  states  of  mind  to  be  followed  by 
euphoria  and  exaltation,  and  now  Ziehen  argues  for  a  sequent  stage  of 
hyperthumia,  or  inordinate  cheerfulness,  in  which  most  melancholiacs 
recover,  while  most  of  the  rest  pass  over  to  mania.  Bevan-Lewis 
thinks  a  depressive  stage  "  precedes  all  forms  of  mental  disease " ; 
Fere "  holds  that  anger  in  the  insane  is  often  a  sthenic  reaction  to 
depression ;  and  Magnan,'  in  a  masterly  study,  has  laid  great  stress 
upon  the  tendency  of  melancholy  with  delusions  of  persecution  to 
change  to  anger  and  perhaps  homicidal  impulses  when  the  victim 
himself  assumes  the  role  of  persecutor  after  reacting  into  more  or 
less  full-blown  delusions  of  greatness;  he  thinks  that  sexual  rhythm 
increases  both  the  depth  and  extent  of  the  denudation  of  the  higher 
centers,  and  makes  the  euphorious  states,  when  the  inevitable  reaction 
brings  them  on,  all  the  more  excessive  and  abandoned.  It  is  in 
periodic  and  more  specifically  in  circular  types  of  insanity,  however, 
that  we  find  this  tendency  of  pleasurable  and  painful  states  of  mind 
to  react  into  each  other,  best  illustrated.*  Each  has  many  forms  and 
symptoms.  Among  periodic  diseases  those  in  which  psychic  symp- 
toms play  a  prominent  part  form  the  largest  class.  Kirn  thinks  most 
of  them  develop  during  adolescence,  and  that  they  are  common  again 
at  the  climacteric.^  The  two  extremes  may  or  may  not  be  separated 
by  a  clear  and  normal  interval.  Interesting,  too,  although  not  conclu- 
sive, is  Koster's  laborious  statistical  effort  to  show  that  these  changes 
from  exaltation  to  depression  coincide  with  the  approach  and  re- 
cession of  the  moon,  which  is  from  forty-seven  to  fifty-five  thousand 
miles  nearer  the  earth  in  perigee  than  in  apogee." 

Morbid  depression  in  its  first  onset  often  coincides  with  what 
Bevan-Lewis  calls  a  decline  of  object-consciousness  and  an  in- 
crease of  consciousness  of  self.     States  of   reverie  or   self-absorp- 

^  Zur  Psychologic  der  Siinde,  der  Bekehrung  und  des  Glaubens ;  tr.  by  Ch. 
Schrempf,  1850. 

'F6r6:   La  Pathologic  des  !]£motions.     Paris,  1892,  p.  352. 

*  Magnan  :    Psychiatrische  Vorlesungcn.     Heft  I.     Especially  Lecture  VII. 

''  For  a  concise  characterization,  see  Kraepelin's  Psychiatric,  fourth  edition, 
1893,  P-  363  ft  ^eq. 

*  Ludwig  Kirn  :  Die  periodischen  Psychoses.  Stuttgart,  1878.  Especially  p. 
2,1  et  seq. 

'  Ueber  die  Gesetze  des  periodischen  Irreseins  und  verwandter  Zustande  von 
Sanitats  Rath.  Dr.  Koster,  1882.  Sec  also  T.  L.  Bolton's  Rhythms,  Am.  Jour, 
of  Psy. ,  January,  1894,  vol.  vi,  pp.  145-238. 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        3^3 

tion  gain  at  the  expense  of  interest  in  outer  things.  The  mus- 
cular factor  of  thought  diminishes  and  the  mind  fails  to  grasp  and 
unite  the  factors  of  the  environment.  Volition  is  restricted,  while 
both  mental  states  and  automatisms  become  segregated  and,  as  it  were, 
feralized  from  the  control  or  domestication  of  attention  and  the  ego. 
Attempts  to  explain  things  result  in  a  new  nexus  of  ideas,  and  be- 
cause the  mental  disaggregation  makes  problems  seem  simple  and 
therefore  their  solutions  easy,  there  is  a  new  sense  of  freedom,  and 
the  old  associative  plexus  is  loosened  as  another  self  or  a  new  per- 
sonality emerges  which  as  a  product  of  devitalization  is  on  a  lower 
level,  because  "  a  weakening  of  associative  affinity  arouses  correlative 
centers." 

This  illustrates  three  laws  of  great  significance  and  pertinence : 
(a)  the  power  of  conscience  and  especially  of  a  sense  of  guilt,  (b) 
the  dissociative  action  of  depression  upon  the  psychic  plexus  which 
may  prepare  for  a  recombination  of  elements  on  a  higher,  as  in  mor- 
bid cases  it  more  often  does  on  a  lower,  plane,  and  (c)  the  deep 
tendency  of  our  nature  to  react  from  pain  to  joy,  which  is  the  moment 
of  conversion,  and  all  the  more  intense  by  contrast  and  resilience.  Here, 
again,  especially  in  the  abnormal  oscillation,  sex,  if  not  a  key,  supplies 
suggestive  analogy.  Nothing  save  hunger  alone  is  judged  from  such 
different  standpoints  by  the  same  person,  and  reversal  of  view-point 
is  nowhere  so  sudden  and  extreme  in  so  brief  a  period  of  time.  Noth- 
ing so  upsets  the  poise  and  stability  of  the  soul  as  excess,  whether  by 
natural  or  unnatural  methods.  From  passionate  love  and  desire  that 
may  reach  an  intensity  that  breaks  through  every  restraint  of  interest 
in  the  well-being  of  self  or  of  one  most  loved,  of  decency  and  law,  the 
disequilibrated  soul  may  pass  in  a  brief  interval  to  post-coital  rage 
against  its  beloved,  of  sometimes  homicidal  intensity,  or  to  the  depths 
of  self-abasement,  despair,  and  perhaps  suicide.  It  is  sins  in  this 
field,  as  we  just  saw,  that  are  so  often  found  to  be  at  the  heart  of 
melancholy  where  psychically  induced  by  qualms  of  conscience,  and 
when  somatic  causes  are  primary  and  the  depressive  delusions 
secondary,  the  latter  are  peculiarly  prone  to  be  of  a  sexual  character. 
It  is  a  change  in  the  wider  irradiation  of  this  function,  especially  at 
adolescence  and  senescence,  when  its  instability  is  greatest,  that  is  so 
often  felt  to  need  an  explanation,  which  makes  the  hypersensitized 
and  abnormal  soul  in  its  illusions  construe  the  universe  as  if  it  all 
centered  about  his  own  person.  In  the  moment  of  temptation,  all  tense, 
eager,  self-assertive  and  aggressive,  resourceful  and  masterful  in 
overcoming  obstacles  or  meeting  objections,  ready  to  make  any  pledge 
or  to  violate  any  vow,  to  face  any  danger,  to  meet  any  enemy,  and  to 
overrule  every  scruple;  and  then  a  little  later,  abject,  contrite,  a  prey 
to  nameless  fears,  weak  and  irritable,  perhaps  with  complete  reversal 
of  feeling,  temporary  paralysis  of  will  and  a  dull  stagnation  of 
thought,  and  with  a  totally  new  scenery  of  images  and  associations  as 
if  a  new  personality  had  supervened.  These  are  not  exaggerations 
of  what  the  exercise  of  a  function  normally  healthful  may  and  often 


3^4  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

does  become  not  only  in  the  enfeebled,  degenerate,  and  corrupt,  but,  to 
some  extent,  in  immature  and  callow  natures  as  well,  especially  when 
wrongly  set  in  external  circumstances  and  methods,  and  in  the  false 
perspective  of  popular  ignorance  and  misinformation.  Here,  then, 
we  must  seek  one  of  the  keys  not  only  to  asceticism  and  celibacy, 
much  unhappy  domestic  life,  and  many  of  the  secrets  of  divorce  courts, 
but  to  many  of  the  more  highly  saturated  and  otherwise  inexplicable 
phenomena  in  religious  life. 


Gautama's  long-  struggle  with  the  problem  of  pain  and  evil 
in  the  world  led  him  to  a  very  different  conclusion  in  the  law 
of  Karma,  We  have  many  lives  behind  us,  as  well  as  be- 
fore. We  reap  only  what  we  have  sowed  in  the  lives  that 
preceded  the  present.  These  have  been  such  that  no  one  can 
make  himself  perfect  in  a  single  life.  Many  are  needed  to 
work  our  way  upward  away  from  sin  and  sorrow.  Therefore 
let  us  be  kind  and  compassionate,  even  to  animals,  practise 
charity,  temperance,  eradicate  evil  and  beautify  our  souls, 
turn  if  possible  all  affection  into  one  great  compassion  for  all 
that  lives,  and  then  we  shall  need  no  worship,  prayer,  priest- 
hood, or  even  personal  God,  but  can  at  last,  when  renuncia- 
tion is  complete,  enter  the  great  peace  of  which  we  know  noth- 
ing, and  find  the  only  comfort  possible  in  the  hour  of  death  in 
thinking  on  our  good  deeds. 

The  Christian  solution,  if  we  interpret  it  in  terms  of  mod- 
ern psychology  rather  than  in  those  of  dogma,  may  be  thus 
stated :  Having  tried  to  look  the  fact  of  our  departure  from 
nature  and  our  ideal  squarely  in  the  face,  and  realized  how 
far  we  are  from  what  we  would  be,  or  might  have  been  with 
other  antecedents — itself  a  discipline  of  the  highest  ethico- 
psychic  value — we  shall  all,  even  the  best  of  us,  find  sooner 
or  later  that  our  imperfections  of  nature  and  nurture  are  too 
many  and  great  to  be  overcome  by  any  effort  we  can  possibly 
make.  Habits  and  instincts  are  too  much  for  our  will.  The 
good  we  can  do  is  partial,  or  lacks  spontaneity ;  it  is  an  arti- 
fact we  have  to  force  upon  ourselves.  Therefore,  the  only 
\  course  is  to  stop  special  and  multifarious  striving  and  fall 
back  on  more  generic  and  unconscious  impulsion ;  with  a 
changed  heart  and  a  new  affection,  having  fallen  in  love  with 
righteousness,  surrender  to  this  new  love;  make  it  supreme 
and  complete;  let  it  have  free  course,  striving  only  to  remove 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        3^5 

obstacles;  feed  its  flame  by  pious  exercise;  fan  it  by  every  in- 
spiring example,  especially  by  that  of  the  great  Exemplar; 
be  this  love's  slave,  its  victim,  follow  its  every  behest;  trust 
it  blindly  as  the  only  pure  and  unfallen  thing  in  us,  feel  its 
very  season  supremely  holy,  and  fix  it  on  the  highest  object; 
aspire  even  more  than  endeavor;  emulate  everything  that  in- 
spires us,  for  love  is  as  old  as  life  itself  and  stronger,  and  is 
therefore  alone  capable  of  reconstructing  it  from  the  bottom. 
It  is  thus  the  power  that  makes  for  righteousness  in  the  soul. 
III.  Intellectual  reconstruction,  or,  in  Herbartian  phrase, 
working  over  ideas,  is  almost  a  synonym  of  mental  growth. 
In  childhood  credulity  amounts  almost  to  hypnotic  sugges- 
tibility. Not  only  is  everything  believed,  but  the  faintest  hint 
starts  the  exuberant  imagination  to  vividness  often  hallu- 
cinatory. This  power  to  believe  the  false  and  even  the  absurd, 
in  infancy,  is  not  defect,  but  excess  of  psychic  vitality.  The 
narrow  horizon  of  reality  within  the  juvenile  ken  is  not 
enough,  and  the  world  of  fancy  and  myth  is  needed  to  sup- 
plement it.  Never  is  receptivity  so  near  to  creative  energy, 
and  this  is  why  genius  is  defined  as  the  preservation  into  ma- 
ture years  of  the  fecund  mental  spontaneity  of  childhood. 

John  Fiske  says :  "  I  remember  distinctly  the  conception  which  I 
had  formed  when  five  years  of  age.  I  imagined  a  narrow  office  just 
over  the  zenith,  with  a  tall  standing-desk  running  lengthwise,  upon 
which  lay  several  open  ledgers  bound  in  coarse  leather.  There  was 
no  roof  over  this  office,  and  the  walls  rose  scarcely  five  feet  from  the 
floor,  so  that  a  person  standing  at  the  desk  could  look  out  upon  the 
whole  world.  There  were  two  persons  at  the  desk,  and  one  of  them — 
a  tall,  slender  man,  of  aquiline  features,  wearing  spectacles,  with  a  pen 
in  his  hand  and  another  behind  his  ear — was  God.  The  other,  whose 
appearance  I  do  not  distinctly  recall,  was  an  attendant  angel.  Both 
were  diligently  watching  the  deeds  of  men  and  recording  them  in  the 
ledgers.  To  my  infant  mind  this  picture  was  not  grotesque,  but  in- 
effably solemn,  and  the  fact  that  all  my  words  and  acts  were  thus 
written  down,  to  confront  me  at  the  day  of  judgment,  seemed 
naturally  a  matter  of  grave  concern."  ^ 

How  very  crude  religious  imagery  of  God,  heaven,  death, 
hell,  angels,  ghosts,  witches,  prayers.  Church  ceremonies,  etc., 
is,   is  well   illustrated   in   a  valuable   and   suggestive  though 

'The  Idea  of  God  as  Affected  by  Modern  Knowledge.     Boston,  1886,  p.  116 


3l6  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

confessedly  local  and  incomplete  study  of  this  in  California 
on  a  basis  of  1091  compositions  upon  these  subjects.^  God, 
e.  g.,  may  be  imaged  as  a  benign  or  cruel  gray-bearded,  blue 
giant;  the  devil  as  pictured  on  labels  of  deviled  ham,  or  in  a 
Punch  and  Judy  show,  etc.  While  these  crass  conceptions 
caused  vague  questionings  sometimes  as  early  as  from  four 
years  to  ten,  the  doubting  spirit  in  this  field  culminated  at 
thirteen  or  fourteen,  when  criticism  seems  more  persistent  than 
later,  and  Earl  Barnes  thinks  that  at  this  period  special  effort 
should  be  made  to  help  the  child  to  correct  and  adjust  his  most 
grotesque  ideas.  The  first  appearance  of  this  spirit  is  often 
seen  in  the  phrases :  "  I  think,"  "  have  been  told,"  "  was 
taught,"  "  they  say,"  "  I  used  to  think,"  and  in  the  use  of  "  if," 
"  but,"  and  "  perhaps."  Barnes  thinks  that  "  from  fifteen  to 
eighteen  there  is  no  such  persistent  exercise  of  the  critical 
judgment  in  matters  theological  as  there  is  between  twelve  and 
fifteen,"  as  if  former  perplexities  had  been  temporarily  laid 
aside.  The  more  gross  and  material  the  imagination  and  per- 
haps the  younger  the  child,  when  religious  ideas  are  instilled 
and  imagery  formed,  the  more  inadequate  the  latter  becomes, 
and,  therefore,  the  more  drastic  the  conflict  later.  The  con- 
clusion of  this  paper  is  that  "  the  period  of  most  intense  critical 
activity  in  theological  directions  seems  to  be  that  of  puberty. 
Some  special  effort  should  be  made  at  that  time  to  rearranging 
and  adjusting  philosophical  and  theological  conceptions." 
Doubts  first  appear  as  checks  or  inhibitions  of  the  illusions  of 
extra  belief  or  Aberglaube.  The  overblown  bubbles  of  fancy 
often  break  because  they  collide,  and  lose  a  given  sum  of  arrest 
in  the  familiar  way  described  by  Taine.  In  our  modern  and 
especially  in  the  American  world,  the  spirit  of  questioning  and 
even  criticising  where  children  should  only  sympathetically 
appreciate  and  admire  comes  all  too  soon.  The  rapid  expan- 
sion of  the  mental  horizon  and  the  new  powers  of  body  and 
soul  necessarily  involve  a  change  of  standpoint  and  of  belief. 
Hence  there  is  skepticism,  which  etymologically  means  look- 
ing around,  and  doubt,  which  means  hesitation  between  two 


'Theological  Life  of  a  California  Child.  Ped.  Sem.,  December,  1893,  vol.  ii, 
p.  442.  See  also  my  Contents  of  Children's  Minds.  Ped.  Sem.,  June,  1891,  vol. 
i,  p.   161  et  seq. 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        3^7 

views  or  acts.  This  occurs  at  nearly  all  stages  of  life,  but  is 
far  more  radical  and  comprehensive  throughout  this  period, 
which  is  its  grand  climacteric. 

Rectifications  concerning  Santa  Claus,  fairy  tales,  clas- 
sical gods  and  myths,  and  popular  superstitions  are  made 
naturally  and  almost  unconsciously  as  the  new  desire  for  cer- 
tainty slowly  arises.  Children  seek  proof  by  touching,  quot- 
ing, wagers,  ordeals,  ceremonial  oaths,  in  ways  which  have 
been  described  with  much  detail  by  Mr.  M.  H.  Small. ^  Crude 
imagery  is  normally  shed  by  vital  processes,  better  described 
as  exfoliation  and  desquamation  than  by  psychologic  or  re- 
ligious terms,  as  growth  substitutes  larger  and  fitter  ideas. 
The  reasons  why  religious  doubt  is  so  hard  and  sometimes 
tragic  are  manifold ;  the  bad  pedagogy  that  insists  on  the 
literal  historic  truth  of  all  Scripture  itself,  due  to  the  low 
vitality  of  religious  life,  the  way  in  which  virtue  is  thought 
to  depend  on  belief,  which  makes  reconstruction  morally  dan- 
gerous, and  the  virus  of  orthodox  theology,  which  makes  no 
provision  for  growth, — all  this  is  calamitous  for  youth.  The 
gravest  doubts  of  this  kind  are  at  first  of  certain  miracles,  the 
morality  of  some  of  the  Old  Testament  heroes,  and  perhaps 
of  Jehovah,  or  the  goodness  of  God  himself  in  permitting  suf- 
fering and  sending  so  many  to  hell,  special  answers  to  prayer, 
the  Judgment  Day,  etc.  Later  come  doubts  of  the  Trinity  and 
the  deity  of  Jesus,  his  resurrection,  supernatural  birth,  fore- 
ordination,  and  immortality.  Where  the  clay  of  dogma  is 
tamped  down  too  hard  about  the  roots  of  the  growing  soul 
either  the  latter  is  arrested  or  else  doctrines  are  ruptured.  Of 
all  the  outrages  and  mutilations  practised  upon  youth  by  well- 
meaning  adults,  insistence  on  such  dogmas  upon  pain  of  moral 
offense  is  perhaps  the  very  most  disastrous  and  antireligious 
in  its  results,  for  it  enlists  the  conscience  of  the  individual  at 
the  age  when  it  is  most  vigorous  and  tender,  against  his  own 
normal  mental  development. 

As  I  write  I  have  before  me  several  hundred  personal  records 
which  I  have  been  accumulating  for  years  and  others  made  for  me  by- 
members  of  other  faculties,  showing  the  acuteness  of  these  struggles, 

'  Methods  of  Manifesting  the  Instinct  for  Certainty.  Ped.  Sem.,  January,  1898, 
vol   V,  pp.  313-380. 


3l8  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

which  have  led  some,  including  three  of  my  own  students,  to  suicide, 
and  upset  more  for  years,  which  they  count  as  lost  or  as  years  of 
mental  obsession  with  permanent  impairment  of  soul.  In  over  seven 
hundred  returns  from  young  men  religiously  reared  and  in  Protestant 
colleges,  there  were  very  few  who  had  not  wrestled  with  serious  doubts 
of  one  or  more  of  these  or  kindred  religious  inculcations  of  their 
parents.  In  healthy  souls  these  struggles  are  in  secret.  Sometimes  they 
are  mild,  and  sometimes  almost  desperate.  Often  skepticism  is  ex- 
pressed and  aggressive,  but  in  the  majority  of  cases  the  doubts  are 
silent  and  often  half-unconscious,  even  in  men  who  outwardly  conform 
to  influences  about  them  and  perhaps  actively  cooperate  in  religious 
work.  Sometimes  protestations  of  faith  are  thus  made  vehement,  and 
even  attempted  proof  of  a  somewhat  strident  or  falsetto  nature  may  be 
a  weapon  against  one's  own  doubts.  The  heinousness  with  which  such 
scruples  are  still  regarded  in  many  academic  and  church  centers  has 
begotten  a  strange  psychosis,  and  unpedagogic  treatment  of  this  has 
driven  many  of  the  best  youth  from  religious  associations  and  affixed 
a  certain  stigma  to  men  of  exceptional  sincerity  and  candor.  Happily 
this  state  of  things  is  now  steadily  improving  and,  we  may  trust,  will 
soon  be  past. 

The  Catholic  Church  at  its  best,  with  its  voluminous  pic- 
torial and  ceremonial  expressions  of  the  religious  sentiment, 
has  certain  advantage  over  the  less  objective  Protestant  cults 
at  this  stage,  and  our  own  returns  amply  prove  that  the  re- 
ligious imagery  of  young  Protestant  children  is  more  crude 
and  pagan  in  form  than  that  of  Catholics.  The  rate  and 
degree  of  progress  from  Rome  toward  reason,  which  fits 
the  needs  or  measures  the  vigor  of  each  soul,  would  with 
proper  care  and  surroundings  be  no  harder  to  insure  than 
from  the  more  fetishistic  point  of  departure  commonly  found 
outside  Catholicism.  The  ideal  education  of  the  religious 
nature,  if  we  ever  attain  it,  will  involve  as  one  important  fac- 
tor much  saturation  of  the  juvenile  fancy  with  the  best  cre- 
ations of  the  mythopeic  imagination,  coarse  at  first,  but  with 
increasing  refinement  with  age,  and  progressive  inferences 
from  what  each  symbol,  picture,  tale,  image,  rite,  or  dogma 
says,  to  what  it  means,  until  the  expanding  mind  has  advanced 
just  as  far  toward  complete  enfranchisement  from  all  supersti- 
tion and  doctrine,  and  in  the  substitution,  point  by  point,  of 
immanence  for  transcendence,  as  its  own  mental  powers 
justify. 

Children's  religious  conceptions  should  at  least  not  be  sys- 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION        3^9 

tematized  or  stereotyped,  or  growth  will  be  checked.  The 
Bible  for  childhood  should  be  pure  literature,  with  no  trace  of 
dogma.  It  is  simply  bad  Bible  pedagogy  that  makes  children 
precocious  and  strident  skeptics  about  the  grand  stories  and 
miracles  of  Scripture,  while  tales  from  Homer,  Shakespeare, 
Greek  tragedy,  and  Dante  maintain  their  sway  over  the  heart, 
unchallenged  by  the  callow  intellect.  The  Bible  moves,  edifies, 
and  shapes  the  soul,  and  we  are  content  to  leave  it  to  expert 
scholars  to  inquire  how  much  or  how  little  historical  validity  it 
has;  and,  whatever  their  verdict,  it  will  have  little  effect  on 
our  feelings  or  practical  reaction  to  Scripture.  The  havoc 
that  dogma  has  wrought  in  the  religious  nature  and  nurture 
of  the  young  by  regarding  the  Bible  as  a  text-book  of  the- 
ology rather  than  a  guide  to  life,  as  itself  literally  inspired 
rather  than  the  most  inspiring  of  books,  is  none  the  less  dis- 
astrous because  well  meant.  The  very  idea  of  orthodoxy  of 
belief  in  this  field  or  of  formulated  creed  is  ominous  for  youth. 
Theology  at  its  best  is  an  attempt  to  describe  religious  expe- 
riences, especially  feelings  and  intuitions.  The  need  of  it 
arises  when  the  latter  are  past  and  lapse  into  the  domain  of 
memory.  When  they  are  most  vividly  present  they  need  no 
explanation,  for  they  are  not  symbols  of  something  else,  but 
intrinsic  and  essential  reality  themselves.  True  religion  cul- 
minates in  youth,  and  doctrine  is  its  substitute  and  memorial 
in  maturity  and  old  age.  Youth  has  far  more  to  teach  in  this 
field,  if  it  only  knew  how,  than  it  can  learn  from  age.  The 
sins  of  orthodoxy  against  youth  were  relatively  unknown  in 
ancient  Greece  or  in  ancient  India,  but  are  a  peculiarity  of 
Christian  lands  and  centuries.  But  for  this,  youth  has  great 
facility  in  changing  its  ideas.  Indeed,  the  reality  and  the 
rapture  of  growth  and  progress  owe  no  small  part  of  their 
vital  heat  to  the  combustion  of  wide  acreages  of  errors  and 
false  beliefs  that  attend  every  step  on  the  upward  way  of 
mental  development,  for  mental  health  and  longevity  consist 
in  a  never-ending  working  over  of  the  contents  of  conscious- 
ness. 

We  may  dream  of  intuitive  natures,  like  Schiller's  "  es- 
thetic souls,"  so  ideally  endowed  and  environed  that  they 
have  acquired  nothing  they  later  need  to  abandon ;  but  such 
a  being  is  as  much  a  psychological  impossibility  as  the  ideal 


320  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

savage  of  Rousseau  or  St.  Pierre.  Natural  selection  among 
thought-forms,  choosing  the  best  and  rejecting  the  worst,  hold- 
ing at  the  same  time  many  heterogeneous  and  even  incon- 
sistent ideas  with  degrees  of  conviction  differing  up  and 
down  the  long  and  complex  scale  of  certainty,  is  most  natural 
with  girls,  who  rarely  ever  regret  outgrown  concepts,  but  leave 
them  to  slowly  lapse  down  the  scale;  while  it  is  chiefly  boys 
who  feel  called  to  evict  all  they  can  not  use,  and  sometimes  to 
doubt  their  own  doubts.  This  is  the  normal  working  of  the 
mental  mill  at  this  age,  and  the  grain  will  all  be  ground  and 
bolted  in  whatever  way  best  meets  the  needs  of  the  individual 
life,  if  no  admixture  of  the  scrap-metal  of  dogma  impair  the 
machinery.  Dead  knowledge  is  simply  useless  and  does  not 
putrefy,  but  only  desiccates  and  needs  no  scavenger,  and,  as 
long  as  it  is  not  in  the  way,  does  not  need  ostentatious  burial 
or  cremation.  Teachings  that  are  likely  to  remain  perma- 
nently alien  and  heteronomous,  resting  on  externals,  need  not 
interfere  with  the  development  of  a  sphere  of  internal  author- 
ity, unless  the  soul  is  very  small.  Probably  all  of  us,  even  the 
dogmatist,  is  at  once,  despite  himself,  pagan,  pantheist,  agnos- 
tic, fetishist,  and  heretic  generally,  as  well  as  Christian  and 
believer.  Like  rudimentary  organs,  these  views,  while  rep- 
resenting a  lower  stage,  are  the  indispensable  conditions  of  the 
unfoldment  of  the  next  higher.  At  best,  it  is  all  a  question  of 
prepotency  and  a  safe  working  majority  in  the  soul.  Thus 
doubt  is  perhaps  never  exclusion  or  extinction  of  a  belief,  but 
a.  phenomenon  of  changing  predominance  and  leadership 
among  the  psychic  elements,  and  that  often  only  for  a  certain 
function.  Some  of  our  many  faculties  are  converted,  and  some 
are  unreclaimed.  The  worst  are  good,  perhaps  exquisitely  so 
in  spots,  and  the  best  are  unregenerate  and  depraved  in  part. 
We  believe,  but  pray  for  help  for  our  unbelief.  More  ti'ouble 
here  is  due  to  inadequate  ideas  of  what  the  soul  really  is  than 
to  meagerness  of  soul  life,  and  hence  is  removable  by  appro- 
priating what  psychology  now  has  to  teach. 

But  not  only  our  ideas  of  soul  but  those  of  Bible  need 
vast  enlargement  and  radical  reconstruction  if  we  would  know 
and  serve  youth  aright.  An  ethnic  and  indigenous  Bible  is  a 
product  of  the  folk-soul  as  now  studied  by  the  higher  an- 
thropology which  seeks   for  primitive  notions  about   funda- 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        3^1 

mental  problems.  It  originates  in  rules  of  organization  and 
worship,  traditions  of  the  past,  genealogies,  songs,  prophecies, 
and  other  expressions  of  what  St,  John  calls  the  logos,  Plato 
the  muthos,  Grote  the  nomos,  and  Maurice  the  ethos  of  a  race. 
When  this  material  shoots  together,  the  psychic  basis  for  a 
period  of  culture  is  laid  and  a  spiritual  cosmos  begins,  and  of 
this  same  mother-lye  theology  is  a  crude  intellectual  formula- 
tion, and  a  truly  natural  philosophy  is  only  a  yet  broader  and 
more  scientific  expansion  of  it.  No  race  ever  flourished  with- 
out its  classics  or  Bible  as  the  pabulum  for  its  higher  humanis- 
tic life.  The  people  of  modern  Christendom  have  received 
their  Bible  from  an  alien  stock,  and  are,  therefore,  peculiarly 
prone  to  bibliolatry  and  parasitic  literalism,  for  the  conception 
of  an  entirely  ab-extra  revelation  only  reflects  its  exogamous 
derivation.  As  it  did  not  spring  out  of  their  own  life  and 
grow  with  their  growth,  its  very  grandeur  predisposes  to  a 
superstitious  reverence  of  it.  It  is  a  graft,  and  its  intussuscep- 
tion requires  a  special  and  transpeciating  act  of  mind  and 
heart.  Its  position  is  therefore  ethnologically  unique,  and  it 
has  long  been  and  still  is  more  or  less  encysted  and  unappro- 
priated. 

It  is,  however,  our  great  good  fortune  to  live  in  an  age 
when  our  Bible  is  being  slowly  re-revealed  as  the  best  utter- 
ance and  reflex  of  the  nature  and  needs  of  the  soul  of  man,  as 
his  great  text-book  in  psychology,  dealing  with  him  as  a  whole, 
body,  mind,  heart,  and  will,  and  all  in  the  largest  and  deepest 
relation  to  nature  and  to  his  fellow  man,  which  has  been  so 
misunderstood  simply  because  it  was  so  deeply  divine.  Now 
that  its  study  is  not  confined  to  the  Sunday-school  and  pulpit, 
but  archeology,  philosophy,  comparative  religion,  criticism,  and 
anthropology  have  shown  it,  part  by  part,  myth,  history, 
prophecy,  song,  and,  above  all,  Christology,  which  is  the  heart 
of  all,  in  a  new  and  majestic  light,  there  is  a  new  hope  that 
when  all  these  studies  have  done  their  work  and  their  results 
are  duly  certified  and  organized,  we  shall  at  last  be  able  to 
minister  to  the  religious  needs  of  academic  adolescence  in  a 
way  that  opens  the  door  to  a  higher  type  of  education  and 
of  man. 

Our  need  is  practical,  perfectly  plain  in  its  general  fea- 
tures,  and   indeed  has  already  its  historic  prototypes.     The 

60 


322  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Veda,  e.  g.,  is  the  Bible  of  India,  and  the  Vedanta,^  or  phi- 
losophy of  India,  means  the  end  of  the  Veda,  as  metaphysics 
was  for  Aristotle  the  end  of  physics.  All  must  pass  the  stage 
of  discipleship  to  the  Vedas  before  the  higher  Vedanta  could 
be  entered  upon.  Those  who  remained  in  the  lower  stage  of 
apprenticeship  were  not  scorned,  nor  were  those  who  admired 
and  devoted  themselves  to  deeper  study  to  purify  faith  from 
superstition  and  to  develop  its  freest  and  deepest  thought 
deemed  heretics,  or  obliged  to  conceal  their  ideas  in  esoteric 
or  in  mystic  guise.  "  It  was  recognized  in  India  from  very 
early  times  that  the  religion  of  a  man  can  not  be  the  same  as 
that  of  a  child."  Yet  the  Upanishads,  in  which  the  Vedanta 
philosophy  is  embodied,  although  they  do  not  recognize  the 
gods  of  the  Veda,  and  ignore  and  even  reject  parts  of  it, 
are  regarded  "  as  perfectly  orthodox,  nay,  as  the  highest  con- 
summation of  the  Brahmanic  religion."  It  is  in  these  that 
the  needs  of  the  well-trained  and  intellectually  elite  adolescent 
were  provided  for  in  this  motherland  of  speculative  philosophy 
thus  blossomed  and  ripened  naturally  into  science,  and  in- 
stead of  conflict  between  them  they  were  only  different  ex- 
pressions of  essentially  the  same  content.  "  There  are  still 
Brahmanic  families,"  says  Max  Miiller,  "  in  which  the  son, 
learns  by  heart  the  ancient  hymns,  and  the  father  performs 
day  by  day  his  sacred  duties  and  sacrifices,  while  the  grand- 
father, even  though  remaining  in  the  village,  looks  upon  all 
ceremonies  and  sacrifices  as  vanity,  sees  even  in  the  Vedic 
gods  nothing  but  names  of  what  he  knows  to  be  beyond  all 
names,  and  seeks  rest  in  the  highest  knowledge  only,  which 
has  become  to  him  the  highest  religion,  viz.,  the  Vedanta,  the 
end  and  fulfilment  of  the  whole  Veda." 

Despite  its  democratic  character,  which  disfavors  esoteric 
views,  Christianity  abounds  in  analogous  tendencies.  The 
very  establishment  of  a  ministry  and  priesthood,  the  ideals  of 
all  types  and  perfectionists  and  special  consecrationists,  sug- 
gests progressive  stages  of  adeptness.  "  The  Eternal  Gospel," 
which  described  a  third  religious  state  to  succeed  the  gospel 
as  the  definite  law  of  humanity,  which  some  regard  as  the 
most  daring  attempt  at  religious  creation  in  the  modern  age, 

^  The  Vedanta  Philosophy,  by  F.  Max  Miiller,  p.  13  et  seq. 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOEOGY   OF   CONVERSION        3^3 

and  which,  though  now  lost  in  the  original  form,  was  em- 
bodied, Renan  tells  us,  in  the  spirit  of  Assisi,  whose  life  was 
a  perpetual  intoxication  of  divine  love,  "  a  prodigy  of  holiness, 
who  made  it  a  carnival,  and  was  a  genius  of  devotion,"  was 
meant  for  a  third  dispensation  of  the  spirit  and  to  originate  a 
higher  religious  life  of  both  faith  and  practise. 

Desjardins's  Companions  of  the  New  Life  represented  a  move- 
ment among  French  students  which  also  pointed  toward  the  realiza- 
tion of  a  kindred  idea,  and  spread  to  Germany  under  the  lead  of  Count 
Engedi.  The  Church  must  be  converted  and  become  as  of  old,  a  nurs- 
ery of  love  and  liberty;  the  moral  consciousness  must  become  universal ; 
an  inner  Christianity  must  be  worked  out  with  absolutely  no  dogma, 
at  least  at  first,  not  even  with  theories,  for  then  the  whole  catechism 
will  creep  in,  nor  yet  with  Atheism,  which  is  often  a  faith  held  with 
passionate  unction.  About  immortality  we  may  feel  as  when  "  watching 
a  diver — sure  he  will  come  up,  but  uncertain  just  when,  where,  and 
how."  There  are  things  more  important  than  the  divinity  of  Christ, 
or  even  the  personality  of  God.  Men  must  become  true  Jews,  true  Cath- 
olics, true  Protestants,  yes,  true  Buddhists,  Confucians,  etc.,  and  that 
will  bring  to  a  deep  sympathetic  unity  which  will  be  the  true  Church 
universal.  Starting  with  no  creed  but  with  an  appeal  to  the  natural  du- 
ties of  man,  which  are  well-nigh  forgotten  in  the  declamation  concern- 
ing his  natural  rights,  the  true  faith  must  be  slowly  worked  out  by 
obedience  to  duty,  and  then  religion,  which  began  among  savages 
as  a  cult  quite  apart  from  morals,  will  assume  its  rightful  place  as  an 
unique  form  of  the  moral  life,  and  not  a  form  of  science.  Be  pure 
in  thought  and  life,  be  self-sacrificing,  helpful  to  every  nascent  moral 
impulse  around  you,  and  doing  good  works  with  ardor,  as  the  voca- 
tion of  life,  will  reveal  the  doctrine.  Be  positive,  not  negative;  re- 
nounce individualism,  which  is  a  cul-de-sac,  always  a  means  and 
never  an  end;  be  disinterested  if  not  ascetic,  in  order  to  better  culti- 
vate associations  and  solidarity;  if  we  feel  that  while  duty  is  noble, 
the  chance  is  that  it  is  not  the  most  valid  thing  in  the  world,  we 
shall,  like  too  many  gilded  collegiate  youth,  combine  sadness  with 
badness,  and  the  gloom  will  not  be  the  romantic  melancholy  of  Ober- 
mann,  born  of  doubt  about  metaphysical  reality,  but  the  dim  and 
perhaps  unconscious  sense  that,  so  far  as  we  are  concerned,  the 
development  of  the  human  race  has  ceased.  If  we  are  to  escape  this 
racial  arrest  and  paralysis  we  must  feel  deeply  that  the  future  may  be 
more  than  the  past,  but  that  it  is  not  a  "  gift  but  a  conquest."  While 
Lotze  was  quite  right  that  it  was  a  doubtful  service  to  seek  to  confer 
upon  God  the  honor  of  demonstrating  his  existence  rather  than  to 
leave  him  to  that  deeper  region  where  not  only  reason  but  the  whole 
soul  clings  to  him  as  its  supreme  postulate,  and  while  we  may,  with 
Mr.  Fiske,  almost  imagine  him  praying  to  be  saved  from  his  friends, 
still  the  rational  needs  of  academic  youth  are  not  finally  met  by  the 


324  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Neo-Christian  movement,  which  having  done  a  great  service  is  now 
declining  and  its  fine  ethical  spirit  is  giving  way  to  new  and  refined 
forms  of  nature-worship  in  Austria,  while  the  need  of  academic  youth 
for  gnosis  as  well  as  pistis  is  seen  in  the  contemporary  zest  for  re- 
ligious philosophy,  and  especially  for  psychology,  which  is  slowly 
taking  the  place  once  held  by  theology  as  the  intellectual  expression 
of  the  religious  instinct. 

Thus  the  second  rehgious  need  of  academic  adolescence 
could  now  be  met  by  a  concise,  inspiring,  and  pedagogic  use  of 
the  results  of  what  may  perhaps  best  be  termed  the  historical 
school  of  Bible  study  as  founded  by  F.  C.  Baur.  This  move- 
ment, unlike  English  deism,  French  atheism,  and  German  ra- 
tionalism, was  originated  by  mature  professors  of  theology 
and  men  of  deep  personal  piety,  Baur's  own  profoundly  re- 
ligious and  pastoral  character  making  him  the  idol  of  his  stu- 
dents and  his  sermons  strangely  edifying  to  all.  This  method 
simply  applies  to  Scripture  the  same  canons  of  criticism  that 
are  applied  to  all  the  other  writings  of  antiquity.  Arrested 
as  the  movement  was  by  the  death  of  its  founder,  discredited 
by  the  extreme  and  essentially  unscholarly  works  of  Strauss, 
Bruno  Bauer,  etc.,  and  by  the  orthodox  reaction  which  fol- 
lowed, it  has  nevertheless,  Zeller  tells  us,  convinced  every 
impartial  person  under  forty-five  who  has  thoroughly  studied 
it,  and  still  points  out  the  direction  religious  studies  must  take 
if  Protestant  theology  is  to  hold  a  respectable  place  among 
other  departments  in  universities.  The  religious  life  and  be- 
lief of  the  young  men  here  considered  does  not  in  fact,  and 
never  can,  rest  on  miracles  considered  as  interference  with 
Nature's  laws  by  a  personal  ab-extra  deity ;  and  the  fear  that 
either  Testament  would  be  less  edifying  if  the  supernatural 
elements  were  "  allowed  to  quietly  lapse  from  the  Christian 
consciousness,"  as  Schleiermacher  suggested,  is  as  groundless 
as  that  of  the  Emperor  Julian,  that  classical  literature  would 
be  discredited  if  faith  in  ancient  mythology  were  destroyed. 
Youth,  most  of  all,  needs  this  greatest  of  human  documents, 
and  needs  to  read  it  with  absolute  freedom  and  honesty  of 
mind ;  and  there  is  no  danger  but  that  the  new  light,  already 
shining  from  it  and  yet  to  be  revealed  by  their  methods,  will 
make  the  new  to  the  old  as  astronomy  to  astrology,  and  will 
make  young  men  not  skeptics  but  apologists. 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        3^5 

The  historic-critical  school  is  now  comparative,  as  almost 
every  scientific  department  that  deals  with  life  must  be 
(anatomy,  physiology,  psycholog5^  philology,  etc.,  as  well  as 
religion  in  some  sense,  for  to  know  one  is  to  know  none). 
All  the  great  religious  themes,  sin,  sacrifice  and  atonement, 
regeneration,  the  soul,  ideas  of  a  future  life,  of  a  golden  age 
past  or  future,  theophany  and  revelation,  the  God-man,  re- 
ligious duties,  rites,  ceremonies,  etc.,  are  found  in  most 
natural  religions  and  can  be  traced  through  various  stages  of 
development,  and  when  sympathetically  presented  from  a 
copious  storehouse  of  knowledge  all  this  awakes  an  interest 
at  the  proper  age,  the  depth  of  which  nothing  can  surpass. 
When  we  see,  too,  what  has  been  done  in  France  since  1876 
by  M.  Guimet  with  his  now  generously  subsidized  museum, 
with  its  library,  two  reviews,  extensive  collections  and  corre- 
spondence, and  not  only  French  but  also  indigenous  pro- 
fessors expounding  and  illustrating  in  full  regalia  all  their 
respective  ceremonials,  and  when  we  see  what  a  judicious  pre- 
scription of  the  higher  criticism  in  all  its  pleroma  of  new  light 
and  life  can  do  and  has  done  in  many  cases  for  a  certain  class 
of  college  men,  every  intelligent  and  sympathetic  friend  of 
youth  will  wish  it  a  hearty,  ungrudging,  and  reiterated  God- 
speed. Heber  Newton  thought  all  the  Bible  should  never 
have  been  translated,  and  no  doubt  many  may  be  injured  by 
this  critical  reillumination  of  it;  but  I  can  not  say  too  earnestly 
that  he  who  doubts  its  beneficence  for  those  souls  in  need  both 
lacks  faith  in  the  Word  and  has  yet  to  learn  the  working  of 
the  divine  pcdogogos,  as  Clement  of  Alexandria  was  wont  to 
call  the  Holy  Ghost,  that  highest  of  all  muses,  in  one  of  its 
most  important  ministrations. 

Then  comes  the  need  of  some  religious  philosophy.  We 
may  agree  with  Hatch  and  Arnold  that  this  is  an  Hellenic 
rather  than  a  Semitic  element,  but  we  must  ask,  with  Renan,  if 
we  are  not  born  to  philosophize,  for  what  are  we  born?  The 
religious  life  and  growth  of  thought  might  be  almost  said  to 
consist  in  gradually  transforming  theological  into  psycho- 
logical ideas,  as  Greek  transcendence  is  gradually  replaced  by 
the  original  Hebrew  immanence.  Thiel  well  says,  "  The  sci- 
ence of  religion  is  not  a  natural  but  a  mental  science,"  and 
it  should  be  written  over  the  door  of  every  institution   for 


326  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

higher  religious  education :  "  Let  no  one  enter  here  who  does 
not  know  psychology."  Instead  of  the  injunction  of  Neo- 
Christian  ethics,  "  Judge  with  all  your  might,"  for  what  ought 
to  be  is  more  and  higher  than  what  is,  we  must  philosophize 
with  all  our  might.  Ever  since,  in  some  remote  age,  psychic 
changes  became  more  important  than  physical  for  evolution, 
the  life  of  the  soul  has  been  more  than  that  of  the  body,  and 
man  has  been  relatively  more  and  more  wretched  if  he  failed 
to  grasp  the  higher  meaning  of  life,  to  give  it  a  psychical 
exegesis,  and  to  rise  thereby  to  a  loftier  consciousness  of  the 
world. 

No  one  has  ever  yet  realized  this  so  adequately  as 
Schleiermacher,  the  greatest  of  all  modern  religious  thinkers, 
who  urged  that  religion  was  the  highest  expression  of  man's 
subjective  states  and  the  best  hall-mark  of  their  legitimacy. 
Even  theology  to  him  was  not  constitutive  but  regulative,  and 
dogmas  were  but  ancient  shore-lines  left  by  the  tides  of  the 
many  sounding  seas  of  human  instinct  and  feelings.  Not  the 
consciousness  of  freedom,  which  Hegel  intellectually  made  the 
sole  criterion  by  which  to  measure  all  human  progress,  but 
the  feeling  of  absolute  dependence  upon  the  power  at  the  heart 
of  the  universe  was  for  him  the  psychic  principle  that  strug- 
gles to  expression  in  all  myths,  ceremonials,  and  doctrines, 
that  made  not  only  natural  religion  but  Christianity  natural, 
and  was  the  only  possible  basis  of  complete  and  world- 
wide religious  unity.  He  cared  little  to  prove  the  facts  of 
religion,  but  only  the  legitimacy  of  the  psychic  states  they  rep- 
resented. Theologies  are  forms  of  interpreting  pious  feelings, 
and  religion  is  not  theology  nor  yet  ethics,  but  personal  and 
experimental.  Its  forms  are  to  it  as  the  world  to  God.  In- 
deed, to  deny  the  objective  truth  of  religious  doctrine  and 
history  may  bring  religious  feeling  to  purer  expression.  His 
deep  Moravian  fervor  impelled  him  beyond  even  Plato  to  wor- 
ship the  fathomless  infinite  with  Spinoza,  and  to  suspect  that 
the  entire  universe  of  consciousness  might  be  a  mere  allegory. 
We  must  follovvT  only  the  most  universal  human  interest.  The 
different  religions  are  only  the  one  universal  religion  divested 
of  its  infinity,  and  all  are  one  if  regarded  sub  specie  cetcr- 
nitatis.  Every  advance  in  science  is  increase  of  God's  glory, 
and  all  things,  when  reduced  to  their  last  ground,  end  in  the 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        3^7 

sense  of  dependence,  and  help  on  man's  spirit  in  its  deep 
propulsive  struggle  toward  the  infinite.  In  fine,  he  says :  "  If  j 
man  does  not  become  one  with  the  eternal  in  the  immediate  I 
unity  of  his  intuitive  feelings,  he  remains  forever  separated  > 
from  it  in  the  derived  unity  of  consciousness."  This  is  the  ( 
monism  that  is  in  philosophy  what  monotheism  was  of  old,  J 
which  asserts  its  supremacy  above  all  dualism. 

This  movement,  too,  declined.  Even  its  author  reacted, 
as  did  the  Zeitgeist,  and  neither  psychology  nor  the  religious 
consciousness  of  the  age  was  sufficiently  developed  for  it. 
Part  of  it  went  into  Feuerbach's  shallow  reiterations  that  the- 
ology was  only  anthropology ;  part  went  into  the  affirmation 
of  Theodore  Parker,  who  was  withal  too  predominantly 
negative  and  deficient  in  sympathy ;  and  the  rest  went  to  seed 
in  sterile  and  sentimental  mysticism,  so  that  Schleiermacher's 
early  work  seemed  doomed  to  remain  an  unfinished  window 
in  Aladdin's  tower.  But  with  the  new  birth  of  psychology 
and  sociology  and  the  critical  historical  movement,  many 
more  special  workers  have  lately  resumed  it.  Xhe  psycho- 
logical basis  of  faith,  of  immortality,  of  sin,  of  inspiration,  of 
prophecy,  "of  conversion,  many  broader  conceptions  of  the 
affectional  nature  that  show  not  only  the  baser  forms  but  the 
higher  relations  of  the  Platonic  eros,  with  the  Pauline  charity 
and  Jesus's  profound  postulate  of  love,  and  many  others,  al- 
ready give  promise  that  in  place  of  the  too-Docetically  appre- 
hended Christ,  we  shall  before  very  long  have  a  psychology  of 
Jesus  which  will  restore  his  sublime  figure  from  the  degrada- 
tion to  which  patristic  metaphysics  has  so  long  banished  him, 
and  of  religion  that  will  make  it  again  central  in  the  soul.^ 


1  We  have  many  suggestive  beginnings,  e.g.,  in  the  story  of  relations  between  re- 
ligion and  abnormal  states  of  mind,  by  Murisier,  A.  Roemer,  Familler,  Mantegazza, 
Karl  Holl,  Hermann  Gunkel,  Heinrich  Weinel,  and  in  an  unpublished  treatise  on 
religious  pathology,  by  J.  Moses;  on  the  psychology  of  faith,  by  Vorbrodt,  Payot, 
and  Bazaill.as  ;  on  miracles,  by  Schinz  ;  on  sin,  by  Kierkengaard  and  Schinz  ;  on 
worship,  by  Ilylan  ;  on  sects,  by  Sighele  ;  on  inspiration,  by  Partridge  ;  on  prophecy, 
by  Cornell;  on  death,  by  C.  Scott  and  Bordeau  ;  on  immortality,  by  Runze,  Gratacap, 
James,  McConnell,  Royce,  Fiske,  and  many  others;  on  the  religious  consciousness, 
by  Hartmann,  Harnack,  Baldensperger,  Inge,  Granger,  Grasserie,  Sabatier,  Kinast, 
E.  Koch,  Flournoy,  M.  Jastrow,  Leuba,  Otto  Ziemssen,  and  here,  perhaps,  we 
should  include  Goldwin  Smith,  Mallock,  Haeckel,  Qstwald  and  MetchnikofT ;  on 
natural  and  anthropological  religion,  by  Miiller,  Baring-Gould,  D'Alviella,  Lefevre, 


328  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Youth  needs  a  record  of  that  Hfe,  the  greatest  yet,  the 
most  truly  and  philosophically  historic,  that  will  represent  it 
as  the  culmination  of  the  entire  series  of  organic  forms  of 
existence,  the  species  in  one  typical  individual,  as  the  revealer 
of  a  new  and  higher  cosmic  consciousness,  advancing  the  hu- 
man ideal  and  opening  the  way  to  the  higher  destiny  of  man. 
When  this  evolution  is  a  little  more  evolved  by  a  natural 
growth,  the  new  does  not  suffer  from  or  discredit  the  old,  but, 
as  in  Scripture,  is  the  revelation  of  what  is  prophesied  but 
concealed  in  it ;  and  when  the  theme  of  the  present  chapter  is 
adequately  understood,  I  believe  that  the  Scripture  itself  will 
be  seen  to  be  primarily  addressed  to  youth,  whose  need  far 
exceeds  that  of  all  other  stages  of  life. 

In  whatever  sense  Christ  is  divine,  his  humanity  is  peda- 
gogically  first,  according  to  every  known  principle  of  educa- 
tion ;  and  divinity  is  a  surplusage  after  his  humanity  has  been 
filled  to  the  utmost  and  all  that  is  possible  made  out  of  and 
ascribed  to  it,  not  so  much  as  Aristotle  wrote  his  physics  and 
then  added  a  metaphysics  as  after  or  supplemental  physics, 
but  as  Jesus  himself  grew  by  degrees  into  full  Messianic  con- 
sciousness, or  as  Scripture,  as  history  shows,  became  the  Bible 
by  its  own  intrinsic  merit.  The  truly  superhuman  factor  is, 
in  philosophic  terms,  the  objectivization  of  what  subjectivism 
can  not  yet  fully  appropriate.  Indeed,  not  only  great  religious 
movements  and  awakenings,  but  psychology  itself,  consists  in 
realizing  in  the  immanent  here  and  now  all  prophecies, 
dreams,  standpoints,  and  ideals  that  have  seemed  remote, 
supernal,  and  alien,  and  in  the  deepening  insight  that  all  that 
has  ever  occurred  will  surely  recur  if  the  conditions  can  be 
made  the  same.  Thus  every  higher  stage  of  development  in- 
volves not  only  re-interpretation  but  re-revelation  on  a  higher 
plane,  and  religious  advancement  is  the  consummation  of  hu- 


von  Czobel,  Brinton,  Hatch,  Thiele,  Gamble,  Lippert,  Wernle,  Drummond,  Saus- 
saye,  Strada,  Stokes,  Seeley,  Wm.  Mackintosh  ;  on  regeneration,  by  Daniels,  Lan- 
caster, Starbuck,  James,  Heeler,  and  the  school  of  Ritschl,  R.  Smith,  Moberly  ;  on 
Biblical  psycliology,  by  Delitzsch,  Karl  Fischer;  on  the  psychology  of  Paul,  by 
Simon,  not  to  mention  the  philosophies  of  religion,  since  Schleiermacher  and  Hegel, 
and  the  many  recent  attempts  to  interpret  the  God  idea  in  mere  psychological  terms. 
To  this  psychological  aspect  of  religion  a  new  journal  (already  announced)  and  a 
book  in  preparation  will  be  devoted. 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        3^9 

man  development.  It  is  far  too  drastic  a  test  to  be  safe  for 
most  of  the  best  of  us  to  ask,  if  all  metaphysical  and  transcen- 
dent elements  were  eliminated  from  a  faith;  if  all  of  the  so- 
called  historic  factors  and  all  miracles  should  fade,  what  have 
we  left?  But  just  this  very  many  young  men  are  doing  for 
their  ideal  and  for  personal  immortality,  and  the  consolation  is 
that  this  "  exercise  "  reveals  to  them  that  it  is  a  most  precious 
and  growing  residuum,  that  must  be  no  longer  ignored.  The 
realm  of  nature  has  vastly  increased  not  only  in  extent,  but 
what  is  far  more  important,  in  intent,  so  that  most  of  what 
was  called  supernatural  now  lies  well  within  it,  but  so  en- 
riched, substantialized,  and  dignified  that  we  hardly  recognize 
it.  Psychic  influence  in  the  cause  and  cure  of  many  diseases; 
rapt  states  of  trances,  exciting  and  mental  exaltations ;  the 
deepened  knowledge  of  what  love  is  and  means,  that  biology 
has  suggested ;  the  laws  of  heredity ;  sin  as  decadence,  de- 
generation, and  pessimism ;  vicariousness  as  evolved  in  phi- 
losophy, therapeutics,  and  esthetics  since  Aristotle's  doctrine 
of  catharsis ;  the  sacrament  of  communion,  with  its  many 
roots  deep  in  the  remotest  past  of  human  instinct  Church 
service  and  ritual,  directly  traceable,  in  its  highest  historic 
antiquity,  as  Neale  has  shown,  to  some  of  the  best  sources; 
Church  organization  and  polity  as  analogous,  feature  by  feature, 
with  Plato's  ideal  republic ;  even  orthodoxies  in  their  prime  as 
perhaps  the  most  economic  of  all  psychic  methods  of  coopera- 
tion and  service,  faintly  echoing  that  greatest  of  all  human 
affirmative  theories,  and  even  foreshadowing  its  philosophical 
correlate,  a  spiritual  monism — these  and  many  more  are  at 
least  secure. 

Bacon,  Hobbes,  and  Newton,  who  inaugurated  the  "  English  way  " 
of  separating  by  water-tight  compartments  in  their  own  minds  their 
religious  from  their  scientific  Hfe  and  thought,  prepared  the  way  for 
the  antagonisms  between  faith  and  knowledge  so  conspicuous  in 
Spencer,  Tyndall,  and  Huxley ;  and  favored  by  the  current  and  per- 
verse dualism  of  mind  as  over  against  matter,  and  by  the  influences 
of  the  French  Revolution,  this  "  modern  calamity  "  was  not  mitigated 
by  a  national  philosophy  broad  enough  to  embrace  religion  and 
science  as  in  Germany.  This  antagonism  is  utterly  obsolete  from 
the  standpoint  of  the  new  psychology,  the  chief  and  highest  function 
of  which,  I  believe,  is  to  be  the  elaboration  not  merely  of  reconciliation 
or  consensus,  but  of  an  union  and  identity  so  complete  that  we  shall 


33°  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

no  longer  suspect  God  to  be  a  hypocrite  who  says  one  thing  in  his 
Word  and  does  another  in  his  works,  and  we  shall  realize  that  science 
must  be  taught  in  our  theological  schools  for  logic,  for  facts,  for 
reverence,  and  for  true  theories;  while  religion,  the  oldest  and  most 
absorbing  of  human  interests,  will  not  only  have  a  place  in  every  col- 
lege and  university,  but  its  spirit  will  pervade  the  laboratory  and 
observatory. 

The  care  of  souls  is  not  yet  an  art.  Pastors  and  the  leaders  of 
religious  organizations  for  young  men  do  not  yet  understand  the  needs 
of  this  yeasty  stage  of  intense  emotion  and  narrow  mentality,  nor 
how  different  is  the  rehgion  of  a  youth  and  a  mature  man.  They  do 
not  realize  the  viciousness  of  a  conversion  that  teaches  the  child  to 
assume  the  airs,  prayers,  and  preachments  of  adults,  when  in  fact 
he  can  be  only  a  candidate  for  full  humanity.  We  still  lack  real 
ductores  dubitantium  who  can  preside  wisely  over  the  parturition 
of  the  higher  mental  life  of  religion,  holding  the  needs  of  youth 
to  be  the  highest  of  all  needs,  and  the  duty  to  serve  it  by  renouncing 
every  obstacle  and  helping  it  to  an  ever  higher  maturity,  to  be  the 
chief  duty  of  man,  and  believing  that  what  ought  to  be  is  the  surest 
of  all  things  to  be.  I  could  not  lose  heart  even  if  I  accepted  Fair- 
bairn's  conclusion  that  but  very  few  people  in  the  world  have  yet 
been  true  Christians,  but  that  the  glory  of  this  religion  is  yet  to  be 
achieved.  Therefore,  in  the  name  of  youth,  I  postulate  and  await 
without  a  shadow  of  doubt  or  fear  ( i )  broader  conceptions  of  the 
human  soul,  which  in  this  field  lives  far  more  by  feeling  and  instinct 
than  by  reason,  that  faith,  the  greatest  of  all  its  faculties,  be  rescued 
from  present  neglect  and  degeneration;  (2)  loftier  ideas  of  Scripture 
that  shall  make  it  not  a  fetish,  but  the  true  and  living  logos  of  the 
human  heart  and  will,  never  finished  and  complete  in  the  past,  but  a 
never-ending  progressive  revelation  of  which  the  prophets  and  Jesus 
gave  us  only  the  beginning;  and  (3)  eternal  warfare  upon  ortho- 
doxies and  all  dogmatic  finalities,  which  are  only  the  petrifactions 
of  faith,  intimately  connected  in  ways  psychology  is  only  just  be- 
ginning to  see  with  the  devitalization  of  life  and  mind  caused  by 
past  or  present  sinful  excesses.  If  at  any  time  in  life,  belief  in  God, 
immortality,  and  a  future  state  is  grown  into  without  special  reve- 
lation, it  is  now.  Miracles  seem  to  be  more  a  continuation  or  aug- 
mentation of  natural  processes  when  the  latter  seem  themselves  most 
impressive,  and  if  there  is  any  time  when  he  is  a  poor  Christian  who 
can  not  believe  in  Jesus  without  their  aid  or  can  not  be  philosophically 
true  to  himself,  if  he  bases  all  upon  them,  it  is  at  this  stage  of  life. 
If  rightly  conceived  and  taught,  the  human  soul  is  so  constituted  that 
it  can  never  for  a  moment  doubt  the  basal  verities  of  religion,  and  the 
energies  of  the  ephebic  age  will  be,  as  they  should  by  its  very  nature, 
more  and  more  affirmative,  and  instead  of  tragic  negation  we  shall 
have  only  the  normal  and  organic  processes  of  eliminating  broken- 
down  tissue  when  it  has  done  its  work. 

Intellectual   seems  far  more  eradicable  than  moral   error.     Here 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        33' 

we  must  be  far  less  optimistic,  for  the  sting  of  sin  is  deeper  than 
mind,  and  the  causes  of  doubt  will  be  removed  long  before  those  of 
wrong  conduct.  Ethical  conversion  and  mental  reconstruction  will, 
perhaps,  be  forever  needful  in  some  form  at  this  age,  but  they  will  be 
more  normal,  complete,  and  salutary  when  no  longer  infected  by 
dogmatic  surds. 

IV.  The  external  types,  norms,  and  symbols  of  conver- 
sion show  it  to  be  the  very  core  of  a  true  philosophy  of  human 
history.  Many  analogies  of  this  change  are,  and  more  may  be, 
drawn  from  the  metamorphosis  of  insects,  and  here  biology 
supplies  the  best  heuristic.  Most  non-oceanic  grubs  will  later 
fly.  In  the  worm  stage  their  sole  business  is  to  eat  and  grow. 
The  external  skin  at  length  hardens  into  chitin,  which  pre- 
vents further  growth.  The  larva  then  chooses  some  appro- 
priate place  and  attachment,  where  it  passes  into  a  quiescent 
state,  perhaps  remaining  long  through  drought  and  winter.  In 
preparing  for  this  pupa  state  some  insects  secrete  or  spin  a 
protection.  They  now  undergo  a  more  or  less  radical  trans- 
formation and  acquire  legs  and  wings.  When  the  changes 
are  complete  the  old  skin  cracks,  and  the  insect  slowly  ex- 
tricates itself  part  by  part,  and,  leaving  the  cast-ofif  skin  or 
exuviae,  emerges  in  adult  or  imago  form,  for  a  life  destined 
chiefly  for  reproduction,  and  usually  very  brief  in  compari- 
son with  the  earlier  developmental  stages.  For  those  who 
love  to  grope  in  obscure  regions  by  the  aid  of  symbols,  pre- 
adolescence  is  the  larva  state  chiefly  for  growth.  The  brain, 
which  developed  from  the  ectoderm,  and  consciousness,  born 
of  touch,  tend  to  harden,  like  the  derma,  till  growth  is  ar- 
rested, and  the  impupation  in  habit,  creed,  becoming  overspun 
with  acquired  knowledge  and  convention,  progresses  New 
life  is  growing  meanwhile  within,  and  if  it  has  vigor  enough 
and  the  chitin  be  not  too  rigid  and  impacted,  the  old  conscious- 
ness with  its  customs  is  sloughed  off,  and  the  soul  enters, 
more  or  less  transformed,  its  mature  imago  stage,  to  live  for 
the  race  and  not  for  self. 

Spring,  and  the  resurrection  of  the  world  of  plant  and  ani- 
mal life  from  the  death  of  winter,  and  all  the  innumerable 
cults,  rites,  legends,  based  on  this  prefigure  it.  Dawn  van- 
quishing night  equips  other  apperceptive  organs  for  it.  All 
nature,  life,  and  letters  abound  in  tropes  and  metaphors  of 


33^  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENXE 

it,  the  collection  of  which  would  make  an  important  con- 
tribution to  our  theme.  Baths,  lustrations,  and  aspersions 
among  savage  and  civilized  races;  a  banquet  for  the  famish- 
ing; successful  operation  for  congenital  blindness  and  deaf- 
ness; discharge  of  debt;  freedom  from  prison  and  tyranny; 
ransom,  emancipation  from  slavery ;  cure  of  disease  by  a  great 
physician ;  sudden  wealth ;  the  bursting  forth  of  fountains  in 
the  desert;  the  substitution  of  love  for  fear  and  hate;  the 
quickening  of  seed  and  growth  out  of  the  dark  earth ;  efflores- 
cence, fruitage,  harvest ;  marriage  to  a  celestial  bridegroom ; 
impregnation  by  the  spermatic  logos;  emergence  from  the 
womb,  and  the  new  mode  of  larger  and  more  independent  life; 
rescue  from  shipwreck;  finding  a  haven  in  storm;  protection 
in  danger;  transition  from  the  life  of  the  body  to  that  of  the 
soul;  change  of  allegiance  from  a  bad  to  a  good  prince — all 
these,  every  one  and  countless  more,  are  only  efforts  which 
abound  in  the  hymns,  theologies,  and  ceremonies  of  all  faiths 
to  describe  some  aspect  of  the  law  that  necessitates  this  change 
of  dynasty  and  of  constitution  in  the  city  of  "  Man-soul." 

The  best  myth  is  a  deeper  and  broader  expression  of  hu- 
man nature  and  needs  than  reason  or  history  has  yet  at- 
tained, and  is  thus  the  shape  revelation  might  be  expected  to 
take.  Where  it  is  an  individual  expression  of  universal 
instincts,  it  is  the  highest  use  of  the  imagination.  Plato's 
myth  of  the  den  (Rep.  vii,  i),  which  describes  men  sitting 
in  a  cave,  chained,  with  their  backs  to  the  light,  studying 
and  measuring  shadows  of  outer  things  and  events  cast  on 
the  wall  before  them,  and  then  freed  and  turned  about,  or 
converted,  and  led  out  to  see  real  objects,  and  at  last,  as  their 
eyes  grew  stronger  and  their  minds  less  bewildered,  shown 
the  sun  itself,  had  much  to  do  in  giving  both  the  term  and 
concept  to  the  early  Christian  idea  of  conversion.  Some 
think  the  myth  of  the  reversal  of  all  cosmic  process,  the  old 
growing  young  and  the  dead  rising  at  the  end  of  the  cosmic 
cycle  (Politicus,  268),  also  contributed. 

One  of  the  dominant  motives  in  this  coming  reorganiza- 
tion of  philosophy  and  history  is  the  coordination  of  the 
biologic  changes  of  adolescence  in  the  microcosmic  individ- 
ual and  its  macrocosmic  analogue  in  the  forces  which  center 
in  the  era  of  dawning  Christianity,  when  both  national  and 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        333 

personal  selfishness  merged  into  a  higher  human  consciousness 
of  universal  brotherhood  founded  the  new  kingdom  of  man. 
Adam  in  Eden  perhaps  thus  represented  prepubertal  inno- 
cence, ideally  environed  and  sheltered,  forbidden  the  prema- 
ture exercise  of  genetic  function  or  knowledge  of  it,  and  his 
probation  stands  for  that  which  is  always  essential  for  the 
attainment  of  full  maturity.  Eve  is  the  romantic  first  dream 
of  an  ideal  mate  born  from  the  development  of  part  of  his  own 
body,  as  woman  can  not  fully  exist  for  man  before.  His 
temptation  is  the  constant  danger,  and  his  fall  the  eternal 
tragedy,  of  prematurity  and  the  penalty  it  entailed  on  all  man- 
kind ;  while  the  whole  is  the  symbol  of  the  arrested  develop- 
ment of  our  race  due  to  violation  of  the  biologic  law  of  youth- 
ful probationary  restraint,  from  which  heavenly  love  incarnate 
later  saves  us. 

Again,  the  Bible  story  as  a  whole,  whatever  else  it  is,  is 
also  conversion  "  writ  large."  Abraham  was  a  desert  sheik, 
nomad,  and  breeder  of  herds  and  men.  The  promise  that  if 
he  kept  Jehovah's  commands  his  seed  should  be  as  the  stars 
of  heaven;  the  Sodomite  episode;  the  rivalries,  jealousies, 
migration;  the  later  apprenticeship  in  Egypt;  the  nomad  life 
in  the  desert ;  the  revelation  of  the  law ;  the  work  of  Moses, 
the  great  organizer  of  external  righteousness;  the  evolution 
of  the  theocracy  and  a  temporal  king;  the  growing  impurity 
of  life  and  worship,  are  the  prelude.  With  the  prophets  comes 
the  awakened  conscience,  intensified  by  its  captivity  (for  ex- 
ternal calamity  always  favors  a  sense  of  guilt),  a  deepening 
conviction  of  sin,  uncleanness,  and  misery,  portending  doom 
and  deepening  toward  despair.  Then  dawns  the  hope,  light, 
and  joy  of  Bethlehem,  which  slowly  spreads  over  the  world. 
All  these  are  typical  of  nothing  so  much  as  the  moral  vicissi- 
tudes of  the  adolescent  period,  of  which  Adam  marks  the 
dawn,  and  the  mature  Christ  the  somewhat  belated,  but  all 
the  more  complete,  culmination  which  had  to  end  in  supreme 
self-sacrifice  that  the  pilgrimage  from  selfhood  to  Altruria  be 
entirely  accomplished. 

The  story  of  Jesus's  life,  psychologically  treated,  whatever 
else  it  may  be,  is  also  another  abridged  and  variant  edition 
of  the  same  import.  There  is  the  glimpse  of  an  early  life 
of  natural  growth  in  favor  of  God  and  man.     At  the  age  of 


334  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

early  Oriental  puberty  he  is  already  characteristically  ponder- 
ing the  highest  themes  with  deepening  sense  of  wrong  and 
human  need,  a  glimmering,  conscious,  higher  mission  strug- 
gling with  temporal  ambition,  a  long  conflict  of  the  noblest 
adolescent  idealism  that  ever  was  with  the  hard,  inveterate 
conservatism  of  a  decadent  age  and  senescent  man,  with 
bigotry,  hypocrisy,  and  shame,  ending  in  defeat,  the  self- 
effacement  of  a  shameful  death,  then  the  inevitable  resurgam 
motive,  at  first  incredulous  and  apparitional,  with  ascension 
or  sublimation  as  the  climax,  but  which  later  became  the  very 
substance  of  the  Christian  faith  and  the  corner-stone  of  belief 
in  both  Jesus's  deity  and  our  regeneration.  As  he  conquered 
death,  so  we  may  rise  to  the  higher  life  of  the  race  if  the  self 
or  flesh  perishes.  Indeed,  the  story  of  the  Cross,  psycho- 
logically considered,  is  both  provocative  and  regulative  of  the 
soul's  widest  and  most  comprehensive  oscillation  from  pain 
to  joy,  these  two  sovereign  masters  of  life.  The  soul  once 
well  cadenced  to  this  rhythm  can  never  fall  a  victim  to  pes- 
simism. In  this  masterpiece  of  pathos  we  find  hunger,  thirst, 
homelessness,  garments  parted,  betrayal,  desertion  by  dis- 
ciples, the  solitary  struggle  in  Gethsemane,  all  the  incidents 
of  passion  week  and  of  the  "  stations  "  on  the  way  to  Cal- 
vary, all  cumulative  and  more  effective  than  in  any  of  the 
great  dramatic  unities.  Every  item  is  a  pathogenic  pity- 
fetish.  Many  young  converts  in  our  returns  are  chiefly 
affected,  e.  g.,  by  the  nails,  some  almost  to  the  point  of  stig- 
matization.  Some  press  nails  against  their  hands  to  deepen 
their  sympathy,  and  one  describes  how  a  painful  wound  in 
the  center  of  the  palm  "  brought  me  to  Jesus."  ^  The  spear 
is  less  prominent,  but  every  item  and  detail  of  its  thrust  is 
sometimes  exquisitely  if  not  neurotically  felt.  With  some  the 
thorns  are  the  apex  of  the  pathos,  with  others  the  scourging, 
the  prayer,  "  If  it  be  possible,"  or,  again,  the  innocence  and 
purity  of  the  victim. 

This  conquest  of  the  world  by  pain  and  grief  is  still  seen 
in  many  a  revival,  where  all  this  holy  drama  has  been  set  in 
scene  and  been  made  to  live  again  for  the  imagination  by 
word-painting  so  vivid  that  men  have  not  only  groaned  and 

*  See  my  article  on  Pity.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  July,  1900,  vol.  xi,  p.  534  et  scq. 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION        335 

swooned,  but  had  visions  that  made  the  whole  seem  transport- 
ingly  reaHstic.  The  spotlessness  of  the  sufferer,  who,  while 
deserving  supreme  good,  is  called  to  endure  supreme  evil, 
makes  pathos  far  greater  than  where  the  innocent  suffer  for 
the  sins  of  their  ancestors,  a  theme  which  has  played  its  great 
role  of  havoc  in  the  world  of  tragic  sin,  guilt,  and  atonement. 

What  was  the  mental  state  of  Jesus's  followers  when  he 
died  and  while  he  yet  lay  in  the  tomb?  The  world-order 
which  the  Jews  thought  rewarded  virtue  and  punished  vice 
in  this  world  was  upset.  The  truth  they  relied  on  was  branded 
as  folly  and  crime.  Their  hero  was  forsaken  by  Jehovah, 
despite  his  agonizing  prayer.  The  world  must  have  seemed 
the  sport  of  malign  chance  or  of  a  personal  power  of  evil,  and 
death  the  end  of  all.  It  is  doubtful  whether,  like  the  disciples 
of  Socrates,  they  could  have  organized  victory  out  of  such  a 
defeat.  Dispersion,  denial,  miserablism,  and  absolute  despair 
must  have  followed,  and  the  teachings  of  Jesus  might  have 
been  forgotten. 

The  resurrection  reversed  all  this,  and  created  perhaps  the 
greatest  of  all  revolutions  in  history.  While  psychology  has 
nothing  to  do  with  its  objective  validity  save  so  far  as  this 
bears  upon  the  intensity  of  belief  in  it,  the  latter  is  the  car- 
dinal psychic  fact  of  early  Christendom.  Conviction  may  be 
of  every  degree,  from  the  faintest  suggestion  up  to  cataleptic 
certainty.  In  the  Homeric  world  mortality  was  feebly  held 
to,  but  it  was  better  to  lead  a  life  of  a  mean  man  on  earth 
than  to  be  ruler  in  the  realm  of  the  dead.  However  it  came 
about,  faith  in  the  resurrection  became  absolute,  and  every- 
thing was  vain  without  this,  its  chief  affirmation.  The  great- 
est of  all  the  fears  that  prey  upon  the  soul  of  man  is  that  of 
the  king  of  terrors,  just  as  the  chief  struggle  of  all  creatures 
is  to  survive.  Perhaps  no  possible  testimony  could  now  vali- 
date such  an  event  in  court,  but  the  vital  fact  was  the  utter 
belief  in  it,  and  this  was  the  burden  of  the  glad  tidings  pro- 
mulgated by  the  first  preaching.  The  very  suggestion  of  it 
would  have  been  a  welcome  relief  to  the  tension  of  despair, 
but  the  conviction  that  death  and  its  cause,  sin,  had  been  van- 
quished, and  Satan  even  overcome  in  his  stronghold,  was  an 
evangel  of  unspeakable  rapture.  Bringing  immortality  to 
light  was  the  discovery  of  a  vaster  and  far  more  glorious  con- 


33^  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

tinent,  the  road  to  which  was  open  to  all.  Heaven  was  now 
first  definitely  established,  and  made  real  and  organized.  The 
scope  of  justice,  before  limited  to  this  world,  was  thus  extended 
to  a  superior  realm,  which  must  be  included  henceforth  in  all 
moral  judgment.  Thus  the  key  to  the  apostolic  and  early 
patristic  period  is  the  conception  of  Jesus  as  the  death-killer 
and  *'  the  first  fruits  of  them  that  slept."  He  had  raised 
others,  and  made  the  tomb  a  portal.  In  the  presence  of  the 
transcendent  world  this  one  shriveled.  Hence  the  exhilara- 
tion and  even  inebriation  caused  by  the  sudden  removal  of  de- 
pression which  set  bondmen  free.  Pentecost  took  off  old  fet- 
ters, and  as  the  mind  was  turned  loose  in  new  paradisal 
pastures  it  gamboled  in  many  forms,  that  seemed  to  the  staid 
religionist  as  pathological.  It  was  an  age  of  expansion  for 
each  sense  and  faculty;  there  were  ecstasies,  trancoidal  states, 
visions,  and  prophecies;  ebullitions  that  expressed  themselves 
in  meaningless  jargon  and  unknown  tongues.  As  Weinel 
and  Gunkel  have  shown,  there  was  folly  and  madness  after 
the  outpouring  of  the  Holy  Ghost  which  soon  came  to  have 
its  bacchantes  if  not  its  sibyls  raving  with  froth  and  foam. 
There  were  exuberant  vaticinations,  gifts,  licenses,  till  it  be- 
came necessary  to  forbid  gazing  up  into  heaven  expecting 
Jesus's  second  coming,  and  to  carefully  test  and  distinguish 
between  spirits  good  and  bad,  true  and  false,  and  especially 
to  show  forth  fruits  of  the  spirit  and  proclaim  the  glad  tidings. 
Thus  the  story  of  the  descent  of  the  Holy  Ghost  represents 
the  normalization  of  these  effervescences. 

So  in  order  was  "  other-worldness  "  that  heaven  was  longed 
for  and  many  would  gladly  have  left  all  and  migrated  thither. 
The  present  life  was  neglected,  despised,  demeaned.  Reason 
was  as  filthy  rags  compared  to  vision.  Martyrdom — which 
Tertullian  said  all  Christians  should  strive  to  attain  at  last, 
w^hich  Cyprian  almost  fulsomely  eulogized,  and  which 
crowned  many  otherwise  unknown  lives — was  longed  and 
prayed  for,  courted  and  provoked.  Many  agonized  whether 
they  could  be  counted  worthy  of  it.  It  was  a  prize,  a  supreme 
honor,  a  diploma  "  siinima  cum  laiide."  This  contemplation 
of  death  was  no  speculative  thanatopsis,  nor  was  it  desired 
as  a  mere  euthanasia,  but  even  its  accompaniments,  the  charnel- 
house  worms,  skulls,  skeletons,  and  all  its  most  terrible  forms 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        337 

were  gloated  over.  When  in  sight  it  was  rushed  toward  with 
a  cheer.  This  reversal  of  value  scales  involved  a  hitherto 
unknown  separation  of  the  soul  from  the  mortal  part,  and 
a  fuller,  clearer  conception  of  it  as  a  spiritual  body  with 
heaven  as  a  soul-home.  Soul  was  no  longer  a  mere  harmony 
or  so  tenuous  as  to  be  liable,  in  Platonic  phrase,  to  be  blown 
away  if  men  died  on  a  gusty  day.  This  gave  individuality  a 
transcendental  value  that  it  had  never  had  before,  and  retrans- 
lated morality  as  other-world  conduct.  Love  idealizes,  and 
as  the  heart  burns  in  memory  of  the  dear  dead  they  are  trans- 
figured, and  it  was  inevitable  that  the  man  Jesus  should  be- 
come to  the  soul  the  heavenly  Christ.  Finally,  when  the  age 
of  the  apocalypse  was  well  passed,  it  was  this  thanatic  idea 
which  inspired  the  organization  of  the  visible  Church  as  an 
earthly  replica  of  the  invisible  New  Jerusalem,  where  were 
stored  up  the  treasures  of  the  heart.  What  was  at  first  a 
dream,  a  suggestion,  perhaps  a  pious  wish,  became  more  real 
than  anything  else,  and  it  is  significant  that  just  at  the  time 
when  Alaric  conquered  Rome,  the  last  hope  of  the  world, 
Augustine  wrote  his  City  of  God. 

Thus  the  story  of  the  Cross,  which  is  the  chief  symbol  of 
Christianity  known  by  multitudes  who  know  nothing  else  of 
Jesus^  when  relived  and  vitally  participated  in  is  the  best 
of  all  the  initiatives  to  maturity.  The  older,  lower  selfish 
self  is  molted  and  a  new  and  higher  life  of  love  and  service 
emerges.  The  pain  is  a  birth-pang  and  the  joy  is  that  a  new 
being  is  born.  The  Gospel  story  is  the  most  adequate  and 
classic,  dramatic  representation  of  the  truest  formulae  of  the 
most  critical  revolution  of  life,  to  successfully  accomplish 
which  is  to  make  catharses  of  our  lower  nature  and  to  attain 
full  ethical  maturity  without  arrest  or  perversion ;  this  is 
the  very  meaning  of  adolescence.  As  Jesus,  the  totemic  em- 
bodiment of  the  race,  gathered,  unified,  and  epitomized  in  his 
own  life  the  many  elements  of  the  autosoteric  motive  that 
were  before  scattered  and  relatively  ineffective  and  made 
thereby  a  new  focus  of  history  to  which  so  many  lines  before 
converged,  from  which  they  have  since  diverged,  so  each 
youth  can  now,  thanks  to  him,  condense  in  his  own  life  the 
essential  experience  of  the  race  by  sympathetic  participation 

in  this  great  psychopheme.     His  catabasis  under  the  burden 
CI 


338  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

of  sin  explored  and  idealized  every  stage  of  the  thanatic 
pathway  we  must  all  pass,  and  his  anabasis  of  resurrection 
from  the  depths  of  humiliation,  renunciation,  and  self-immola- 
tion to  Deity  itself  is  the  Eternal  Gospel,  for  it  shows  that 
human  nature,  in  what  Reischle  calls  its  thymetic  core,  is 
sound,  resilient,  positive,  and  can  not  be  overwhelmed.  Now, 
having  attained  a  sense  of  fundamental  impulsion  as  by  a 
higher  power  (which  Jesus  construed  as  sonship),  feeling  a 
mission,  an  inner  call  (such  as  he  found  in  realizing  the  Mes- 
sianic ideals  of  his  day),  and  seeking  a  sphere  of  influence 
as  he  would  found  a  new  heavenly  kingdom,  youth  is  truly 
adult  and  ready  to  enter  upon  his  career. 

Men  will  always  dififer  concerning  the  proportion  played 
by  objective  and  subjective  factors  in  the  deification  of  Jesus, 
as  to  how  much  was  given  as  historic  data,  and  how  much 
is  due  to  human  reaction  upon  them.  The  latter  element, 
however,  whether  it  be  great  or  small,  has  an  ineluctable  basis 
which  no  higher  or  lower  criticism  can  ever  impair,  and  even 
if  all  the  historic  factors  were  to  prove  fallacious  and  be 
abandoned  there  remains  a  Christ  born  within.  To  cling  to 
this  is  the  new  psychological  orthodoxy.  For  weaker  faith 
historicity  is  indispensable.  But  there  are  already  strong  souls 
for  whom  the  very  sibilance  of  the  word  suggests  a  lower  and 
almost  ophitic  stratum  of  the  religious  consciousness.  But  if 
the  latter  pales  there  is  now  this  consolation,  that  the  smaller 
the  nucleus  of  fact  the  greater,  and,  we  may  even  say,  the 
more  divinely  creative  the  soul  of  man,  so  far  as  it  evolved 
from  its  conscious — reenforced  by  its  larger  unconscious — 
depths  this  supreme  solution  of  its  own  greatest  need.  Just 
as  the  power  of  appreciation  is  only  a  less  decree  of  the  same 
qualities  that  create  masterpieces  or  heroic  deeds,  so,  whatever 
history  loses,  we  must  ascribe  to  the  productive  genius  of  the 
soul  and  substitute  universal  truth  for  particular  facts.  Thus 
the  soul  seasons  itself  by  exploring  both  extremes  of  suffering 
and  glory,  reacts  from  depression  to  exaltation,  from  the  cross 
to  the  crown,  expands  temporal  to  eternal  dimensions. 
Thus  the  instinct  of  justice  complements  the  agony  of  inno- 
cence by  transcendent  joy,  and  when  it  is  lost  in  iniquity 
works  out  a  program  of  salvation. 

Again,  literature,  philosophy,  and  history  abound  in  variant 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        339 

editions  of  the  same  theme,  which,  although  relative  and 
partial  compared  with  that  of  Christianity,  illustrate  certain 
features  of  the  ephebic  metamorphoses  more  fully  and  might 
be  mosaicked  into  a  new  higher  unity  about  this  theme.  Faust, 
e.  g.,  passed  through  a  very  different  curriculum  of  lust  of 
knowledge,  and  of  sense,  sold  his  soul  to  sin,  experienced  the 
moral  chaos  of  Walpurgis  night,  and  at  last,  having  learned 
the  vanity  of  wealth  and  ambition  and  every  egoistic  impulse, 
found  atonement  and  joy  in  humble  service.  Parsifal,  roused 
from  innocence  by  the  suggestion  of  sinful  love,  developed  a 
higher  life  and  became,  as  some  "  young  Germans  "  think,  a 
"  German  Christ,"  representing  a  principle  of  Teutonic  atone- 
ment that,  as  presented  by  Wagner,  they  conceive  destined  not 
only  to  supersede  but  even  to  save  Christianity  itself. 

Dante,  "  the  voice  of  ten  silent  centuries,"  whose  work 
"  best  expresses  the  heart  of  medieval  Catholicism,"  is  read 
in  a  new  light  and  invested  with  a  new  and  higher  charm, 
as  an  allegory  of  adolescence,  more  ethical,  richer,  and  more 
concrete  than  Hegel's  phenomenology,  and  with  all  its  differ- 
ences, still  best  studied  as  a  Pilgrim's  Progress  for  the  cul- 
tured. The  many  professorships  established  to  teach  Dante  can 
do  best  service  by  studying  what  the  ephebic  revolution,  of 
which  it  is  on  the  whole  the  fullest  consummate  literary  char- 
acterization, really  is,  and  means,  and  the  needs  of  the  sub- 
jective processes  of  whatever  else  this  "  divine,"  and  of  all 
secular  books  most  frequently  edited,  masterpiece  may  be. 
Rich,  learned,  titled,  the  author  was  overwhelmed  by  mis- 
fortune and  transformed  by  love.  He  "  held  heart-break  at 
bay  for  twenty  years  "  to  write  a  spiritual  biography  in  the 
true  language  of  the  soul,  and  uttered  himself  as  few  have 
ever  done.  His  soul,  tempered  by  an  amazing  range  and  in- 
tensity of  typical  human  experience,  slowly,  and  exhausting 
nearly  all  the  many  stages  of  the  process,  passes  through  the 
hell  of  torture,  grief,  and  fear,  sees  the  true  and  hideous 
nature  of  every  sin  revealed  in  its  fit  retributive  penalty 
through  all  the  long  descending  way  of  blood  and  tears, 
learns  the  dialect  of  anger  and  blasphemy,  till  at  the  center 
of  the  earth's  gravity  he  clambers  down  Satan's  shaggy  sides, 
inverts  himself,  and  is  suddenly  transported  four  thousand 
miles  to  the  other  side  of  the  earth  on  the  Easter  mom, 


340  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

under  the  southern  cross,  while  the  love  planets  incite  to  glad- 
ness, and  his  blackened  face  is  washed  by  the  tears  of  grati- 
tude and  a  deep  new  joy.  The  mountains  of  purgatory,  the 
highest  in  the  world,  and  the  only  land  in  the  new  hemisphere, 
with  all  its  rich  and  varied  landscape,  are  before  him,  but  steep 
and  uncertain  as  the  Hill  Difficulty.  Each  terrace,  with  new 
penitential  expiation  and  comforting  promises,  marks  pro- 
gressive growth  in  grace  and  clearer  vision,  till  at  Lethe  the 
guilt  of  remembered  sin  and  pain  is  washed  away,  and  on  the 
summit  the  shadowy  "  sweet  pedagogue,"  who  had  hitherto 
guided  him,  commits  him  to  the  care  of  his  old  love,  purified 
and  transfigured,  with  whom,  now  fully  regenerate,  he  com- 
mences the  ascent  through  the  nine  heavens  of  Paradise  to 
the  ineffable  rose  of  dawn,  and  of  the  blessed  at  the  apex  of 
the  empyrean,  lifted  through  every  crystalline  sphere  by  gazing 
fixedly  into  the  eyes  of  his  celestial  love,  while  his  mind,  dull 
with  false  human  doctrine,  is  opened  to  the  awful  mysteries 
of  divine  science. 

We  have  no  space  to  characterize  but  only  to  name  the  legends 
of  the  Holy  Grail,  King  Arthur  and  the  Knights  of  the  Round  Table, 
the  Nibelung  Hoard  or  Rheingold,  the  Golden  Fleece,  Prometheus, 
Hercules,  Theseus,  Ulysses,  CEdipus,  Orestes,  Iphigenia,  Samson, 
Beowulf,  Hamlet  and  other  Shakespeare  story  roots,  and  scores  of 
ethnological  radicles  from  the  Indie  wars  with  King  Balin,  the 
Sakuntala,  and  the  legends  of  the  descent  of  fire,  to  the  Kalevala  and 
Hiawatha,  and  many  more.  They  are  in  differing  degree,  either  warp 
or  woof,  nothing  but  allegories  of  the  birth  of  sex  and  its  higher 
meaning,  or  are  at  least  replete  with  allusions  to  which  only  the 
psychology  of  adolescence  can  furnish  the  true  key.  They  are  quite 
as  adequate  ethnic  expressions  of  conversion  as  are  many  of  the  in- 
dividual experiences  of  it  in  Starbuck,  Leuba,  Coe,  and  James.  The 
history  of  ancient  philosophy  is  a  very  different  rendering  of  a  part 
of  the  same  theme,  and  shows  the  same  sequence  as  its  only  unity. 
First  came  the  early  Greek  oneness  with  nature,  represented  in  the 
Homeric  world,  which  had  no  state,  church,  school,  Bible,  literature, 
science,  inventions,  but  where  all  was  solvent  in  personalities  and 
in  the  natural  relation  between  men,  with  the  rich  nursery  mythology 
of  Hesiod,  which  was  not  broken  by  the  Ionic,  nor  hardly  by  all  the 
early  schools.  This  harmony  was  ruptured  by  Socrates,  Plato,  and 
Aristotle.  But  their  solution  of  the  tension  was  partial,  and  after  the 
decay  of  the  Greek  state,  and  the  bankruptcy  of  the  ancient  culture,  a 
sense  of  incubation  gave  place  to  the  Alexandrian  parusiamania  as  the 
transcendental  world  grew  paramount,  and  thus  paved  the  way  to  the 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        341 

contempt  of  reason,  the  passionate  cultivation  of  ignorance,  and  the 
repagination  and  repeasantization  of  Europe  by  monasticism  in  the 
nascent  period  of  the  new  consciousness  brought  by  Christendom  as 
it  slowly  came  to  wield  the  accumulated  resources  of  the  Western 
world. 

Savage  initiation  ceremonies — creeping  through  the  effigy  of  a 
sacred  cow  in  token  of  a  new  birth;  torture,  mutilation,  and  ascetic 
mortification  of  the  flesh  in  the  interest  of  a  larger  tribal  or  yet  higher 
spiritual  consciousness ;  inductions  to  civic  and  natural  as  superposed 
on  private  and  family  membership  and  duties ;  burial  and  resurgence 
from  baptismal  waters ;  renunciation  of  the  old  Adam  and  the  putting 
on  of  the  new  Christ,  and  all  the  vast  repertory  of  solemn,  artistic, 
symbolic,  allegorical,  and  metaphysical  rites,  descriptions,  similitudes, 
pilgrimages  of  man's  soul — all  witness  by  their  very  abundance  to  the 
manifold  significance  of  this  change  in  human  life,  although  each  is 
inadequate,  often  pathetically  so,  and  often  even  repulsively  gross 
from  the  standpoint  of  the  higher  psychology  which  seeks  to  grasp 
its  vast  range  and  scope  for  all  the  past,  present,  and  future  of  man's 
body  and  soul. 

Here,  perhaps  more  than  anywhere  else,  consciousness  is 
a  very  poor  witness  to  what  takes  place  in  the  abysses  of 
soul-life.  It  struggles  to  reflect,  describe,  realize  what  is  going 
on  below  its  threshold  and  beyond  its  ken.  It  strives  for 
clarification,  self-expression,  and  feels  that  otherwise  its  in- 
tegrity is  threatened  with  dissolution.  It  has  many  an  inkling, 
perhaps  even  in  the  form  of  dreams,  automatisms,  psychic 
tensions,  and  various  invasions  from  subjacent  meristic  strata 
that  witness  to  the  fact  of  a  ferment,  that  it  is  powerless 
to  explain,  although  the  curtain  sometimes  seems  to  rift  or 
lift  a  little.  This  is  one  reason  why  the  remembered  religious 
experiences  of  individuals  are  so  pitifully  fragmentary  and 
puerile,  and  often  so  absurdly  mistaken  as  to  cause,  process, 
issue,  and  object.  To  the  individual  it  means  so  much,  and 
to  all  others  so  little.  This  is  why  there  often  seem  breaks 
in  character  and  reversals  of  motive  that  appear  so  abrupt ; 
why  trivial  incidents  loom  up  so  large  in  the  mist;  v/hy  they 
grow  so  in  the  telling  as  the  years  go  by,  as  if  they  really 
expressed  the  experiences  that  once  found  in  them  some 
momentary  and  accidental  vent ;  hence,  too,  their  intensity 
under  the  great  subliminal  stress.  The  value  of  collections 
of  individual  narrations  is  that,  by  tabulation,  comparison,  etc., 
the  fragments  may  be  so  ordered  and  systematized  by  indue- 


Z^2  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

tion  as  together  to  furnish  a  basis  of  illation  to  the  larger 
unconscious  life,  on  which  consciousness  floats,  to  sound  and 
dredge  it,  explain  the  tides  and  currents,  map  its  depths  and 
shallows,  study  the  known  and  unknown  primal  forms  of  life 
that  inhabit  it,  and  better  learn  to  navigate  it.  Consciousness 
is  of  the  individual;  the  substratum  on  which  it  is  developed 
is  of  the  race.  Subconscious  processes  are  better  compacted, 
older,  more  inerrant.  By  their  brooding  and  incubation  the 
conscious  person  communes  with  the  species,  and  perhaps  even 
the  genus  to  which  he  belongs;  receives  messages  from  and 
perchance  occasionally  gives  them  to  it;  appeals  to  mighty 
soul  powers  not  his  own,  but  which  are  so  wise,  benignant, 
and  energetic  that  he  is  perhaps  prone  to  the  pathetic  fallacy 
of  interpreting  the  subhuman  as  superhuman,  if,  like  the 
English  Psychic  Researchers,  he  has  no  intimation  of  the 
wisdom,  depth  below  depth,  that  has  been  organized  into  our 
bodies,  brains,  automatisms,  and  instincts,  which  is  vastly  and 
incomparably  greater  than  all  that  is  in  the  consciousness  of 
all  men  now  living  combined,  and  if  he  deems  the  surface  phe- 
nomena in  his  own  sapient  soul  to  be  its  essential  experience. 
This  is  the  larger  self,  if  such  an  anthropomorphizing,  self- 
idolatrous  term  may  be  used,  with  which  we  are  continuous. 
It  is  beneath,  and  not  above  us,  immanent  and  not  transcen- 
dent, and  if  only  rightly  interpreted  it  is  veridical  in  a  sense 
and  degree  our  voluble  ratiocination  knows  not  of.  Its  best 
evolution  is  by  the  methods  of  lysis  and  not  those  of  crisis. 
It  answers  prayers  because  it  made  them.  What  successfully 
appeals  to  it  and  receives  its  sanction,  we  call  sacred,  divine, 
biblical,  and  its  messages  are  revelations.  It  is  cosmocatop- 
tric,  and  the  most  central  of  all  biologic  changes  which  we 
are  now  considering,  and  the  motifs  of  the  choicest  human 
documents  are  due  to  its  initiative  and  control. 

V.  But  if  there  are  now  happily  many  approximations  to 
larger  interpretations  of  conversion,  there  are  still  many 
reductive  tendencies.  In  fact  and  nature,  all  the  adolescent 
decade  is  none  too  long  for  its  full  development,  even  in 
favored  cases.  ( i )  There  are  still  theologians  who  deem  it 
instantaneous,  as  if  the  soul  were  shocked  into  righteousness 
by  a  fulminating,  convulsive  change  like  the  perhaps  epileptic 
Paul.    An  aura  more  or  less  describable,  a  spasm,  and  presto. 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        343 

all  is  changed,  as  if  the  old  soul  were  torn  out  and  another 
inserted  in  its  place.  It  is  all  the  work  of  the  Holy  Spirit, 
which,  we  have  been  told,  does  not  necessarily  work  in  time. 
According  to  this  paroxysmal  view,  the  process  is  miraculous, 
but,  in  fact,  it  seems  so  only  because  its  continuity  is  so 
shattered  in  consciousness.  Even  where  the  change  seems 
gradual,  there  must  be  a  moment,  we  are  told,  when  the 
powers  of  good  become  stronger  than  those  of  evil,  and  then 
the  lever  tips,  and  though  it  does  so  ever  so  slowly  there  is 
a  mathematical  and  epochful  moment,  especially  in  saltatory 
temperaments,  full  of  latent  reflexibility,  when  it  crosses 
the  absolute  horizontal  and  dips  the  other  way.  In  practise, 
however,  most  would  concede  hours,  perhaps  days,  weeks,  and 
even  months,  to  the  processes.  But  the  intemperate  haste  for 
speedy  results  is  strong.  The  danger  of  delay,  the  sympathy 
that  would  shorten  the  period  of  pain  and  struggle,  the  haste 
to  get  it  well  over  and  to  pass  on  to  the  cultivation  of  the  fruits 
of  the  Spirit  and  the  Christian  graces  as  a  post-graduate 
course,  all  act  as  accelerants.  No  informed  mind  can  for 
a  moment  doubt  the  vast  good  that  sudden  conversions  have 
wrought,  or  that  this  method  has  reclaimed  many  otherwise 
unreached.  There  are  innumerable  ways,  all  perhaps  good, 
and  every  new  form  means  more  feet  led  in  the  way  of  salva- 
tion. But  for  most,  and  those  probably  on  the  whole  the  best, 
the  religious  change  is  a  growth  rather  than  a  conquest. 

(2)  Again,  there  is  a  tendency  to  intensify  the  symptoms 
of  this  change  to  acute  form,  to  represent  depravity  as  total, 
the  danger  great,  the  conflict  with  sin  bitter,  to  appeal  to  fear, 
to  represent  God  as  angry  and  hardly  restraining  himself  from 
inflicting  condign  punishment,  to  encourage  violence  in 
storming  the  heavenly  kingdom,  to  agonize  in  prayer,  and  to 
maximize  the  joy  and  rapture  of  deliverance,  etc.  Many  nar- 
ratives of  conversion  told  by  exhorters  and  by  converts  about 
themselves  are  not  only  sensational  and  yellow  but  twice 
exaggerated,  first  from  temperamental  and  environmental 
causes,  and  still  more  from  telling  and  retelling  them.  Here 
the  convert  meets  at  the  outset  of  the  new  life  a  very  strong 
temptation  to  make  himself  interesting.  How  subtly,  yet  un- 
consciously, he  feels  his  way  along  lines  of  most  approval  in  the 
callow    stage   of   the   first   prayer-meetings,    while   trying   to 


344  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

formulate  some  account  of  the  tumult  he  has  passed  through 
that  shall  establish  its  legitimacy  and  impress  and  help  others. 
He  would  be  truthful,  but  who  can  describe  feelings,  especially 
of  an  utterly  new  kind  and  degree  ?  Perhaps  he  would  prefer 
silence  and  retirement  awhile  for  orientation,  it  is  all  so 
thymetic  and  pectoral,  and  to  grow  calm  from  the  maenadic 
muse  that  seized  and  transported  him  into  another  world. 
But  the  new  form  of  his  dimorphic  personality  can  not  be 
deemed  securely  established  till  he  has  "  borne  witness,"  so 
he  develops  the  legend  or  idyl  of  his  allotropism,  and  into  it 
weaves  the  life  story  of  his  romance  first  with  Apollyon  and 
then  with  the  Holy  Ghost.  At  such  an  hour  and  place,  and 
in  such  a  setting  of  circumstances,  his  soul  took  its  one  flight 
from  death  to  life.  The  grand  event  of  his  entire  existence  is 
in  the  past,  and  so  hot  was  the  battle  that  the  great  fatigue  of 
early  senescence  begins  prematurely  to  settle. 

(3)  Very  strong  in  the  past  have  been  the  tendencies  to 
normalize  the  processes,  to  order  the  stages,  to  convention- 
alize it  all,  to  set  up  one  or  more  orthodox  and  theological 
types  that  should  be  accepted  as  current  coin,  and  so  to  pre- 
scribe its  onset,  -progress,  and  outcome.  Where  this  has  been 
done,  attempts  to  erect  new  standards  have  caused  the  greatest 
disturbance,  like  threatening  the  validity  of  titles,  or  disturb- 
ing social  rank  and  classes.  Candidates  are  cross-examined 
on  the  precise  nature  of  their  subjective  evidences  of  personal 
piety.  This  tends  to  throw  the  stress  of  the  test  upon  belief 
even  more  than  feeling,  because  it  is  more  examinable  and 
inclines  to  the  undue  emphasis  of  doctrinal  soundness.  But 
recent  studies  abundantly  show  that  profoundly  religious  and 
even  exceptionally  Christian  lives  are  led  by  those  who  have 
almost  any  or  almost  no  belief.  Lives  have  been  described, 
which  few  could  for  a  moment  doubt  were  such,  in  which  no 
real  belief  in  any  article  of  the  creed,  even  God  or  another 
life,  as  Leuba  shows,  could  be  found.  Many  pious  souls, 
whom  the  Church  could  ill  afford  to  lose,  are  utterly  incapable 
of  assimilating  dogma  of  any  kind.  They  have  a  more  vital 
charge  to  keep.  Service  in  the  present  life  absorbs  all  their 
energies,  and  they  have  no  time  to  care  for  another.  "  One 
life  at  a  time  "  is  their  unspoken  motto.  They  are  sure  of 
another  life  if  there  is  one  and  if  that  is  best,  and  if  not,  why, 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        345 

they  mean  to  so  wear  themselves  out  in  Christian  work  that 
eternal  sleep  will  be  no  whit  less  welcome.  As  to  God,  it  is 
a  far  cry.  How  can  we  know?  The  world  is  lawful,  beau- 
tiful, full  of  things  to  do  and  undo.  Let  theologians  busy 
themselves  about  such  great,  curious,  and  technical  questions, 
and  the  workers  will  wish  and  hope  they  are  right.  If 
he  exists,  he  will  neither  feel  toward  nor  treat  us  differently 
whether  we  know  much  or  nothing  of  him.  If  his  nature 
accords  with  the  character  men  give  him,  he  wants  us  to  do 
good  to  our  fellow  beings,  and  this  such  Christians  chiefly 
love  to  do  whether  he  is  or  no,  for  they  have  experienced  the 
great  conversion  from  love  of  self  to  love  of  others,  although 
how,  or  by  what  agency,  they  neither  know  nor  care. 

E.  M.  Robinson  well  portrays  the  different  and  characteristic  ways 
in  which  youth  enter  the  religious  life.  Some  plunge  in  with  definite 
decision,  settling  once  for  all  the  problem  of  their  relations  to  God 
and  of  right  and  wrong;  some  wade  in  deliberately  and  cautiously, 
step  by  step ;  some  run  in  a  little  way  and  then  come  out  again,  till 
at  last  they  swim  off;  some  are  forced  in,  and  being  in,  may  stay  or 
frantically  struggle  to  get  out;  while  some  simply  sit  on  the  beach 
and  let  the  tide  rise  about  them  and  float  them  off.  It  would  also 
seem  from  Coe's  seventy-seven  cases  that  the  sanguine  or  prompt 
and  weak  temperament  is  most  favorable,  the  melancholic  or  slow 
and  intense  next,  and  the  choleric  and  phlegmatic  least  predisposed 
to  conversion ;  that  expectation  plays  an  important  role  and  that  each 
type  has  its  own  way.  If  something  is  expected  which  the  tempera- 
ment makes  impossible,  there  is,  of  course,  disappointment.  For  some 
it  may  be  guided  by  external  ritual,  and  for  others  be  purely  spontane- 
ous. It  may  be  almost  solely  ethical  in  the  sphere  of  will  and  conduct, 
or  emotional  and  with  the  motivation  of  natural  affection.  Its  stages 
may  slowly  devolve  through  a  lifetime  or  be  almost  momentary.  The 
change  it  works  may  be  superficial  or  profound,  complete  or  partial ; 
attended  by  innumerable  symptoms  or  none;  transient  or  permanent; 
arrested  at  any  stage  for  a  time  or  for  good ;  or  may  be  so  unconscious 
and  gradual  as  to  be  unsuspected.  It  may  be  genuine,  without  any  rag 
of  creed,  in  those  who  never  heard  of  the  Christian  name  or  knew  that 
the  necessity  was  even  urged  upon  men. 

(4)  It  may  suffer  displacement  up  and  down  the  age 
scale.  Its  true  place  is  in  adolescent  years.  Rightly  under- 
stood, it  gives  fulness  and  completeness  to  the  moral  changes 
of  these  years  as  nothing  else  can  do.  At  this  time,  as  we  saw, 
are  the  great  temptations,  most  incipient  criminality  and  vice, 


346  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

and  all  races,  even  the  lowest,  focus  all  their  educational 
efforts  here.  It  is  especially  the  religious  teacher's  great  op- 
portunity. This  is  its  nascent  period.  Thus  both  pre-  and  post- 
maturity involve  waste.  If  too  early,  it  is  sure  to  be  super- 
ficial and  incomplete,  and  dwarfed  afterward  by  childish  asso- 
ciations. To  repeat  John  Stuart  Mill's  well-worn  simile,  such 
children  are  like  too  early  risers,  conceited  all  the  forenoon 
of  life  and  stupid  and  uninteresting  all  its  afternoon  and  even- 
ing. Precocious  revivalism  is  a  little  like  teaching  school 
children  the  duties  and  responsibilities  of  married  life.  At 
their  very  best,  falsetto  notes  like  the  piping  of  treble  are 
always  found  in  the  later  utterances,  if  not  in  the  lives  of  those 
prematurely  regenerated.  When  infant  voices  that  have 
shown  no  sign  of  mutation  are  encouraged  to  confess  or  pray 
in  the  terms  prescribed  for  the  very  young  by  a  child  revival- 
ist, "  I  am  covered  with  sin,"  "  the  leprosy  of  sin  is  in  my 
soul,"  *'  I  come  to  Thee  a  poor  lost  sinner,"  "  although  I  am 
but  a  child  I  am  very  wicked,"  something  is  very  wrong  with 
the  child,  its  teacher,  or  both.  It  is  usually  the  latter  that 
most  needs  our  prayers.  Indeed,  to  teach  such  a  litany  of  de- 
pravity before  its  day  seems  actually  immodest  and  sugges- 
tive. Conversion  at  too  tender  an  age,  at  best,  is  like  vaccina- 
tion with  the  mild  form  of  smallpox,  in  that  it  gives  immunity 
against  graver  forms  of  religious  infection  later  when  passion 
wakes  and  needs  its  full  and  undeflowered  force.  Perhaps 
this  is  the  grossest  case  of  the  vast  educational  waste  of  trying 
to  pick  open  buds  before  they  are  ready  to  unfold,  or  teaching 
with  effort  and  labored  supervision  what  will  almost  or  quite 
come  of  itself  later  when  interest  and  need  arise,  like  the 
propitious  moment  when  the  Holy  Spirit  knocks  at  the  door 
of  the  heart.  This  is  one  of  the  causes  of  the  traces  of  religious 
infantilism  so  often  found  in  the  lives  of  otherwise  mature 
adults. 

On  the  other  hand,  as  is  far  better  understood,  the  change 
may  come  too  late.  Happily,  it  rarely  harms,  however  post- 
mature its  subjects,  and  may  transform  those  grown  old  in 
sin  whom  nothing  else  can  help,  but  its  initiation  is  harder, 
its  completeness  rarer,  and  the  obstacles  to  its  every  stage 
greater.  It  may  have  to  rectify  vocation,  perhaps  with  suffer- 
ing to  the  family,  break  habits  and  associations  grown  in- 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        347 

veterate,  and  involves  going  back  to  the  branching  of  the 
ways  before  which  youth  normally  lingers  and  ponders. 
Hence,  the  physical  and  mental  strain  is  greater,  and  the  mor- 
bidities are  increased.  The  devil  in  each  of  us  has  had  time 
to  make  his  intrenchments  within  stronger,  and  has  grown 
worldly  wise  and  casuistical. 

These  tendencies  to  narrow  the  sweep  of  this  great  biotic 
law,  to  make  it  a  psychic  fetish,  a  neurosis,  a  ritual  of  initia- 
tion instead  of  a  norm  of  life,  till  nothing  more  needs  regen- 
eration than  both  the  theory  and  administration  of  regenera- 
tion itself,  have  had  many  sad  results.  They  often  tend  to 
cultivate  a  gushy,  religious  sentimentalism  of  a  unique  type 
that  evirates  character,  favor  flightiness,  unctuousness,  mobile 
and  superficial  sentiments,  incline  to  ultra-femininity  and  pa- 
theticism,  and  to  love  of  climaxes  that  react  to  apathy.  The 
cerebro-spinal  and  vaso-motor  system  is  ensanguined  in  those 
of  erethic  diathesis  by  temperamental  eloquence,  and  tempo- 
rary excitement  takes  precedence  over  impulsion  to  the  nearest 
duties.  Such  incitements  to  virtue  are  like  a  cloudburst  that 
only  slightly  irrigates  faith  or  works  which  need  its  refresh- 
ment, but  makes  the  soul  resemble  landscapes  where  droughts 
and  washouts  alternate  and  there  is  no  storage  system. 

Feeling  is  basal  and  central  in  the  new  psychology  of  the  soul,  but 
this  is  not  feeling  in  this  sense,  but  only  its  froth  and  sillibub.  Or, 
again,  the  healthful  sense  of  imperfection,  incompleteness,  oc  in- 
adequacy predisposes  to  focus  upon  some  specific  act  or  trait,  for  the 
youthful  intellect  is  very  concrete.  Single  and  often  petty  faiilts  are 
"  fetished  "  till  they  seem  heinous.  Youth  feel  baffled  or  dejected,  and 
this  suggests  demerit  or  even  penalty  and  fear,  that  may  be  acu- 
minated. Lack  of  robustness  of  health,  or  even  fatigue,  are  almost 
always  factors  and  often  dominant.  Anxiety,  especially  about  their 
life  work  or  the  future  generally,  easily  becomes  morbid.  Perhaps 
they  take  the  reconstruction  of  their  entire  moral  regimen  into  their 
hands  and  would  be  literally  and  absolutely  perfect.  This  stage  of 
legalism  often  appears  in  our  data.  They  would  do  their  full  and 
complete  duty.  But  there  are  many  duties  which  conflict,  and  some 
must  give  way.  Hence  casuistry  arises,  and  in  their  mental  awkward- 
ness they  are  driven  almost  to  desperation  by  problems  with  which 
their  feeble  powers  can  not  cope,  for  a  complete  system  of  duties  is 
postulated.  Again,  conscience  is  hypersensitized  and  every  little  act  is 
good  or  bad,  while  there  is  no  broad  domain  of  ethically  neutral  acts 
such  as  the  Stoics  strove  so  painfully  to  elaborate.  Either  or,  sic  aut 
non,  is  the  dilemma  that  suffices  for  all  decisions.     They  become  fin- 


348  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

icky,  overnice,  are  paralyzed  and  can  not  decide  at  trivial  emer- 
gencies. Rigid  standards  are  set  up  for  puerile  details.  This  Coe 
well  illustrates  by,  e.  g.,  a  girl  who  would  say  "  Thank  you  "  for  every 
pin,  every  flower  or  bouquet;  another  who,  having  vowed  to  pray 
each  day  at  ten,  would  drop  her  pencil  or  make  some  excuse  to  touch 
her  knees  to  the  floor  every  day  at  that  time ;  a  boy  who,  starting  from 
the  major  premise  that  everything  worth  doing  at  all  was  worth  doing 
well,  would  leave  the  reaper  he  was  running  in  the  field  and  go  back 
to  pick  up  every  head  of  wheat  behind ;  one  who  must  pull  every 
tiniest  weed  in  the  garden ;  children  who  copy  and  recopy  a  page 
many  times  if  there  is  the  least  error,  misplaced  dot,  comma,  etc.; 
one  who  in  a  choir  would  stop  singing  if  there  was  a  sentiment  in 
the  hymn  he  was  not  sure  he  believed,  etc.  In  this  state  of  nerves 
and  moral  touchiness,  youth  often  grow  irritable  and  have  bitter  and 
long  conflicts  with  their  tempers.  Fears  of  having  committed  the  un- 
pardonable sin,  in  rare  cases,  become  tragic.  There  is  a  veritable 
obsession  of  the  duty  of  deciding  by  some  inner  witness  or  outer 
token  whether  they  are  really  Christians,  or  what  vocation  to  adopt, 
and  they  often  feel  that  right  impels  them  to  do  something  they  dis- 
like or  are  unfitted  for.  The  moral  imperative  may  provoke  self- 
effacement  in  many  forms.  A  flitting  thought  of  a  possible  crime 
startles  them  with  the  dread  that  they  might  commit  it.  Thus  the 
young,  if  made  to  feel  a  moral  strain  to  which  they  can  not  adequately 
respond,  often  nag  themselves  into  crankiness,  which  suggests  the 
overscrupulosity  so  characteristic  of  some  forms  of  adolescent  de- 
generation, against  which  interesting  occupations,  objective  life, 
intelligent  sympathy  by  insightful  adults,  and  physical  hygiene,  are 
the  only  prophylactics. 

Sometimes  this  ethical  perversion  is  directed  to  others.  The  lives 
of  religious  people  are  found  wanting,  friends  are  criticized,  social 
forms  and  the  artificialities  of  life  are  keenly  felt  and  work  their 
disenchantments.  The  neophyte  would  reform  his  social  environment. 
His  insights  are  true  and  his  judgments  correct,  but  he  soon  finds 
that  he  can  no  more  reform  the  world  than  he  can  himself.  His 
mental  apercus  are  so  far  more  developed  than  his  will-power,  that 
he  feels  baffled,  rebuffed,  heated  by  social  frictions,  thrown  back  on 
himself,  whenever  he  tries  to  accomplish  things.  He  is  vitterly  unable 
to  meet  the  new  demands  he  makes  or  recognizes,  is  impatient  to 
satisfy  his  ideals,  can  make  no  form  of  adjustment  that  is  satis- 
factory, and  every  efferent  impetus  is  balked.  He  knows  and  feels 
great  things,  but  can  do  little  or  nothing.  He  feels  the  mighty  im- 
pulses of  the  everlasting  ought  and  is  ready  to  essay  heroic  tasks, 
but  can  bring  nothing  to  pass.  He  feels  himself  superior  in  penetra- 
tion but  very  inferior  in  execution.  All  that  he  really  could  accom- 
plish seems  mean  and  homely. 

Hence  some  form  of  renunciation  is  inevitable,  for  salvation  is 
not  by  works.  Thus  the  striver  may  relax  and  relapse  to  the  old  life 
of  habit  and  the  easiest  way,  and  perhaps  with  a  sense  of  wasted 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION        349 

effort  because  he  has  done  his  best  and  failed.  He  grows  indifferent, 
perhaps  cynical  toward  the  good  life,  or  possibly  revolts  and  makes 
evil  his  good,  and  plunges  into  self-indulgence.  There  is  often  an 
intercalary  stage  of  religious  and  ethical  neutrality  for  months  or 
years,  during  which  the  powers  below  consciousness  are  solving  all 
his  problems  by  their  slow  method  of  growth  and  all  unbeknown  to 
him,  till,  in  the  denouement,  he  is  taken  into  partnership  with  his 
own  under-soul  and  achieves  the  second  part  of  the  process  of  re- 
construction. Or,  again,  in  the  more  classical  type,  at  the  point  of 
defeat  and  bankruptcy  of  effort  to  be  wholly  good  and  do  all  duty, 
there  is  a  sense  of  surrender  to  some  deeper  powers  felt  to  exist  in  the 
soul.  There  is  recognition  of  older,  surer,  more  potent  agencies  than 
those  which  conscious  effort  can  command.  The  whole  case  is  non- 
suited in  the  lower  court  and  appeal  taken  to  a  higher  and  better  one. 
A  new  dynamism  arises  from  the  depths  of  the  soul  which  takes  the 
place  of  conscious  striving  and  seems  like  a  new  will  or  god  working 
in  us.  The  young  convert  feels  estranged  to  both  himself  and  others, 
because  he  is  different  from  what  he  had  so  long  been  before.  Hence 
he  is  prone  to  deem  himself  peculiar  and  not  like  others,  because 
unlike  his  former  self.  He  readily  regards  his  mutation  as  super- 
natural or  miraculous,  because  it  is  too  large  for  his  mind  to  interpret. 
There  is  a  changed  center  of  apperception.  All  these  are  normal 
growth  formulae,  and  all  failures  to  achieve  true  conversion  are  forms 
of  mental,  moral,  or  emotional  arrest  or  perversion,  while  every  good 
motive  or  example  of  this  age  of  life  is  an  incentive  to  it.  Thus  in 
religious  thought,  we  must  reverse  current  processes  and  argue  from 
fact  to  theory ;  from  below  upward ;  pass  from  man  to  God ;  look  to 
the  heart  to  explain  creeds  and  not  the  reverse,  for  all  religions  are 
formed  to  minister  to  human  needs.  Our  quest  should  be  from  what 
psychic  facts  did  faiths  arise.  Religion  is  of  the  emotion  and  instincts 
and  not  primarily  of  the  mind.  Buddhism  is  great  and  the  teachings 
of  Jesus  divine  because  each  codified  and  organized  a  higher  stage  of 
human  growth.  If  proof  is  needed  the  soul  of  belief  is  gone.  Sacred 
truth  is  that  which  rings  true  to  the  heart,  and  many  of  the  most  reli- 
gious people  and  the  greatest  doers  are  foolish  at  reasons.  Creeds  are 
but  crude  interpretations  of  wordless  music,  and  the  soul  responds  to 
the  great  religions  as  a  violin  rightly  tuned  responds  by  sympathetic 
vibration  to  an  orchestra.  The  thing  is  to  awaken  an  echo.  Faith  tells 
the  secrets  of  the  world  in  an  unknown  tongue,  and  Fielding  Hall 
argues  that  it  dies  out  with  natural  and  racial  fecundity. 

In  some  of  our  cases  this  psychic  growth  seems  to  be 
purely  spontaneous.  On  a  walk,  at  a  lesson,  there  is  a  sudden 
sense  of  a  new,  larger,  and  purer  life,  and  this  may  be  re- 
garded as  the  decisive  moment.  New  aspiration  which  may 
even  impel  ejaculatory  prayer,  new  insights,  ideals,  waves 
of  love,  resolves  to  do  duty  and  attain  perfection,  and  noble 


350  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

ambitions,  break  out  and  may  take  possession  of  life.  Or  in 
a  quiet  hour  comes  a  sense  of  moral  discontent  with  self,  or 
with  companions,  as  if  conscience  sprung  into  function,  or  a 
sense  of  increased  reality  of  the  world  or  of  greater  serious- 
ness of  life,  a  strange  feeling  of  dependence  upon  some  higher 
power,  a  passion  for  service.  Or  old  truths  open  up  new 
meanings,  perhaps  there  are  thrills  or  waves  of  joy  or  peace, 
reveries  and  even  dreams  grow  intense  almost  to  visions, 
phrases  are  automatically  formulated,  perhaps  spoken,  or,  in 
some  cases,  heard.  Again,  manifold  depressions  arise  no  less 
spontaneously.  Overblown  personal  vanity  is  suddenly  con- 
fronted by  a  feeling  of  inability  to  do  anything  worth  while 
and  fears  to  disappoint  all  friendly  expectation,  while  youth 
agonize  to  find  some  latent  talent  in  themselves.  They  feel 
themselves  dishonest,  impure,  slothful,  guilty,  or  revengeful. 
Again  the  world  recedes,  seems  afar,  unreal,  indifferent,  and 
mechanical,  so  that  all  interest  dies  or  all  is  a  baffling  mystery. 
God  suddenly  seems  gone,  or  is  bad  because  he  made  hell.  Is 
there  any  truth  or  standard,  or  can  I  attain  it?  is  a  question 
that  often  marks  the  moment  when,  turning  from  the  childish 
preoccupation  with  particular  objects,  the  adolescent  passion 
for  the  general  and  universal  arises  and  a  love  of  logic  and 
self-analysis  and  an  abhorrence  of  compromise  come  to  the 
surface.  All  this  is,  as  Lipsius  has  well  said,  essentially  ''  a 
natural  process  of  a  higher  order."  It  is  growth,  which  has  its 
own  dynamics  which  always  defies  ordinary  logic,  but  which 
here  seems  all  the  more  mysterious  because  it  is  into  a  higher 
nature,  somewhat  alien  to  all  that  had  preceded.  It  tends  to 
no  disorders  of  conscience  or  of  life. 

In  an  atmosphere  charged  with  religiosity  each  of  these  may  be 
interpreted  by  the  individual  as  the  beginning  or  as  the  substance  of 
conversion  and  described  in  its  technical  phrases.  Among  Coe's  and 
other  cases,  one  dreamed  of  taking  an  examination  in  his  fitness  to 
go  to  heaven;  one  had  a  vision  of  a  broad  and  narrow  way,  saw  a 
light  out  of  a  tomb,  had  a  sense  of  presence,  of  some  one  dictating 
thoughts,  heard  an  inner  voice,  saw  a  luminous  eye  in  the  ceiling, 
had  a  sense  of  being  under  two  influences,  one  good  and  one  bad,  but 
both  objective;  one  experienced  an  outburst  of  defiance  to  God,  shak- 
ing the  fist  at  the  sky  and  telling  him  how  unjust  and  hated  he  was. 
The  heart  is  often  now  too  much  for  the  intellect  suggesting  neurot- 
icism,  and  feeble  minds  often  develop  casuistry,  magnifying  innocent 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CON\^RSION        35 1 

things  to  sins  of  deepest  dye,  or  a  finicky  susceptibility  "  showing  the 
undue  dominance  of  a  major  premise."  When  the  brotherhood  of 
man  dawns,  young  men  in  their  warm  beds  are  tortured  into  sleep- 
lessness by  the  thought  that  some  of  their  fellow  men  are  cold.*  A 
girl  of  twelve,  on  a  visit,  thought  it  sinful  not  to  tell  her  hostess  if 
she  had  taken  a  pin.  Another  could  not  decide  on  fine  points  of  ex- 
pression in  a  composition  and  worked  herself  almost  into  a  frenzy. 
Another  argued  with  herself  on  all  small  matters,  and  only  learned  to 
make  prompt  decisions  when  they  were  necessary  by  riding  a  bicycle. 
A  young  girl,  impressed  by  a  neighbor's  suicide,  was  overwhelmed 
with  the  fear  lest  she  should  kill  her  mother,  which  she  quelled  by 
telling  her  of  it.  Another  had  fear  of  every  post,  avoided  tracks,  and 
suffered  a  long  hydrophobia. 

VI.  What  contrast  can  be  greater  than  when  we  turn 
from  these  grimaces  and  tweaks  of  rehgiosity,  to  regard  con- 
version as  the  philosophy  of  history  and  rehgion  and  the  germ 
of  all  educational  systems  ?  I  have  collected  and  have  before 
me  forty-two  definitions  of  religion.  They  are  as  varied  as 
the  descriptions  of  religious  experience.  For  some  authorities 
it  is  essentially  noetic;  for  others  it  is  in  the  realm  of  feeling 
or  volition;  for  others  it  is  chiefly  moral.  All  are  instructive, 
or  at  least  suggestive,  but  they,  too,  are  so  very  diverse  and 
sometimes  so  contradictory  as  to  be  but  broken  lights,  per- 
haps because  they  also  largely  rest,  as  religion  is  peculiarly 
prone  to  do,  upon  individual  differences  of  character  and  life. 
If  so,  they  are  valuable  only  as  bases  of  classification,  or  as 
data  and  material  toward  a  real  definition.  Pending  this.  I 
suggest  that  religion  may  be  described  from  the  view-point 
of  psychology  as  favoring  the  old  and  now  often  discarded 
etymology  of  the  word  religion,  as  rebinding,  bringing  back, 
or  as  restoration.  As  natural,  it  is  reestablished  unity  with 
nature ;  as  ethical,  a  reunion  of  conduct  with  conscience ; 
as  theoretical,  it  is  a  re-at-one-ment  of  the  mind  with  truth ; 
as  feeling,  it  is  the  ecstatic  closing  in  again  of  the  highest 
love  with  its  supreme  object,  or  fresh  impulse  along  a  for- 
saken but  recovered  path.  The  common  element  is  atone- 
ment with  implication  of  previous  estrangement  or  heteri- 
zation,  the  ecstatic  closing  in  by  faith  or  intuition  with 
what  is  felt  to  be  normative  and  central.    The  heart  finds  ob- 

1  Coe :  pp.  68,  69. 


352  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

jects,  the  will  duties,  and  the  intellect  truths  to  adequately 
and  truly  express  them,  but  all  after  more  or  less  jeopardy  or 
loss.  The  reunion  must  be  in  the  field  of  the  higher  nature, 
and  must  generally  be  achieved  with  eflort  and  anxiety.  How 
man  came  to  deviate  from  his  ideal,  or  the  cause  and  extent 
of  his  departure  from  it;  the  form  under  which  the  ideal  is 
conceived,  whether  subjectively  or  objectively;  how  the 
rapprochement  is  begun;  whether  the  process  is  transcendent 
or  immanent,  objective  or  subjective — important  as  they  are 
for  cult,  theory,  conduct,  sentiment — are  less  central.  Re- 
ligion is  the  reinstallation  of  the  individual  or  the  race  into 
its  true  place  in  the  world,  recovery  to  health  or  wholeness. 
Always  and  everywhere  the  i^W-motif  is  present,  however  far 
in  the  background,  and  joy  is  always  felt  at  the  reascent. 

The  very  idea  of  catholicity,  Bible,  and  even  religion 
itself,  means  consensus,  and  assumes  the  same  fundamental 
needs,  instincts,  and  experiences  for  all.  Always  there  was 
a  primitive  state  of  unity,  harmony,  joy,  innocence;  then  a 
tension,  a  sense  of  error,  loss,  estrangement  or  guilt,  decay, 
fear;  then  something  once  more  or  less  integral  or  dear  is 
dropped,  sacrificed,  alienated,  hated;  thence  results  new  life, 
Joy,  love,  and  restoration ;  and  lastly,  there  is  growth  along 
new  lines.  These  are  cardinal,  and  each  stage  has  countless 
interpretations.  The  primitive  state  may  be  materially  con- 
ceived as  one  of  nature,  idyllic  innocence,  or  instinct,  and  vari- 
ously located  in  time  and  place,  or  as  a  psychic  condition.  Its 
loss  has  been  slight  or  total,  ascribed  to  many  internal,  exter- 
nal, and  even  transcendental  causes,  thought  to  be  objective 
and  historic,  or  subjective  and  ideal,  as  deviation  from  a  norm 
or  disobedience  of  the  commands  of  an  outraged  Deity.  The 
sense  of  insufficiency  may  deepen  to  demerit  and  ill-desert, 
reaching  even  a  passion  for  punishment,  not  merely  for  pur- 
gation but  also  for  retribution,  that  justice  may  be  done;  or 
a  hunger  may  arise,  no  less  intense,  for  the  disclosure  of  a 
better  way  and  strength  to  walk  in  it.  The  third  stage  has 
been  described  as  losing  a  burden ;  the  surrender  of  a  per- 
verse will ;  the  mortification  of  the  body,  or  even  the  loss  of 
an  offending  member;  the  sacrifice  of  possession,  career, 
friends,  or  poverty,  chastity,  and  obedience ;  the  abandonment 
of  culture  and  knowledge,  or  the  limitation  of  science ;  the  an- 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION         353 

nihilation  of  will  and  desire;  the  reversal  of  former  loves,  and 
ambition,  or  the  substitution  of  a  passionate  passivity  in  their 
place,  as  the  molt  of  the  old  self  had  to  be  more  or  less  deep 
or  complete.  The  fourth  stage  begins  with  a  sense  of  salvage 
of  something  precious  from  the  wreck.  Despite  all  the  loss, 
there  is  a  reservoir  of  life  abounding  that  yet  wells  up  from 
its  deep  springs,  which  may  be  formulated  as  a  biological 
gift  of  nature  or  as  by  divine  grace,  with  an  hedonic  sweet- 
ness at  the  root  that  may  make  us  jubilant  in  chains,  disease, 
pain,  calamity,  or  even  death.  It  is  this  euphoria  of  the  soul's 
life  that  transcends  every  gratification  of  sense,  possession, 
ambition,  etc.,  as  far  as  the  life  of  the  race  upon  which  the  soul 
enters  transcends  that  of  the  individual.  Lastly,  the  sense  of 
growth  and  progress  to  ever  new  and  higher  planes,  which 
has  made  every  conception  of  evolution  so  fascinating,  is  es- 
sential to  the  vitality  of  interest,  curiosity,  love,  achievement, 
and  of  all  our  powers.  All  these  are  phases  of  the  great 
change  of  base  from  the  egoism,  normal  and  necessary  to  the 
first  stage  of  human  life,  to  the  self-subordination  of  the  stage 
of  philoprogenitive  maturity  which  is  ripening  to  die  for  what 
it  lives  for,  where  love  has  done  its  perfect  work  and  self  has 
"  passed  to  music  out  of  sight,"  and  where  the  Platonic  eros, 
Pauline  charity.  Buddhistic  sympathy  and  pity,  or  Jesus's  en- 
thusiasm for  humanity,  that  loves  the  Lord  and  neighbors 
with  all  mind,  might,  and  strength,  have  taken  its  place. 
What  more  has  life  to  give  or  its  wisdom  to  teach? 

There  is  a  sense  in  which  the  story  of  primitive  man,  from 
the  troglodytes  up,  is  a  long  passion  history.  For  the  most 
part,  what  we  call  the  prehistoric  period  is  so  because  it  is  as 
unhistorical  as  the  story  of  kites  and  hawks.  The  struggle 
for  survival,  beginning  with  the  stern  law  in  the  animal 
world,  Eat  or  be  eaten,  shows  that  man  has  been  a  wolf  to 
his  fellow  man.  The  infant  comes  crying  into  the  world  with 
the  pain-field  at  first  larger  than  the  pleasure-field.  The  rem- 
nant that  survives  is  small ;  the  ape  and  the  tiger  in  man's 
nature  have  died  hard,  or  too  often  still  survive.  The  best  of 
us  carry  a  heavy  handicap  of  biological  sin  from  our  ancestors. 
Tragic  guilt  in  classic  drama,  like  the  curse  of  Atreus's  house, 
a  theme  now  revived  in  drama  by  Ibsen,  Hoffman,  and  others, 
exhibits  the  physiological  effects  of  the  errors  or  vices  of  the 


354  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

past.  Lucretius  pities  the  estate  of  man  craven  by  fear  and 
his  soul  darkened  by  superstition.  Theology  lately  taught 
that  depravity  may  be  total,  and  that,  for  most,  the  sufferings 
of  this  world  culminate  in  transcendental  torture  hereafter. 
At  best,  life  is  short;  man  is  preyed  upon  by  hundreds  of 
diseases  officially  catalogued ;  death  is  sure  and  often  comes  as 
a  relief.  The  inevitable  hour,  to  many  world-sick  souls,  makes 
every  tick  of  the  clock  pathetic  and  the  very  lapse  of  time 
itself  pitiful.  The  high  aspirations  and  ambitions  of  adoles- 
cence shrivel  as  life  advances,  and  because  many  of  its  prom- 
ises are  unfulfilled,  philosophers  have  urged  that  unless  there 
be  immortality  our  nature  is  a  lie.  Modern  industry  does  not 
fit  the  hygienic  needs  of  the  body,  nor  mental  work  satisfy 
those  of  the  soul.  Monsters  of  cruelty  and  rapacity  have 
been  let  loose  as  scourges  of  mankind  and  enemies  of  the  hu- 
man race,  and  thus  melancholy  has  abundant  food  to  batten  on. 
Many  now  urge  that  our  race  is  decadent  and  degenerate,  and 
even  impeach  modern  civilization.  The  wise  men  suffer  from 
an  ignorance  that  is  unfathomable,  and  to  breaking  hearts 
it  has  almost  seemed  as  if  man  were  but  a  parasite  upon  this 
clod  of  earth,  whom  the  gods,  if  there  be  any,  could  not  see  with 
a  microscope  even  if  they  wished  to.  Thus  even  joy  and  beauty 
are  pathic  and  have  a  trace  of  woe  in  them,  or  even  should  not 
have  been,  because  they  torture  man  with  a  sense  of  what  is  so 
much  better  than  he  can  possibly  attain.  So  fallen  is  man, 
growing  ever  farther  from  heaven  as  he  leaves  childhood  be- 
hind, that  some,  like  Tithonus,  would  almost  pray  the  gods 
to  take  back  their  gift  of  immortality.  World-woe  may  re- 
gard creation  itself  as  a  blunder  or  a  crime,  and  regret  and 
remorse  not  only  rob  man  of  all  hope  and  self-respect,  but 
make  autumn  and  even  twilight  ominously  bodeful  of  his 
darkening  doom.  If  man  be  not  an  utterly  lost  and  fallen 
creature,  he  is  at  least  wretched  and  an  object  of  pity  to 
himself. 

Now  man's  self-pity  and  sense  of  his  own  loss  and  imper- 
fection are  reflected,  projected,  ejected,  or  objectified  in  the 
transcendental  realm  as  ill-will,  anger,  or  even  among  the 
Greeks  as  jealousy  of  the  gods,  in  fear  of  whom  most  have  grov- 
eled, and  against  whom  only  a  few  Titanic  souls  have  rebelled. 
But  as  human  conditions  slowly  ameliorated  and  man  asserted 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION         355 

his  dominion  over  beasts  and  over  nature,  we  find,  besides 
enmity,  traces  of  pity  in  the  gods  and  demigods  whom  he 
reveres.  Buddha  was  smitten  with  the  anguish  of  pathos  at 
the  thought  of  death,  evil,  and  finitude,  so  that,  abandoning 
all  that  makes  life  attractive  for  most,  he  sought  to  find  a 
way  out  to  peace.  The  labors  of  Hercules,  Theseus,  and 
Prometheus  were  merciful  and  sympathetic  acts.  Jove  can 
remit  his  thunder  and  Jehovah  grow  slow  to  anger  and  com- 
passionate upon  the  intercession  of  his  favorites.  Thor, 
Siegfried,  and  even  Beowulf,  and  many  a  culture  hero,  have 
waged  war  against  the  enemies  of  man,  and  deep  in  the  popu- 
lar consciousness  is  the  idea  that  the  great  souls,  the  saviors 
of  the  race  from  evil,  who  have  died,  may  some  time  return 
to  right  things;  reward  those  that  have  suffered  unjustly,  or 
become  intercessors  with  higher  powers.  Indeed,  all  great 
men  and  heroes  have  a  soteriological  function  in  the  world. 
Wherever  leaders  appear,  their  followers  are  more  or  less  pro- 
tected and  sheltered  in  their  shadow.  Those  who  advance  the 
kingdom  of  man  by  intellectual  achievement,  discovery,  in- 
vention, teaching  how  to  think  the  world  more  truly  and 
economically ;  light-bearers  who  become  the  hermits  and  per- 
haps the  martyrs  of  truth ;  reformers,  legislators,  founders  of 
religions,  who  reconstruct  society  on  higher  levels;  the  great 
editors  and  re-editors  of  the  sacred  traditions  of  the  race  into 
deathless  classic  form;  all  who  live  out  the  inner  life  of  con- 
viction ;  W'ho  are  called,  sent,  or  commissioned  by  the  evolu- 
tionary push  upward,  which  is  the  oracle  of  the  soul — all  these 
are  immortal  in  the  sense  that  their  work  is  deathless ;  and 
when  we  reflect  on  what  each  century  would  have  been  with- 
out a  few,  or,  at  best,  a  few  dozen  leaders,  we  may  well  call 
them  the  caryatides  in  the  temple  of  humanity,  the  true 
aristarchy,  and,  in  a  way,  the  saviors  of  man,  because  express- 
ing more  fully  his  inner  vocation.  Many  if  not  most  of  these 
have  loved  their  task  better  than  life,  have  helped  save  men 
from  despair  by  widening  the  dominion  of  man  and  enrich- 
ing his  life;  have  been  comforters,  and  all  who  live  in  their 
companionship,  though  it  be  across  the  centuries,  are  branches 
of  a  true  vine.  Into  their  hands  the  destinies  of  the  world 
have  been  largely  committed,  and  its  history  is  to  a  great  ex- 
tent that  of  their  own  thoughts  and  achievements.     It  would 


35 6  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

be  a  bold  task,  far  more  so  than  to  designate  the  hundred  or 
thousand  best  books,  to  name  these  leaders,  as  Comte  attempts 
in  his  worship  of  humanity.  But  while  these  men  are  the  best 
possessions  of  the  world,  it  will  never  worship  them.  While 
these  names  are  revered  as  the  strong  are  instinctively  vener- 
ated by  the  weak,  and  while  the  lives  of  many  of  them  are 
pathetic  enough,  service  to  the  race  has  not  always  been  the 
all-dominating  motive,  and  heroes  scorn  to  either  give  or  take 
pity.  Like  Nietzsche's  Zarathustra,  they  would  so  resent  it 
that  to  be  pitied  even  by  the  gods  would  be  matter  for  revenge, 
because  a  being  who  could  pity  would  lack  due  respect  for 
the  object  of  his  pity,  and  the  latter  would  regard  it  as  an 
insult.  Only  the  weak  crave  it.  Beggars  show  their  sores 
and  tell  their  stories,  often  more  characteristic  than  their 
names  or  photographs.  Weak  women  invent  and  group 
symptoms  to  excite  the  interest  of  doctors  from  an  uncon- 
scious craving  that  accepts  pity  as  a  pinchbeck  substitute  for 
love.  There  is  a  real  inebriation  of  pity,  too,  that  makes  it 
infectious.  It  seemed  to  the  Stoic  sage  a  disease,  and  Aristotle 
thought  that,  like  fear,  it  needed  purgation  in  the  drama  and 
otherwise,  lest  it  grow  too  strong  and  overmaster  the  serenity 
and  dignity  of  the  philosophical  mind.  Spinoza  thought  it 
unworthy,  because  it  was  passive,  and  the  modern  world  knows 
that  it  may  take  the  form  of  a  selfish  inebriation  that  finds 
no  vent  in  efforts  to  relieve  the  suffering  that  causes  it.  The 
very  bodily  manifestations,  or,  according  to  some  theories,  the 
somatic  causes  of  it,  are  unworthy ;  hence,  the  hero  is  content 
to  feel  that  no  evil  can  befall  a  good  man  living  or  dead,  and  is 
satisfied  to  have  attained  salvation  of  his  own  kind  in  his  own 
way ;  he  rarely  feels  the  pedagogical  motive  of  helping  others, 
and  perhaps  confirms  his  own  pride  with  some  evolutionary 
conception  that  the  lowly,  feeble,  and  weak  are  doomed  to 
extinction  to  make  room  for  the  elect  strong.  This,  especially 
in  our  overindividualized  age,  with  egotism  full-blown,  is 
one  factor  in  explaining  why  some  who  have  served  the  world 
best  have  neither  loved  mankind  nor  been  loved. 

One  characteristic  of  religious  genius,  however,  has  always 
been  its  wide  and  deep  human  sympathy  with  man  in  all 
stations.  In  them,  love,  which  is  perhaps  most  closely  asso- 
ciated with  the  care  of  the  young,  and  has  its  best  exempli- 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        357 

iication  in  maternal  sacrifice  and  in  the  purest  love  of  sex, 
lias  broadened  to  the  phratry,  deme,  curia,  gens,  tribe,  and 
clan,  and  to  the  poor,  sick,  and  defective;  it  has  developed  the 
function  of  helper,  and  in  its  culmination  has  passed  even  be- 
yond national  patriotism  to  philanthropy,  and,  perhaps,  even 
includes  animals,  and  indeed  all  being.  This  "  pathos  of 
resonance  "  a  recent  writer  (Lyon)  would  make  the  charac- 
teristic of  genius,  which  is  in  a  state  of  exquisitely  sensitized 
rapport  with  the  entire  human  environment  and  feels  keenly 
all  its  joy  and  woe.  This  culmination  is  the  result  of  long 
development,  because  pity  tends  to  be  almost  inversely  as  the 
square  of  the  psychic  distance  from  its  object.  The  young 
can  not  pity  because  they  lack  experience  with  pain ;  the  rich 
can  not  sympathize  with  the  poor  because  they  have  not  known 
poverty ;  and  the  poor  have  no  feeling  for  the  suffering  of  the 
rich.  Hence,  the  middle  station  in  life  is  most  favorable  for 
the  wholesome  exercise  of  this  sentiment.  Again,  we  see  this 
illustrated  in  the  crude  school  penalties  that  have  been  devised 
to  correct  it.  The  child  who  laughs  at  the  lame  has  his  own 
leg  tied,  or  if  he  scorns  the  hungry  is  himself  made  to  fast. 
Criminals  of  the  pitiless  type  who  torture  and  gloat  over  suf- 
fering that  should  cause  them  to  grieve,  are  arrested  at  this 
stage  and  are  callous  to  dolorific  sensations.  So  the  blind,  be- 
cause they  can  not  see  the  expressions  of  pain,  or  the  deaf, 
because  they  can  not  hear  them,  often  seem  cruel.  But  true 
sympathy,  as  Sutherland  has  shown,  is  as  basal  for  morals  as 
Jesus  made  love  the  basal  for  true  religion.  The  very  essence 
of  youth  consists  in  making  this  transit  completely  in  all  the 
departments  of  its  nature  and  effectively  insuring  itself  against 
relapse  to  either  miserablism  or  sin.  Every  life  is  stunted 
that  has  not  experienced  this  metamorphosis  in  some  form. 
If  the  Church  allows  it  to  fossilize,  psychology,  when  it  be- 
comes truly  biological,  will  preach  it.  Indeed,  the  chief  fact 
of  genetic  psychology  is  conversion,  a  real  and  momentous 
change  of  unsurpassed  scientific  and  practical  importance  and 
interest.  It  is  one  of  the  best  criteria  of  the  degree  of  culture 
of  different  ages,  races,  religions,  and  communities,  how  it  is 
conceived,  interpreted,  formulated,  and  administered.  It  is 
the  inner  meaning  of  the  savage  initiations  described  in  the 
last  chapter,  and  from  Paul's  change  of  belief  and  Augustine's 


358  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

change  of  life  and  creed  down  to  Scherer,  from  the  most 
formal  and  external  confirmation  down  to  the  most  convulsive 
colored  Methodistic  inner  revolution,  from  the  slowest  anti- 
crisis  theories  of  growth  to  the  most  cataleptic  instantaneous 
reversal  of  life,  the  change  has,  at  its  core,  an  unchanged  and 
constant  element  beneath  all  its  mutable  fashions  in  different 
ages,  races,  and  sects,  viz.,  growth  from  a  life  of  self  to  one 
of  service.  That  it  is  so  often  administered  by  those  who  have 
no  conception  of  its  vaster  significance,  or  who  lack  all  higher 
sanctity,  and  indeed  that  it  is  so  often  effective  when  con- 
ceived as  a  mere  formal  fetish  or  a  windy  mouthful  of  the 
most  hackneyed  and  time-worn  phrases,  shows  a  vitality  such 
as  no  other  human  culture-form  has  ever  possessed.  Even  the 
most  partial,  degenerate,  and  aberrant  forms  of  it,  while  they 
suggest  that  nothing  so  needs  regeneration  in  all  its  ways, 
means,  and  conceptions  as  regeneration,  still  have  incompa- 
rable efficiency  when  all  else  fails.  If  it  often  most  needs 
to  be  saved  from  its  friends,  it  still  more  needs  to  be  psycho- 
logically restated  and  vindicated  to  both  religious,  scientific,  and 
pedagogic  minds  that  have  undervalued  or  even  ignored  and 
scoffed  at  it. 

Rightly  understood,  the  historic  period  begins  with  the 
dawning  adolescence  of  the  race,  the  gospel  of  its  infancy  be- 
ing always  and  everywhere  more  or  less  mythic.  If  we  could 
organize  the  strategraphic  stages  of  the  development  of  con- 
sciousness for  all  the  historic  record,  somewhat  as  geologists 
have  organized  their  science;  if  we  could  correctly  describe 
the  emergence  of  conscious  mind  from  the  primeval  sea  of  in- 
stinct and  impulse ;  reconstruct  the  so  evanescent  "  soft  parts  " 
and  determine  all  the  genera  and  species  of  all  the  paleo- 
psychic  types  from  their  fossils  of  implements,  inscriptions, 
etymologies,  myths  and  rites,  degenerate,  neurotic  reflexes, 
excavated  stonework,  ancient  manuscripts,  etc. ;  eliminate  the 
effects  of  all  retrogression  periods,  of  erosion,  iconoclasm. 
the  fall  of  the  Roman  Empire,  all  dark  and  stationary  ages, 
as  well  as  the  submergence  effects  of  unrecorded  generations ; 
account  for  gaps,  flows,  convulsions,  inversion ;  point  to  the 
best  outcrop  for  every  stage  of  mental  evolution  down 
through  all  the  ethnographic  meso-  and  ceno-psychic  strata ; 
and  thus  see  some  realization  of  the  rude  but   magnificent 


ADOLESCENT   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION        359 

dream  dimly  and  very  diversely  described  by  Hobbes  as  the 
Leviathan,  by  Comte  as  la  grand  Etre,  by  Hegel  as  the  phe- 
nomenology of  mind,  by  Hartmann  as  that  of  morals,  by 
Lilienfeldt  and  Schafer  as  the  social  man,  of  which  each 
individual  is  a  cell  and  each  institution  an  organ,  etc...  the 
genetic  psychology  of  such  a  cosmic  homo-sapiens  would  be 
a  perfect,  normal,  and  uninterrupted  history  of  the  human 
soul.  His  association  processes  would  work  by  no  such  rudi- 
mentary laws  as  contiguity  in  time  and  space,  but  would  co- 
ordinate from  every  race  and  land  every  typical  expression 
by  word  or  deed  of  every  tendency,  element,  and  stage.  If  we 
could  mark  everything  upon  a  common  scale  as  Romanes 
would  correlate  animals,  infancy,  and  savagery,  we  should 
then  have  a  standard  to  measure  and  also  to  compare  progress 
in  different  civilizations;  all  categories  would  reveal  their 
stages  in  true  relations  of  superposition,  each,  as  in  an  ideal 
geologic  section,  marked  by  its  characteristic  types,  while  the 
diverse  experiences  of  man  would  not  seem  lacking  in  unity  or 
too  complex  to  have  any  character,  as  if  its  currents  flowed 
in  all  directions  and  any  culmination  were  possible,  but  life 
would  be  a  consistent,  continiK>us,  complete,  and  self-support- 
ing whole.  For  such  a  being,  a  citizen  of  all  times  and  climes, 
the  doer  of  all  deeds  and  the  thinker  of  all  thoughts,  the  logi- 
cal and  the  psychogenetic  order  could  never  disagree,  if,  in- 
deed, they  were  not  absolutely  and  always  identical.  The 
philosophy  of  history,  education,  and  life  would  be  their 
aspect  viewed  from  the  standpoint  of  such  a  perfect,  quasi 
theanthropic  consciousness,  and  man's  curriculum  would  be  a 
complete  organism  or  a  science  of  all  sciences,  while  his  phi- 
losophy would  not  be  an  eclectic  mosaic  of  glimpses,  like  a  dfs- 
sected  map  badly  recomposed,  but  the  true  organic  unity  long 
sought  but  still  delayed.  This  is  the  ideal  and  goal  of  the  psy- 
chogenetic movement,  which  cross-sections  previous  modes  of 
studying  the  human  soul.  The  achievements  of  geology  and 
of  all  the  cosmogenetic  sciences  have  not,  perhaps,  altogether 
required  the  labor  yet  needed  to  accomplish  this  work,  but 
the  currents  of  endeavor  already  setting  in  this  direction, 
and  the  actual  progress  now  being  made,  have  given  birth  to 
a  new  hope  in  the  world  already  big  with  promise.  This 
would  be  perpetual  growth  so  rapid  and  manifold  that,  by 


360  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

contrast  with  the  slow  and  often  broken  average  progress  of 
the  race,  any  section  of  it  would  seem  a  period  of  spring-tide 
and  youth,  of  reformation  and  Sabbath. 

Our  Bible  comes  nearer  fulfilling  this  ideal  than  any  other 
literature.  Despite  its  deviations,  redundancies,  and  gaps, 
when  measured  on  such  a  program,  it  depicts  the  development 
of  "  Man-soul  "  in  a  way  which,  if  it  is  rightly  understood, 
leaves  the  best  classics  of  the  best  races  far  behind.  The  Old 
Testament  begins  with  the  myth  of  cosmic  origins  and  passes 
to  the  agricultural  and  pastoral  stage  of  Cain  and  Abel,  the 
heroics  of  Abraham,  Isaac  and  Jacob,  Moses  and  Joshua,  the 
royalty  of  Saul,  David,  and  Solomon,  the  legal  stage  of  law 
and  justice  which  so  appeals  to  boys,  to  dawning  prophecy, 
etc.  It  is  all  objective,  strenuous,  full  of  incident,  battles, 
dramatic  incidents,  and  with  a  large  repertory  of  persons. 
There  is  fear,  anger,  jealousy,  hate,  but  not  love,  and  it  de- 
picts an  age  of  discipline  and  authority.  Later  comes  the 
adolescent  New  Testament  stage  with  its  altruistic  motives, 
and,  last,  the  philosophic  age  of  Pauline  and  other  doctrines 
which  appeal  to  the  intellect.  All  this  is  normal  and  in 
pedagogic  sequence,  the  order  of  which  should  not  be  reversed 
as  is  so  often  done  in  religious  teaching.  So,  too,  Jesus  should 
be  taught  first  as  a  kind,  noble,  but  natural  man,  for  the  at- 
tribute of  divinity  makes  him  uncanny  and  sometimes  mon- 
strous to  the  child.  But  later  the  supernatural  side  of  his 
being  is  necessary  to  fit  the  age  when  the  heart  and  intuition 
so  far  outstrip  the  callow  intellect.^ 

This  can  profitably  be  supplemented  at  certain  points  by 
some  of  the  best  material  from  other  great  ethnic  religions. 
The  passionate  affirmation  of  monotheism  in  Mohammedan- 
ism not  only  illustrates  how  passionate  may  be  the  belief  in 
one  God,  but  it  marks  perhaps  the  next  step  above  fetishism 
and  idolatry,  against  which  the  early  history  of  Israel  was  a 
long  struggle.  To  pass  from  this  lower  paganism  to  the  idea 
of  one  supreme  ruler  of  heaven  and  earth  is  a  revolutionary 
conversion  for,  e.  g.,  African  tribes,  where  Islam  missions  are 
now  making  such  rapid  advances,  as  well  as  teaching  temper- 

'  This  is  all  elaborated  with  reasons  in  my  article,  Some  Fundamental  Principles 
of  Sunday-School  and  Bible  Teaching.      Ped.  Sem.,  December,  1901. 


ADOLESCENT  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION        3^^ 

ance,  as  Christianity  does  not.  Confucianism  with  its 
reverence  of  age  and  worship  of  ancestors,  its  non-metaphys- 
ical, practical  religion  of  duties  and  forms  of  daily  life,  its 
legalism  and  social  conventionality,  may  fit  the  stage  of  boy- 
life  and  supplement  the  rules  of  Jewish  legislation.  At  the 
top  of  the  curve  of  life  comes  Christianity,  forever  supreme 
because  it  is  the  norm  for  the  apical  stage  of  human  develop- 
ment, glorifying  adolescence  and  glorified  by  it,  and  calcu- 
lated to  retain  and  conserve  youth  before  the  decline  of  the 
highest  powers  of  the  soul  in  maturity  and  age.  Buddhism, 
with  its  doctrine  of  universal  sympathy,  renunciation,  peace, 
poise,  and  repose,  has  special  messages  to  mature  men  and 
women.  The  religion  of  the  Brahmanic  Vedanta  is,  as  Max 
Miiller  shows,  the  form  of  piety  in  old  age  and  may  supple- 
ment or  at  least  tone  the  teachings  of  Paul  and  dogmatic 
theology,  for,  inconsistent  as  the  two  are  in  theory,  both  appeal 
to  the  nature  of  a  Ciceronian  old  age.^ 

From  all  this  I  draw  one  more  inference.  Jesus  sought 
to  fulfil  and  not  to  destroy,  and  so  Christianity  evolved  from 
Judaism  as  another  and  higher  dispensation  of  the  same  con- 
tent. In  Hegelian  phrase,  a  decadent  faith  was  sublated  in  a 
new  ascendent  one.  Renan  has  shown  how  persistent  in 
Christendom  has  been  the  idea  of  a  third  and  yet  higher  rev- 
elation related  to  ours  as  it  is  to  the  Hebrew  canon.  This 
achievement  of  Jesus  will  be  not  a  less  but  a  more  sublime 
pedagogic  masterpiece  if  it  is  regarded  not  only  as  in  itself 
the  most  precious  work  of  the  spirit  but  as  a  pattern  and  in- 
centive for  us  to  do  for  other  great  but  decaying  religions  what 
he  did  for  Judaism,  and  if  missionaries  strive  to  fulfil  rather 
than  to  destroy  them.  In  some  respects  they  are  as  susceptible 
of  being  a  propjedeutic  of  Christianity  as  Jesus  made  the  Old 
Testament  to  be.  They,  too,  are  full  of  symbols,  types,  and 
prophecies,  and  if  treated  by  the  method  of  sympathy  rather 
than  that  of  criticism  could  blossom  into  new  life  and  be  re- 
generated in  our  faith,  to  which  they  point  as  directly  and 
which  they  need  for  completion  as  much  as  did  the  religion  of 


1  This  is  elaborated  in  an  original  and  suggestive  book,  now  in  press,  by  a  student 
of  mine,  Dr.  Jean  Du  Buy.  Some,  but  not  all,  of  these  principles  are  worked  out 
in  thesis  by  my  pupil,  S.  13.  Haslett.  The  Pedagogical  Bible  School,  New  York, 
p.  381,  1904. 


362  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Moses  and  David.  The  supreme  mission  problem  to-day  is 
the  same  for  them  as  that  which  Jesus  faced  in  Judea.  They 
are  degenerate  and  need  an  analogous  new  proclamation  of 
what  they  ignorantly  worship.  The  true  problem  is  evolu- 
tion, not  revolution,  grafting  and  not  uprooting,  a  revival  of 
the  best  in  them  in  this  best  age  and  not  a  fanatical  running 
amuck.  The  missionary  should  proclaim  that  Confucius  was 
a  great  sage;  that  Mohammed  was  a  servant,  in  his  way  and 
day,  of  the  true  God ;  that  the  Buddha  was  a  religious  genius 
who  opened  up  a  new  way  of  peace  and  blessedness.  Thus 
making  sure  that  he  is  not  ignorant  of  all  the  truth  which 
every  faith  contains,  cordially  and  enthusiastically  apprecia- 
tive of  all  that  is  good,  feeling  all  the  devotion  its  worship 
and  sacred  writings  can  inspire,  as  Jesus  first  exploited  the  old 
cult,  he  will,  if  he  is  his  true  disciple,  in  his  teaching  seek  to 
advance  to  the  next  step  and  open  a  new  gospel  till  old  dead 
stalks  put  forth  green  shoots,  bloom,  and  bear  fruit. 

Finally,  when  this  is  attempted,  as  it  is  certain  to  be  be- 
cause it  is  the  only  true  and  right  way,  these  new  growths 
will  not  always  conform  to  Christianity  as  it  is  now  under- 
stood, but  there  will  be  new  features  in  these  indigenous  flew 
evangels.  That  of  the  crude  fetishistic  races  may  be  more 
like  a  purified  Mohammedanism,  and  the  latter  may  ripen  into 
something  like  the  ethical  fidelity  to  duty  of  Confucianism. 
This,  in  turn,  may  sometimes  prove  to  be  as  good  a  prepa- 
ration for  our  faith  as  Hebraism.  The  prematurely  developed 
philosophic  creeds  of  India  may  need  to  be  rescued  from  their 
too  early  senescence  and  given  a  youth  they  never  had.  If 
this  be  done  with  fidelity  to  these  and  all  other  systems,  the 
product  will  be  something  of  priceless  value  in  rejuvenating 
old  races  and  will  seem  at  first  new  and  strange  to  us,  while 
we  in  our  turn  may  be  converted  to  an  enlarged  and  enriched 
conception  of  our  own  faith  as  parts  of  which  they  will  take 
their  place,  as  surely  as  it  is  adequate  to  the  culminating 
golden  stage  of  life,  and  our  pistis  will  also  have  a  gnosis  that 
will  meet  the  needs  of  academic  youth  to  whom  neither  ex- 
isting religious  institutions  nor  our  college  philosophy  now 
adequately  minister. 


CHAPTER   XV 

SOCIAL   INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS 

I.  Self-consciousness,  vanity,  affectation,  and  showing  off — Dress,  manners — Feats, 
bragging  II.  Anger,  pugnacity,  repressals.  III.  Fear,  shock,  blushing,  bash- 
fulness,  modesty.  IV.  Pity,  sympathy — Reluctance  to  dissent — Susceptibility. 
V.  Love  of  home  versus  running  away — Truancy,  wanderers — Relations  to 
temperature  and  food — Animal  and  human  migrations,  nostalgia.  VI.  School 
and  teachers  versus  home  and  parents — Imitation — Like  and  dislike  of  teach- 
ers. VII.  Wider  irradiations  to  adult  ideals  and  plans  for  life — Ideals  of 
vocation — Influence  of  historic  and  biblical  characters — Home  and  foreign 
ideals.  VIII.  Property  and  the  money  sense.  IX.  Social  judgment,  cronies, 
and  solitude — Ideas  of  punishment — Work  together  and  alone.  X.  First 
forms  of  spontaneous  social  organizations — Gangs — Predatory  clubs.  XL 
Student  life  and  organizations — Banality,  infantilism.  Class  feeling,  hazing — 
Secret  societies — German  student  clubs — Secrecy,  initiations,  and  the  duel — 
Town  versics  gown — Ideal  relation  of  student  and  teacher — Caricature.  XII. 
Associations  for  youth  devised  or  guided  by  adults,  {a)  Captains  of  Tens — 
{b)  Agassiz  Association — {c)  Abstinence  Clubs — {d)  Princely  Knights — {e) 
Bands  of  Mercy — (f)  Coming  Men  of  America — {g)  Harry  Wadsworih 
Club — {h)  Young  Men's  Christian  Association — (/)  Christian  Endeavor;  the 
evils  of  its  oath — (y)  Epworth  League — (/')  Brotherhood  of  St.  Andrew — 
(/)  Luther  League — Conclusions.  XIII.  Material  for  moral  and  social  cul- 
ture in  :  A,  Oratory — B,  Drama — C,  The  Arthuriad — D,  The  Bible — E,  His- 
tory— A  new  standard  of  moral  values. 

In  the  last  four  chapters  we  have  tried  to  describe  the 
great  awakening  of  love  of  the  other  sex  and  of  nature,  and 
the  religious  impressionability  during  adolescence,  and  to  sug- 
gest the  proper  treatment  of  these  three  feeling-instincts.  None 
of  these  undergo  more  characteristic  developments  than  does 
the  social  nature  to  the  description  and  regimen  of  which  we 
now  proceed.  No  creature  is  so  gregarious  as  man,  and  we 
can  hardly  conceive  him  except  as  a  member  of  the  family 
and  emerging,  as  the  boy  and  girl  now  do,  to  become  a  sociiis 
in  tribe,  society,  or  political  and  industrial  communities.  As  we 
have  seen,  individual  differences  of  all  kinds  are  now  suddenly 
augmented.  The  interval  between  the  strong  and  weak,  the 
dull  and  bright,  beautiful  and  ugly,  becomes  far  greater  than 
it  was  before.     This  of  itself  impresses  upon  each  that  he  has 

363 


364  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

some  rank  in  a  scale,  with  some  above  and  others  below.,  and 
he  is  very  eager  to  know  his  place  here.  There  is  a  new  sense 
of  passing  some  kind  of  unwritten  examination  in  the  world's 
school  and  a  new  rivalry  to  stand  high  and  not  low  upon  some 
of  these  multiplying  and  lengthening  scales.  Each  sex,  too, 
now  feels  itself  rated  by  the  other,  and  the  approval  of  a  larger 
and  more  adult  environment  is  also  sought.  The  result  is  a 
greatly  intensified  social  self-consciousness  which  may  be  ex- 
pressed in  bashfulness,  showing  off,  or  affectation,  according  to 
temperament,  environment,  etc.  To  win  good-will  and  avoid 
ill-will  is  now  one  of  the  strongest  motives.  Fame,  glory, 
renown,  leadership,  may  now  become  ruling  passions.  Praise 
is  never  so  inebriating,  and  flattery  is  never  so  liable  to  cause 
conceit  and  a  dualized  hypocritical  life,  while  censure,  derision, 
or  failures  that  suggest  inferiority  are  never  so  depressive  or 
so  liable  to  leave  a  permanent  mark.  Poise  between  indiffer- 
ence to  the  good  opinion  of  others  and  excessive  regard  for 
it  is  never  so  hard  as  in  this  most  plastic  stage  of  both  tempera- 
ment and  character. 

I.  Self-consciousness,  vanity,  affectation,  and  showing  off. 
One  of  the  first  and  most  serious  of  these  new  self-ratals  in 
girls  concerns  the  gifts  of  heredity.^  They  become  conscious 
of,  ponder,  and  often  discuss  their  eyes  in  color,  size,  expression, 
movement ;  their  hair,  its  abundance,  its  hue,  color,  etc. ;  their 
complexion,  teeth,  form,  dimples;  and  study  to  show  or  con- 
ceal in  most  effective  ways  the  good  or  bad  that  comes  of 
breeding,  blood,  and  family.  They  earliest  in  life  and  much 
more  so  than  boys  are  conscious  of  their  ancestors,  parents, 
relatives,  etc.,  and  this  normally,  because  their  bodies  and 
souls  are  in  some  sense  better  organs  of  heredity  than  man's. 

Dress  is  always  modified  in  a  way  that  is  sometimes  very 
obvious  up  the  grades  in  school.  The  boy  suddenly  realizes 
that  his  shoes  are  not  blacked,  or  his  coat  is  worn  and  dirty, 
his  hair  unbrushed,  his  collar,  necktie,  or  cap  not  of  the  latest 
pattern,  while  girls  love  to  flaunt  new  fashions  and  color  com- 


•  See  my  study  with  T.  L.  Smith  :  Showing  Off  and  Bashfulness  as  Phases  of 
Self-Consciousness.  Ped.  Sem.,  June,  1903,  vol.  x,  pp.  159-199.  Also  J.  J. 
lloppe:   Die  Eitelkeit  and  ihre  Arten.     Wiirzburg,  1890,  p.  38. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  3^5 

binations  and  have  a  new  sense  for  the  toilet.  The  clothes- 
consciousness  sometimes  becomes  a  matter  of  very  exiguous 
fastidiousness,  and  those  who  never  cared  how  they  looked 
before  become  now  very  conscious  of  their  attire.  While  dress 
has  a  psychology  of  its  own,  it  is  its  ornamental,  decorative 
function,  however,  which  chiefly  concerns  us  here.  Very 
challenging  is  the  homology  between  the  dress,  which  nature 
provides  for  animals  by  an  organic  function,  and  that  which 
man,  by  the  psychic  function,  which  Schleiermacher  was  so 
fond  of  paralleling  with  the  organic,  provides  for  himself. 
Loudness  and  dandyism  ill-adjusted  to  wealth,  station,  or  to 
good  taste  are  frequent.  The  influence  of  dress  upon  be- 
havior is  now  given  a  place  in  ethical  text-books.  That  not 
merely  the  quality  of  goods  and  their  cut  but  their  rigidity  or 
•  softness  has  much  influence  upon  conduct,  spirits,  and  even 
circulation,  respiration,  and  digestion,  is  plain,  and  the  maxim 
often  advocated  of  so  dressing  wherever  one  is  as  to  be  utterly 
unconscious  of  dress  is  probably  unpedagogical  even  more  than 
it  is  at  this  age  impossible  to  carry  out.  New  styles  of  dress, 
toilet,  or  coiffure  fads,  perfumes,  ribbons,  curls,  souvenir  pins, 
rings,  bows,  motto-badges,  new  colors,  charms,  flowers,  etc., 
quickly  permeate  a  school  community,  as  Small  has  described, 
in  the  age  of  greatest  plasticity  to  fashion.^ 

Manners  are,  of  course,  minor  morals  and  should  be  from 
within  outward,  and  not  products  of  external  environment. 
They  belong  intrinsically  to  character  and  are  normally  the 
physiological  economies  of  expressing  the  higher  and  better 
sentiments.  Here  girls  are  more  plastic  than  boys,  more  apt 
in  putting  on  and  off  vivacity,  languishing  moods,  drawling 
speech,  fine  ladyism,  superior  ways,  accents,  and  airs  of  many 
kinds ;  their  penmanship,  pronunciation,  choice  of  words  and 
style  are  all  subject  to  affectation;  they  are  precise,  easy,  in- 
dolent, mincing,  boisterous,  and  readily  fall  into  acting  roles. 
Both  boys  and  girls  often  imitate  even  half-unconsciously 
squints,  position  of  lips,  dialects,  limps,  coughing,  stammering, 
and  other  speech  defects,  and  even  choreic  symptoms,  especially 
of  favorite  companions  and  teachers,  or  by  way  of  mimicry 

'  The  Suggestibility  of  Children.     Ped.   Sem.,  December,   1896,  vol.  iv,   pp. 
176-220. 


366  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

of  those  disliked,  sometimes  almost  to  the  point  of  impersona- 
tion, to  say  nothing  of  every  trade  and  occupation.  Various 
styles  are  often  successively  aped  until  one  is  found  or  made 
by  eclectic  comparison  that  fits.  Swagger  ways,  saccharinity, 
mincing,  affability,  hauteur,  domineering  loftiness,  stoic  im- 
perturbability, and  perhaps  hardness,  callous  apathy  and 
indifference,  languor,  poses  for  effect,  affected  smiles  and 
laughs  thought  to  be  fetching,  every  type  of  gait,  poise  and 
carriage,  disps,  staccato  or  presto  styles  of  speaking,  extremes 
of  primness  and  formality,  and  of  abandon,  everything  by 
turn  and  nothing  long — these  show  this  to  be  a  polymorphic 
stage  of  etiquette,  bearing,  and  the  style  that  does  so  much  to 
make  the  man,  and  perhaps  still  more  the  woman. 
'  In  feats,  stunts,  and  "  dares,"  boys  lead  and  are  most  per- 
sistent in  seeking  recognition.  The  cruder  excellences  of 
strength  and  fleetness,  biceps,  athletic  record,  and  physical 
achievements  become  centers  of  intense  social  and  self-con- 
sciousness. True  to  man's  pedigree,  because  in  primitive 
society  the  strongest  was  chief,  they  seek  both  distinction  and 
victory.  Aristotle  long  ago  pointed  out  that  true  courage  was 
the  mean  between  foolhardiness  and  cowardice,  and  in  early 
youth  we  see  both  extremes  before  the  mean  is  approximated. 
If  the  former  could  be  made  as  much  a  matter  of  reproach  as 
the  latter,  it  would  be  well.  The  instinct  of  courage  wrongly 
directed  by  "  dares,"  impulsions  suddenly  appealed  to  by  sug- 
gestion, and  the  list  of  risks  and  calamities  in  boy-life  due 
to  crude  and  ignorant  challenges  of  courage,  show  that  fool- 
hardiness,  if  often  an  insanity  or  form  of  mental  arrest  and 
defect,  is,  however,  susceptible  of  easy  early  remedy,  caution 
being  the  normal  form  of  maturity.  Thus,  too,  the  presence 
and  n&iv  consciousness  of  ,^the  other  sex  and  of  adults  greatly 
intensifies  as  well  as  refines.  Skills  and  accomplishments  of 
a  higher  nature  have  new  social  motivation. 

The  bragging,  boastful  lie  is  a  psychosis  by  itself  which 
has  of  late  been  somewhat  treated  in  the  literature  of  psy- 
chology. Here  the  truth  is  left  behind  and  the  imagination 
Munchausenizes  in  the  field  of  romance,  heroics,  and  rodomon- 
tade. Ruse  and  deception  are  only  the  fore-school  to  this  form 
of  self-inflation.  One  of  the  most  interesting  groups  of  slang 
words  has  ior  its  function  the  puncturing  of  these  bubbles  of 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND  INSTITUTIONS  3^7 

fake  achievements  and  experiences  for  which  childhood  and 
youth  have  a  keen  sense  and  subject  to  summary  treatment. 
Sometimes  this  is  connected  with  impudence,  often  a  form  of 
showing  off,  but  which  is  normally  reduced  in  the  teens. 
Where  it  is  persistent,  aggressive,  and  defiant  it  is  frequently 
motivated  by  a  stinging  sense  of  inferiority,  which  at  this  age 
may  incline  to  malevolence.  The  philosophic  and  the  scientific 
man  has  a  deep  and  basal  desire  to  bring  seeming  and  being 
into  complete  coincidence,  at  least  in  most  of  the  realms  of  life. 
He  would  scorn  to  be  admired  for  excellences  which  he  does 
not  possess,  but  demands  recognition  for  real  virtues.  Perhaps, 
as  a  recent  writer  concludes,^  falsehood  tends  to  develop  in  pro- 
portion as  society  becomes  complex,  and  its  evil  is  that  it 
dwarfs  the  generous,  esthetic,  and  social  sentiments,  and  leads 
to  profound  dissociation. 

This  instinct  of  self-exhibition  to  win  commendation  which  now 
becomes  so  dominant  plays,  of  course,  an  enormous  role  at  all  ages  and 
at  all  stages  of  life.  Courting  and  combat  also  belong  here.  Insects 
and  still  more  birds  compete;  they  are  dressed  by  nature  in  more  bril- 
liant hues,  and  take  a  new  interest  in  displaying  every  charm  of  color 
or  form.  Male  wasps,  butterflies,  moths,  fishes,  frogs,  and  snakes 
abundantly  illustrate  all  this.  Birds  acquire  and  show  off  new  charms 
at  the  beginning  of  the  breeding  season.  Primitive  man  is  tattooed, 
removes  hair  or  teeth,  undergoes  mutilations,  wears  ornaments,  etc., 
under  the  stress  of  the  same  instinct.'  There  are  men  and  women 
whose  manner,  bearing,  voice  and  whole  nature  undergo  immediate 
and  sudden  transformation  in  the  presence  of  the  other  sex.  Each 
should  thus  be  inspired  both  to  be,  do,  think,  and  feel  his  or  her  best, 
and  thus  each  both  supplements  and  complements,  and  helps  to  make 
the  other. 

II.  Anger  undergoes  characteristic  changes  in  the  teens, 
and  its  expressions,  before  more  alike  in  boys  and  girls,  show 
marked  sexual  differentiations.  In  boys  the  fighting  instinct, 
if  unchecked,  is  more  intense  and  has  new  motives.  The 
human  being  is  no  exception  to  the  law  of  the  animal  world  in 
this  respect. 


1  Le  Mensonge:  G.  L.  Duprat.  Paris,  1903,  p.  183.  Also  Nordau,  Conven- 
tionelle  Liigen,  1898. 

*  See  Scott:  Sex  and  Art.  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  January,  1896,  vol.  vii,  pp. 
153-226. 


3^8  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Pugnacity  is,  in  good  part  at  least,  a  secondary  sexual  trait,  arising 
near  maturity  and  chiefly  in  the  male.  Some  male  grasshoppers  fight 
so  that,  Darwin  tells  us,  in  China  they  are  matched  like  young  cocks. 
Ants  fight  and  are  often  found  dead  with  mandibles  locked,  and  so  do 
male  beetles  and  butterflies  whose  wings  are  often  injured  thus.  Many 
male  fish  fight  to  the  death  during  the  breeding  season  and  on  the 
spawning-grounds,  and  the  teeth  of  the  male  adult  salmon  become 
sharp  and  differ  radically  from  those  of  the  female.  Male  lizards  can 
hardly  meet  during  the  spring  without  fighting.  Most  male  birds  are 
pugnacious  in  the  spring,  and  use  beak,  claws,  and  spurs  on  both  wings 
and  legs.  With  them  the  season  of  love  is  also  the  season  of  war. 
The  male  of  some  species  is  better  equipped  to  drive  off  all  other  males 
than  to  woo  the  female.  Most  mammals  are  desperate  fighters  for  the 
females  and  often  develop  special  weapons  of  offense  and  defense  in 
the  spring.  Male  stags  are  found  dead  with  their  horns  inextricably 
locked.  Stallions  kick  and  bite,  and  mane  is  often  protective.  Bull 
seals,  elephants,  male  beavers,  giraffes,  whales,  hares,  bears,  beasts  of 
prey,  antelopes,  walruses,  buffalo,  etc.,  all  are  known  not  only  to  follow 
the  law  of  battle  often  to  the  death,  but  to  know  just  how  to  make  the 
most  effective  cut,  thrust,  blow,  that  their  peculiar  weapons,  whatever 
their  position,  make  possible.  Beards,  dewlaps,  some  accumulations 
of  fat,  callosities,  and  carapaces  are  essentially  protective.  Man's 
anthropoid  progenitor  fought  less  with  tooth  and  jaw  as  he  became 
confirmed  in  the  upright  position ;  the  hands  were  freed  from  the  work 
of  locomotion  and  used  to  strike,  and  weapons  were  developed. 

Long  stories  of  struggles  to  suppress  anger  are  most  fre- 
quent with  girls.  Where  it  has  been  yielded  to  with  abandon 
before,  there  are  now  manifold  efforts  to  pause  and  weigh  the 
facts,  attempts  to  bring  up  counter  motives,  struggles  for 
diversion,  realizations  of  how  painful  its  vents  and  even  its 
facial  expressions  are  to  others,  and  retirements  to  fight  it  out 
alone  or  conceal  its  ebullitions.  Often,  and  especially  with 
girls,  there  is  an  increased  irritability  that  demands  special 
prophylactics,  and  explosions  now  are  smothered  into  sulki- 
ness.  To  veil  it  in  smiles  usually  prolongs  it.  Revenge  is 
often  fondly  nursed  and  its  gratifications  more  studied  and 
elaborate.  Sometimes  a  single  spasm  of  anger  seems  able 
to  expel  affection  forever  beyond  the  power  of  pardon.  Many 
mention  a  peculiar  mental  inebriation  or  exhilaration  in  it 
which  makes  them  feel  more  alive,  so  that  even  where  its 
potential  does  not  pass  into  its  kinetic  form,  but  is  held  in 
leash,  there  is  an  increased  sense  of  both  exaltation  and  power. 
Often  there  are  a  few  spasmodic  outbursts,  which  carry  the 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  3^9 

individual  away  into  a  frenzy  of  rapt  passion,  and  then  the 
physical  reaction  of  weakness,  fatigue,  shame,  apologies,  re- 
grets for  wounded  friendships,  are  experiences  which  mark  a 
change  to  a  steadier  type.  Above  the  sense  of  satisfaction  that 
justice  has  been  done,  the  truth  spoken,  the  basis  for  a  new 
and  better  understanding  laid,  arises  now  the  view  that,  after 
all,  it  may  be  left  to  others  to  right  the  wrongs  of  the  world. 
At  adolescence  anger  grows  more  inward,  and  the  effects  are 
less  in  the  somatic  and  more  in,  the  psychic  sphere  in  which 
a  far  larger  area  of  causes  is  now  open,  and  expressions  more 
sanctioned  and  refined  are  found.  As  the  mind  grows  large, 
there  is  more  space  for  the  subjective  expenditure  of  energy 
and  for  thinking  unutterable  things.  Tension  is  often  vented 
in  prolonged  physical  exercise;  religious  and  altruistic  motives 
are  appealed  to ;  the  childish  forms  of  biting,  striking,  scratch- 
ing, making  faces,  and  all  the  involuntary  modifications  of 
phonation,  respiration,  and  salivation  are  changed.  Often  an 
outbreak  causes  vasomotor  disturbances  that  begin  at  this  age 
of  instability,  and  especially  during  menstruation  these  psychic 
weather-signs  may  affect  secretions.  One  of  the  chief  causes 
is  the  thwarting  of  purpose  and  expectation,  limitations  of 
freedom,  a  sense  of  injustice,  invasions  or  repression  of  the 
self,  and  as  all  these  are  greatly  increased  at  this  age  the  lia- 
bilities to  anger  grow  with  them.  Jealousy,  although  not 
originating  at  this  time,  takes  now  a  sexual  form.  Angry 
feelings  now  seem  to  the  subject  often  spontaneous,  partly 
because  he  can  not  analyze  all  the  new  and  complex  incite- 
ments to  it,  but  partly  because  there  are  new  erethic  needs  of 
the  system  that  demand  this  tension.  Now  the  sense  of  being 
misunderstood,  contradiction,  the  very  presence  of  those  who 
are  distasteful,  distraction,  and  lofty  ways  are  more  liable  to 
inflame  the  temper.  Even  in  the  midst  of  its  greatest  heat,  an 
almost  independent  psychosis  of  philosophic  reflection  is  often 
carried  on.  Sarcastic  things  to  say  are  thought  of,  and  per- 
haps written  out,  but  not  uttered,  and  if  fury  of  an  epileptic 
type  is  not  suppressed  there  is  danger  of  criminality.  Anger, 
"  sweeter  than  honey,"  as  Homer  calls  it,  may  be  nursed  and 
vented  in  fantastic  schemes  of  revenge  in  which  some  rind 
it  a  luxury  to  revel.  It  is  really  an  expression  of  egotism  and 
self-feeling,  while  the  immense  role  that  this  invasion  by  what 

63 


37°  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

seems  like  an  alien  demonic  personality  may  assume  is  seen  in 
the  scores  of  words  in  English  which  indicate  it.^  Only  weak- 
lings are  incapable  of  it,  and  righteous  indignation  has  done 
much  of  the  best  work  in  the  world.  But  as  with  love,  pity, 
and  fear,  a  large  part  of  the  education  of  the  heart  consists 
in  directing  it  aright  or  against  objects  worthy  of  it.  These 
psychic  storms  sometimes  seem  to  clear  the  mental  air,  give 
a  sense  of  strength  and  a  keener  appreciation  of  justice,  and 
prompt  cowards  to  be  heroes.  Up  the  evolutionary  scale  they 
have  marked  a  point  where  our  animal  progenitors  ceased  to 
flee  in  fear  and  turned  upon  their  foe,  so  that  those  who  ac- 
quired the  power  to  discharge  the  most  volcanic  reactions 
against  their  enemies  survived,  while  those  who  lacked  it 
perished. 

III.  Fear,  or  anticipatory  pain,  is  probably  the  great  educa- 
tor in  both  the  animal  and  the  human  world,  even  science  being 
developed  in  large  measure  for  prevision  or  to  eliminate  shock 
which  is  so  disintegrating  to  the  system.^  Those  who  fear 
aright  survive.  At  adolescence  the  fear  system  is  modernized 
and  otherwise  profoundly  reconstructed,  and  becomes  reason- 
able. Fear  of  being  lost  passes  over  to  fear  of  losing  the 
points  of  the  compass ;  fear  of  great  animals,  real  and  imagi- 
nary, diminishes,  and  that  of  bugs,  spiders,  snakes,  and  creepy 
things  is  augmented  with  the  new  dermal  sensations  for  mini- 
mal contact;  fear  and  a  desire  for  protection  is  less  effective 
in  evoking  love  either  for  God  or  man.  Dread  of  diseases, 
which  is  often  intense  and  secret,  is  greatly  increased  and  may 
become  a  causative  factor,  so  that  if  the  mind  can  cure  the 
diseases  it  can  make  in  adolescence  it  does  much.  In  general, 
physical  fears  decline  and  social  fears  increase  as  do  those 
in  the  moral  and  religious  realm.  The  new  feeling  for  per- 
sonality seems  at  first  to  make  both  God  and  ghosts  more  real. 
There  are  far  more  fears  that  others  will  suffer.  Objects  of 
fear  are  seen  much  farther  off,  and  protective  activities  have 
a  wider  range.    Many  fears  are  toned  down  into  respect,  rever- 

•  See  my  Study  of  Anger.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  July,  1899,  vol.  x,  pp.  516-591. 

"  This  I  think  a  fair  inference,  although  never  yet  drawn,  from  all  the  facts 
gathered  by  Groeningen,  Ueber  den  Shock  ;  Wiesbaden,  1885,  p.  255  ;  and  by 
Oppenheim,  Traumatische  Neurosen  ;   Berlin,  1892,  p.  253. 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  37 ^ 

ence,  and  awe,  and  an  increasing  proportion  of  dreads  are  of 
psychic  rather  than  of  physical  suffering.  Every  new  desire 
means  a  new  fear  of  failure  to  attain  it.  Childish  fears  are 
among  the  very  oldest  elements  of  the  soul,  and  the  fact  that 
they  do  not  fit  present  conditions  but  do  fit  a  past  environment 
so  well  is  the  basis  of  some  of  the  strongest  arguments  for 
psychogenesis.  The  plasticity  of  the  psychophysic  organism 
in  youth  makes  it  often  peculiarly  convulsible.^  Children  fear 
strangers,  but  adolescents  blush  in  their  presence.  The  Swedish 
blygscl  means  both  blush  and  shame,  which  is  partial  fear.  The 
chief  blushers  are  adolescent  girls,  especially  in  the  presence 
of  those  of  whose  sympathy  and  good  opinion  they  are  not 
well  assured.  The  blush  at  compliments  is  the  vasomotor 
survival  of  a  state  when  to  be  admired  meant  danger. 

Our  data  suggest  that  bashfulness  in  some  directions  may 
go  with  ostentatious  conduct  in  others.  This,  however,  seems 
to  be  exceptional,  though  not  abnormal.  Where  the  nascent 
sense  of  the  social-self  takes  the  form  of  diffidence  this  in  the 
extreme  may  become  almost  cataleptic.  Respiration,  circula- 
tion, eating  and  swallowing,  speech,  common  industries  like 
sewing,  ciphering,  etc.,  lose  precision,  and  are  perhaps  more 
or  less  inhibited.  Automatisms,  like  giggling,  chewing  the 
nails,  twisting  the  hair  or  clothes,  writhing,  trembling,  and 
awkwardness  in  its  many  forms,  where  the  fundamental  move- 
ments are  exaggerated  as  the  accessory  are  reduced,  may 
appear.  The  sense  of  being  observed  more  closely  than  usual 
or  by  strangers  or  numbers  of  people  is  paralyzing  to  the 
higher  activities  and  may  bring  out  primordial  ones  like  cry- 
ing, hiding,  etc.  All  these  effects  are  greatly  heightened,  not 
only  if  the  child  has  been  unusually  alone  or  neglected,  but  if 
observation  of  its  acts  has  generally  been  associated  with  dis- 
approval, failure,  defect,  or  has  led  to  ridicule.  The  really 
shy,  retiring  child  is  sometimes  an  only  child  or  sickly  and 
undervitalized.  Partridge  says,  ''  It  is  generally  agreed  that 
blushing  increases  at  puberty."  ^  The  diffidence  of  some  very 
genuine  young  men  is  almost  incredible.     They  go  far  out  of 

'  See  my  Study  of  Fears.      Am.   Jour,   of  Psy.,   January,    1897,   vol.   viii,  pp 
147-249.     Also  L.  Dugas :    I.aTimidite;    Paris,    1898;   and  P.  Hartenberg:   Les 
Timides  et  la  Timidite  ;    Paris,   1901. 

''  Blushing.     Ped.  Sem.,  .April,  1897,  vol.  iv,  pp.  387-394. 


37^  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

their  way  to  avoid  meeting  a  girl  on  the  street  who  seems  to 
them  a  being  almost  too  worshipful  to  speak  to.  Others  can 
not  go  into  society  without  the  stimulus  of  some  intoxicant 
to  give  them  boldness.  Some  are  sleepless  in  advance,  imagin- 
ing every  embarrassing  gaucherie  they  feel  sure  to  commit. 
Some  country  youth  so  dread  new  faces  that  they  become 
solitary  in  their  habits.  Some  are  so  impressed  by  the  su- 
periority of  all  who  have  confident  manners  that  they  are 
speechless  in  their  presence,  and  their  feelings  may  develop 
into  silent  and  unsuspected  but  intense  hate.  Both  blushing 
and  flushing  are  subject  to  very  wide  variations  in  the  manner 
and  place  where  they  begin,  in  their  causes,  in  the  subjective 
and  somatic  feelings  that  accompany  them,  and  in  their  reac- 
tions, mental  and  physical.  In  morbid  blushers,  there  may  be 
tremors,  mental  confusion,  chill,  weakness,  dizziness,  stutter- 
ing, etc.  A  perusal  of  this  literature  suggests  to  me  when  I 
have  never  seen  mentioned,  that  we  have  here  in  every  respect 
a  perfect,  though  miniature  and  circumscribed,  epilepsy  with 
its  aura,  its  crisis,  and  its  reactions,  and  that  this  adds  a  very 
interesting  point  of  attack  for  the  further  study  of  this  inter- 
esting psychosis. 

Socrates  thought  modesty  one  of  the  very  best  adornments 
of  youth  because  it  involved  docility  and  a  sense  of  something 
above  and  beyond  yet  to  be  attained,  while  a  too  early  sense 
of  confidence  and  lack  of  deference  is  often  a  sign  of  preco- 
cious arrest.  An  interesting  fact  that  seems  brought  out  by 
returns  is  that  while  boys  in  general  are  more  prone  to  the 
overt  forms  of  showing  off,  they  often  incline  in  early 
adolescence  a  little  toward  modesty,  and  girls,  usually  a  little 
more  retiring  at  this  period,  now  become  for  a  time  less  so. 
Possibly  this  may  be  reminiscent  of  a  time  when  the  human 
female,  formerly  like  the  female  in  the  animal  world  less 
beautiful  than  the  male,  by  ornament  or  a  new  access  of  attrac- 
tion from  nature  became  more  so,  and  the  initial  forwardness 
of  girls  may  be  a  rudiment  of  the  age  when  woman  was  the 
active  agent  in  domesticating  man  and  developing  the  family 
father  in  the  way  Bachofen  and  Drummond  suggest.  On  this 
view  woman  must  once  have  had  courtship  proclivities  for  a 
prolonged  period  after  as  well  as  before  motherhood.  Her 
endeavor  was  to  hold  man  by  her  own  attractions  to  his  duties 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  373 

and  responsibilities  in  the  long  ages  that  preceded  marriage 
which  clenched  these  obligations.  Thus  the  inherited  effects 
of  a  primeval  desire  to  hold  are  now  added  perhaps  by  tachy- 
genesis  to  the  maiden  desire  to  win  him.  If  this  be  correct, 
modern  woman's  wish  to  please  is  the  survival  of  a  not  yet 
spent  momentum  of  her  culminating  achievement  in  the  great 
work  of  domestication. 

Intense  consciousness  of  others  and  perhaps  even  artificial 
conduct  are  a  necessary  disciplinary  stage,  but  excess  makes 
character  hollow,  dramatic,  and  attitudinizing.  The  tendency 
of  both  extremes  of  this  is  toward  a  type  recognized  by 
recent  writers  in  characterology  from  Nietzsche  to  Ribery  ^ 
as  amorphous  or  unstable.  Youth  must  also  hew  out  their  own 
lives  and  develop  personalities  of  their  own  without  modeling 
them  too  much  on  alien  patterns,  for  thus  only  can  they  ac- 
quire character  which  gives  a  basis  to  just  self-confidence  and 
due  self-assertion, 

IV.  Pity.  Few  sentiments  undergo  a  greater  increase 
of  both  depth  and  range  at  this  age  than  those  of  sympathy 
and  pity.^  These  feelings  are  not  highly  developed  in  chil- 
dren, but  become  exquisite  in  youth.  Few  of  its  former  ex- 
citants now  lose  power,  but  nearly  all  are  greatly  increased 
and  a  vast  number  of  new  ones  arise.  Romance  is  usually  now 
more  pathogenic  than  fact,  because  youth  often  has  little  per- 
sonal acquaintance  with  poverty,  illness,  evil,  and  human 
suffering  generally.  In  Chapter  XIII  we  saw  what  Passion 
Week  now  means  for  this  feeling.  The  irrevocableness  of  the 
past,  too,  that  makes  every  tick  of  the  clock  a  requiem,  the 
self-pity  of  cramped  conditions  in  one's  own  childhood,  the 
sense  that  our  souls  are  larger  than  our  destiny  can  be,  that 
we  have  the  elements  of  a  greatness  we  can  never  attain :  all 
this  intensified  by  the  sad  autumn  psychoses  of  falling  leaf 
and  fading  flower,  and  by  that  of  twilight,  often  make  youth 
lacrimose  and  its  very  heart  to  wail,  but  it  all  seasons  and 
sobers  us  to  maturity.     Tenderness  of  heart  should  now  sup- 

1  Essai  de  classification  naturelle  du  caract^re.      Paris,  1902,  p.  156. 
'  Pity,  by  F.  H.  Saunders  and  myself.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  July,  1900,  vol.  xi, 
P-  554- 


374  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

press  callous  ways.  The  latter  are  degenerative,  but  the 
former,  which  brings  the  heart  into  sympathetic  vibration  with 
every  order  of  life,  is  the  mark  of  superiority  and  even  of 
genius.  The  sad  fact  is,  however,  that  instead  of  broadening 
now  to  a  full  humanistic  altruism  and  knowing  how  every 
type  of  sorrow  feels,  this  instinct  may  narrow  to  some  few 
fetishistic  forms.  It  should  ripen  into  benevolence,  charity, 
kindness,  and  universal  good-will.  Sympathy,  if  Sutherland 
is  right,  is  not  merely  an  esthetic  principle  to  be  interpreted 
on  the  narrow  basis  of  Greek  tragedy,  but  it  is  the  germ  of 
all  the  moral  faculties  and  strikes  its  roots  deep  down  into 
the  world  of  gregarious  animal  life.  Hence,  more  even  than 
fear  and  anger,  it  needs  the  most  careful  guidance  in  its  stage 
of  efflorescence,  and  its  problem  is  closely  bound  up  with  that 
of  moral  education.  Even  the  ideals  of  a  gentleman  and  of 
a  lady  often  center  in  these  powers  of  sympathetic  apprecia- 
tion. 

One  form  of  sensitiveness  common  in  adolescents  ex- 
presses itself  in  an  extreme  reluctance  to  dissent  from  the 
opinions  or  purposes  of  others,  especially  adults.  Sympathy 
is  so  quick  and  ready  that  all  the  mental  energy  is  expended 
in  trying  to  get  into  the  closest  rapport  with  alien  sentiments 
and  self-assertion  is  for  a  time  almost  entirely  in  abeyance. 
We  have  many  records  of  long  statements  of  religious  views, 
judgments  of  character,  purposes  and  intentions,  interpreta- 
tions of  current  events,  verdicts  by  gossip  of  happenings  in 
small  communities,  which  are  held  and  perhaps  actively  as- 
,  sented  to  and  helped  along  in  a  way  which  sometimes  causes 
entire  misapprehension  by  the  adult ;  or  they  are  mistaken  as 
promises  where  none  were  intended,  and  may  utterly  belie  the 
real  interests,  beliefs,  and  plans  of  the  hearer,  who  effaces 
himself  to  a  degree  that  he  finds  an  object  of  astonishment 
afterward,  and  doing  so  only  because  his  entire  energies  are 
so  focused  in  anticipating  and  reenforcing  what  is  heard  that 
there  is  nothing  left  in  him  with  which  to  dissent.  This  is 
sometimes  based  on  an  almost  morbid  delicacy  of  feeling, 
which  makes  any  shade  of  disagreement  seem  a  form  of  hardi- 
hood that  is  too  much  of  a  strain  upon  the  callow  character. 
With  Rousseau,  there  seems  to  have  been  a  spice  of  conscious 
flattery  in  this  sensitiveness.     It  often  prompts  people  to  say 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  375 

what  they  think  will  please  and  to  even  swerve  from  the  truth 
to  gratify  a  friend.  Young  women  not  infrequently  acquire 
the  reputation  of  lying  solely  from  their  passion  of  accommo- 
dating themselves  to  their  guests  or  neighbors.  This,  too,  is 
now  perhaps  a  legitimate  expression  of  the  social  instinct 
which  has  not  yet  found  the  true  balance  between  adjusting 
and  adapting  to  the  tastes  of  others  and  to  just  self-expression. 
Some  carry  their  self-abnegation  so  far  that,  divining  by  a 
rapport  that  seems  almost  mystic,  the  lines  of  tastes  and  likes, 
they  develop  almost  a  passion  for  saying  only  what  ministers 
to  these.  Their  compliance  can  be  sometimes  so  played  upon 
that  they  make  the  most  self-contradictory  statements.  This 
in  extreme  makes  the  social  parasite  and  political  henchman. 
It  was  utilized  by  the  Greeks  by  apprenticeship  to  a  mentor 
who  must  never  do  or  say  an  unworthy  act  or  word  before  his 
protege,  and  suggests  the  need  of  hero-worship  to  rightly 
direct  the  passion  of  admiration.  The  opposite  instinct  of 
opposition,  also  strong  now,  is  an  outcrop  in  the  psychic  field 
of  the  tendency  to  vary,  in  biology.  Together  they  enable 
man  to  adjust  to  new  environments.^ 

V.  Love  of  home  versus  the  impidse  to  leave  it.  One  of 
the  best  measures  of  domestication  in  animals  or  of  civiliza- 
tion in  man  is  the  intensity  of  love  of  home.  This  is  a  very 
complex  feeling  and  made  up  of  many  ties,  hard  to  dissect,  or 
even  to  enumerate.  Kline  ^  attempts  to  analyze  the  factors  of 
love  of  home,  in  the  order  of  their  intensity,  as  follows :  love 


'  Small's  observations  cited  above  are  here  in  point.  After  talking  of  perfume 
for  suggestion,  he  sprayed  distilled  water  in  school-rooms,  and  asked  classes  up 
the  grades  how  many  smelled  the  perfume.  In  the  two  lower  grades  the  majority 
did  so,  and  there  was  only  one  to  five  per  cent  of  skeptics.  In  the  fifth,  si.xth, 
and  seventh  grades  the  decline  was  most  rapid,  and  in  the  eighth  and  high  school 
grades  nearly  all  were  skeptics.  Unfortunately,  Small's  tests  for  illusions  of  sight, 
taste,  motion,  heat,  cold,  and  touch,  were  not  carried  up  the  grades,  so  that  while 
we  may  suririse  a  similar  growth  of  incredulity  with  puberty  in  these  respects,  it  is 
not  yet  provcfl.  From  his  studies  of  imitation  and  neuroses  induced  by  sugges- 
tion, dramatic  imitation,  and  especially  school  fads,  of  which  latter  he  studied  one 
hundred  and  cightv-two  different  forms,  it  would  appear  that  certain  kinds  of  imi- 
tation are  increased  and  others  decreased  at  puberty,  but  we  have  not  yet  sufficient 
data  to  formulate  a  law. 

'The  Migratory  Impulse  ts.  T,ove  of  Home.  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  October, 
i8g8,  vol.  X,  pp.  1-81.     Historically  the  tribe  precedes  the  family. 


3/6  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

of  parents,  scenery,  house,  familiar  ways,  freedom  of  opinion 
and  conduct,  relatives  and  friends,  animals,  pleasant  memories, 
sympathy,  etc.  We  often  find  specified  also  the  room,  articles 
of  furniture,  the  garden,  hills,  trees,  rocks,  meadow,  streams, 
frankness  of  expression,  leisure  to  do  as  one  pleases,  liberty 
to  arrange  things  to  one's  taste.  All  these  make  up  the  con- 
tent of  that  magic  word,  home,  of  which  the  hearth  with  its 
altar-fire  is  the  heart.  It  inclines  to  settled  habits  of  life,  is 
the  converse  of  the  roving  instinct,  and  is  largely  woman  s 
creation. 

It  is,  however,  a  recent  development,  and  children,  true  to 
their  function  of  revealing  the  past,  sometimes  almost  as  soon 
as  they  have  acquired  the  upright  method  of  locomotion  as 
if  intoxicated  by  "  out-of-doors,"  start  off,  and  by  some  inner 
impulse,  go  on  and  on  with  no  idea  of  where  or  why,  tempted 
by  an  open  gate  or  by  the  instinct  to  follow  a  man  or  vehicle, 
or  as  a  just-hatched  chick  follows  any  moving  thing.  Some- 
times these  outbreaks  are  periodic  or  due  to  being  shut  up  too 
much.  When  a  little  older  they  may  sell  all  their  trinkets, 
and  as  they  go  leave  their  luggage,  then  coat,  hat,  shoes,  etc., 
by  the  way,  as  if  with  progressive  dislike  of  the  accouterments 
of  civilization.  When  this  truant  instinct  is  strong  and  hered- 
itary, as  is  often  the  case,  tying  will  not  prevent  it,  and  where 
the  child  feels  the  impulse  to  abandon  everything  and  go  with 
the  birds,  dog,  car,  circus,  clouds,  or  to  see  where  the  road  goes, 
to  see  what  will  come  next,  etc.,  this  may  be  irresistible  and 
almost  epileptic.  Such  children  often  have  a  weak  instinct 
for  property,  act  by  fits  and  starts,  have  few  toys  and  little 
spending  money,  perhaps  are  underfed  at  home,  are  indifferent 
to  rags  and  dirt,  but  may  be  bright,  pretty,  and  well  adapted 
to  beg  and  make  their  way  in  the  world.  One  of  the  strongest 
motives  for  running  away  from  both  home  and  school  in  young 
children  is,  as  we  saw,  to  get  to  and  play  in  the  water.  While 
the  blind  impulse  to  be  off  and  away,  or  to  go  for  the  sake  of 
going,  is  strongest  soon  after  children  can  walk,  and  declines 
pretty  steadily  during  the  early  years  of  life,  the  summer  leads 
all  other  seasons,  until  from  the  ages  of  eight  to  ten.  Spring 
runaways  then  begin  to  exceed  those  at  any,  and  at  fourteen, 
exceed  those  at  all  other  seasons  combined,  continuing  to  do 
so  for  some  years.     Ennui,  malaria,  space-hunger,  horror  of 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND  INSTITUTIONS  377 

familiar  environments  and  habitual  duties,  and  spring  fever 
are  comparatively  infrequent  as  long  as  children  are  sexually 
neuter;  but  at  puberty,  reaction  against  the  confinement  of 
winter  impels  many  to  leave  the  hibernating  quarters  and 
makes  some  habitual  vagrants. 

At  the  dawn  of  adolescence  this  impulse  to  migrate  or 
wander  shows  a  great  and  sudden  increase.  The  restlessness 
of  spring  is  greatly  augmented.  Home  seems  narrow,  monoto- 
nous, intolerable,  and  the  street  and  the  motley  passers-by 
interest  and  invite  to  be  up  and  away.  Injured  feelings, 
wounded 'mnoiir  propre,  love  of  nature  and  solitude,  a  sense 
that  their  environment  is  above  or  perhaps  below  them,  anger 
and  resentment,  reaction  against  authority;  impatience  of  all 
restraint,  dread  of  tedium,  and  a  desire — to  use  Kline's  phrase 
— "  to  shelve  all  old  impressions,"  and  "  indulge  a  yearning 
for  and  into  space,"  an  intensification  of  the  motor-sense  that 
makes  riding  or  going  a  charm  and  sedative,  and,  above  all, 
the  impulse  to  test  themselves  by  measuring  their  powers 
with  those  of  others,  to  find  how  they  stand  and  rank,  and 
whether  they  are  weaklings  or  heroes,  to  see  the  great  world 
and  find  out  what  it  is,  to  find  the  luck  that  must  be  lurking 
for  them  somewhere,  or  to  set  up  for  themselves  and  begin 
life  on  their  own  hook — these  are  the  motives,  this  the  strong 
reenforcement  of  the  roving  impulse,  that  makes  the  boy  in 
the  school-room  chafe  like  a  caged  bird  in  the  season  of  migra- 
tion. It  is  the  age  when  by  far  the  most  children  satisfy  the 
legal  requirements  of  school  attendance  and  leave  it  forever. 

This  instinct,  if  not  normally  developed  and  then  reduced 
again  by  the  right  correctives,  has  many  strange  forms  of  per- 
sistence into  adult  life  in  the  gad-abouts,  globe-trotters,  vaga- 
bonds, rovers,  gipsies,  tramps,  or  those  interesting  psychic 
species  who  move  or  change  their  vocation,  go  from  country 
to  city,  from  housekeeping  to  boarding,  the  swappers  and 
traders  of  all  they  possess,  an  unique  type  of  travelers,  vvith  no 
purpose  but  to  go,  boatmen  and  trainmen,  who  for  love  of  it 
can  not  leave  their  vocation,  the  passionate  shoppers,  meeting 
and  funeral  goers,  gossips  and  newsmongers,  hunters,  fisher- 
men, and  other  restless  classes  who  are  averse  to  all  static 
conditions,  and  in  whom  the  home-making  instinct  is  dying 
out.      Kline   undertook   to   classify   by    age   the   strength   of 


3/8  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

motives  which  impelled  to  first  leave  home.  His  curve  shows 
the  love  of  adventure  rising  very  rapidly  to  ten  and  almost 
steadily  thereafter  to  nineteen,  when  his  survey  ends.  At  the 
latter  age,  this,  he  thinks,  accounts  for  nearly  sixty  per  cent 
of  all  cases.  The  motive  of  seeing  the  opposite  sex,  which 
begins  at  thirteen,  rises  at  nineteen  to  nearly  thirty  per  cent. 
The  motive  of  starting  in  life  shows  also  a  marked  adolescent 
rise,  while  the  desire  to  see  nature  as  a  motive  declines,  and 
loneliness,  very  strong  in  childhood,  is  almost  extinct  as  a 
motive  at  fourteen.  Spring,  of  course,  is  the  mating,  as  it  is 
the  migrating,  season.  Most  of  the  migrations  of  savage  man, 
in  his  three  stages,  frugivorous,  fishing,  and  hunting,  in  whom 
the  Wanderlust  is  strong,  and  most  of  the  great  historic  migra- 
tions, from  the  old  hypothetical  home  of  man  in  Eurasia,  oc- 
curred in  the  spring.  Vacant  souls  are  at  no  season  so  irksome 
to  their  possessors.  Climatology,  hunger,  and  need  of  a  higher 
rate  of  metabolism,  and  many  other  factors  are,  of  course, 
•  involved,  but  we  can  not  fail  to  associate  spring  fever  and  the 
increased  love  of  freedom  and  independence  at  the  onset  of 
puberty  with  the  basal  instinct,  which  shows  itself  statistically 
in  the  vernal  increase  in  the  number  of  marriages  and  the 
number  of  illegitimate  children  who  are  then  begotten.  The 
scholares  vagantes,  who  spent  the  vacations  of  the  medieval 
universities  in  roving,  with  specially  granted  licenses  and  im- 
munities both  to  do  so  and  to  beg,  sing,  and  write  letters  for 
the  unschooled  peasantry,  and  who  displayed  their  small  learn- 
ing and  courted  rural  maidens,  were  manifesting  secondary 
sexual  qualities  and  illustrating  the  courting  and  nest-making 
instincts  in  their  callow  stirrings  as  truly  as,  though  less  ob- 
viously, than  the  jongleuds  and  troubadours  of  the  eleventh 
and  twelfth  centuries,  whose  methods  have  been  called  the  most 
refined  of  all  the  expressions  of  mate-seeking  propensities. 


Notwithstanding  many  interesting  recent  special  studies  upon  vari- 
ous aspects  of  the  subject,  we  still  know  far  too  little  of  the  psychology 
of  the  migratory  versus  the  sessile  instincts  in  men  and  animals.  It 
seems  to  be  a  biological  law  that  animals  require  a  certain  range  and 
are  injured  by  greatly  transcending  or  restricting  it.  Young,  in  1885, 
showed  that,  other  conditions  being  constant,  and  within  considerable 
limits,  the  larger  the  vessel  in  which  tadpoles  were  reared  the  larger 
they  grew.     Insular  animals,  too,  are  usually  smaller  than  their  con- 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  379 

tinental  congeners,  and  smaller  trout  are  usually  found  in  smaller 
streams.  Many  animals  reported  by  De  Varigny,  Jordan,  Delboeuf, 
and  others,  if  not  well  domesticated,  seem  to  be  reduced  in  size  by 
captivity.  Every  form  of  animal  life  has  its  optimum  temperature 
most  favorable  to  nutrition  and  growth,  its  optimum  amount  of  average 
light,  moisture,  oxygen,  electricity,  atmospheric  pressure,  quality  and 
amount  of  food  and  drink,  and  if  any  of  these  slowly  change,  or  there 
are  changes  within  the  organism  itself  with  reference  to  these  cosmic 
or  telluric  conditions,  there  must  be  readjustment  or  re-acclimatiza- 
tion during  a  period  of  more  or  less  conscious  discontent ;  hence  the 
changed  metabolism,  body  temperature,  and  new  appetites  of  pubes- 
cence. Careful  experiments  show  that  polliwogs  and  still  lower  forms 
of  life,  in  a  trough  of  water  some  yards  long,  one  end  of  which  can  be 
cooled  and  the  other  heated,  tend  to  settle  at  that  intermediate  point 
where  the  temperature  is  most  favorable  for  their  growth,  or  seek  their 
metabolic  optimum  and  migrate  from  one  end  of  the  trough  toward 
the  other  as  this  point  changes,  as  lobsters  migrate  from  deep  to  shal- 
low water  in  the  spring  and  back  again  in  the  fall.  Sand-crabs  come 
down  the  hill  to  the  water  to  lay  eggs  in  the  spring  and  return,  leaving 
the  young  to  follow  them  later,  a  habit  akin  to  that  of  the  common  toad. 
Then,  many  forms  of  life  on  sea  and  land  are  drawn  to  the  shore  to 
breed.  Anadromous  fish,  like  the  mackerel,  shad,  bluefish,  menhaden, 
herring,  migrate  mostly  horizontally,  but  often  more  or  less  bythmical- 
ly,  and  so  do  many  catadromous  fish,  like  eels,  which  are  born  in  the  sea, 
go  up  the  rivers  to  mature  and  then  return  to  the  sea,  which  they  never 
leave.  The  salmon,  that  "  king  of  fish  "  which  can  leap  twelve  feet 
perpendicularly  out  of  water,  has  a  migration  frenzy  when  pushing 
from  the  sea  up  rivers  sometimes  more  than  a  thousand  miles,  which 
brings  it  to  its  destiny  often  with  the  skin  in  rags,  and  its  fins,  tail,  eyes, 
and  head  bruised  and  torn.  Some  of  our  birds,  like  the  bobolink,  go 
north  in  the  spring  from  Florida,  and  from  the  Middle  or  New  England 
States  turn  west,  sometimes  as  far  as  Montana,  returning  by  the  same 
circuitous  route,  because  it  was  the  way  by  which  they  entered  the  west ; 
while  eastern  birds  come  and  go  via  Texas  and  Mexico  from  and  to 
Central  America,  where  they  winter.  Many  birds  leave  the  south  when 
weather  and  food  are  of  the  best  to  penetrate  the  bleak  north  too  early 
in  spring  with  a  regularity  as  sure  as  the  almanac.  The  retreat  of  the 
glaciers,  which  by  annual  freezing  and  thawing  narrowed  and  widened 
the  subsistence  areas,  can  not  account  for  all  of  even  bird  migration; 
neither  can  climate,  for  birds  do  not  follow  a  constant  temperature. 
Their  migrations  are  often  east  and  west,  but  it  is  coming  to  be  held 
that  it  is  changes  in  the  reproductive  organs  that  first  upset  the  fit  of 
environment  and  separated  food  from  breeding  areas.  While  condi- 
tions that  make  the  food  supply  constant  through  the  year  often  check 
migration,  sterility  causes  the  barren  members  of  the  same  group  to 
refuse  to  migrate.  The  lemming  and  about  a  dozen  species  of  rodents 
migrate,  as  do  reindeer,  antelopes,  some  squirrels,  and  wolves,  while 
horses,  cows,  sheep,  dogs,  cats,  hens,  ducks,  and  turkeys  often  revert 


380  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

to  the  feral  habit  of  wandering,  especially  in  the  mating  season,  and  of 
hiding  their  young. 

Primitive  man  perhaps  originated  in  the  tropics,  was  frugivorous, 
and,  if  he  followed  food,  his  migrations  were  seasonal.  When  he 
learned  to  subsist  on  fish,  especially  from  inland  lakes,  he  became  more 
settled.  The  hunting  stage,  which  may  have  persisted  far  longer  than 
civilization,  placed  an  immense  premium  on  wandering  and  the  results 
of  a  lucky  arrow  or  find.  The  nomadic  life  preceded  and  very  likely 
was  far  longer  than  settled  agriculture  has  been.  Helwald  thinks 
human  migration  has  always  been  in  the  direction  of  the  longest  axis 
of  the  continent.  It  has  been  thought  that  at  sea,  where  temperature 
and  wind  are  more  constant,  tides  and  currents  have  contributed  some- 
what, as  herds  of  cattle  grazing  on  a  prairie  swerve  to  the  right  or  left 
with  the  wind.  Wallace  thinks  that  man  migrated  from  some  not  very 
well-defined  area  south  or  southwest  of  Siberia  or  the  highlands  of 
Central  Asia,  to  the  south  and  east  over  India  and  China,  crossing  to 
the  islands  of  Australia,  southwest  to  Africa,  west  to  Europe,  and 
perhaps  northwest  to  America,  and  there  are  several  other  schemes  of 
diffusion  from  other  cunabula.  In  the  background  of  the  history  of 
nearly  all  lands,  we  have  migration.  Thus  the  migratory  diathesis  had 
a  long  prehistoric  incubation,  and  the  Huns,  Vandals,  Goths,  Crusades, 
invasions,  and  emigrations  show  that  it  has  not  ceased  within  historic 
times.  The  role  of  spring,  at  least  in  these  north  temperate  wander- 
ings, was  marked ;  the  role  of  youth  and  love  is  less  clear. 

Calhoun,  Tuke,  Willis,  Peters,  Kline,  and  others,  have 
studied  the  symptoms  of  home-sickness,  or  nostalgia,  and  agree 
in  calling  it  one  of  the  most  complex  and  distressing  of  dis- 
eases when  severe.  It  destroys  the  appetite,  brings  nausea, 
dizziness,  palpitation,  hallucination,  localized  pains,  sensations 
of  smothering,  night  sweats,  sobbing;  in  boarding  schools, 
factories,  in  camps  of  young  soldiers,  in  hospitals,  and  on  dis- 
tant voyages,  it  is  especially  aggravated  by  nightfall,  katydids, 
frogs,  crickets,  the  sough  of  the  wind,  a  long  storm,  thunder, 
a  letter,  waking  from  dreams  of  home,  a  friend,  or  chance 
reminder  of  it,  and  may  swoop  down  upon  the  soul  like  an 
obsession,  bringing  melancholy  and  sometimes  even  death  in 
its  train.  At  adolescence,  when  the  heart  is  most  sensitive  to 
a  malingering  form  of  it,  the  symptoms  of  home-sickness  are 
sometimes  caused  in  neurotic  girls  by  the  loss  of  a  pet,  the 
felling  of  a  favorite  tree,  a  rearrangement  of  furniture,  change 
of  food;  while  it  often  checks  menstruation,  reduces  all  ana- 
bolic and  favors  katabolic  processes,  so  that  they  literally  ache 
for  home.     The  yearning  soul  would  break  away  from  the 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  3^1 

body,  and  may  lose  sympathy  with  man  and  beast  about  it. 
Idleness  both  intensifies  and  increases  liability  to  it,  while  a 
battle  or  a  lively  personal  encounter  is  perhaps  its  most  sure 
and  complete  cure.  The  young  yeoman,  who  has  never  left 
his  own  glebe,  dreads  crowds,  fears  parents  might  die,  or  that 
something  untoward  would  happen  if  he  was  away,  and  pre- 
fers his  own  ways  and  to  entertain  rather  than  to  be  enter- 
tained. 

Adolescence  is  really  the  age  of  nostalgia  according  to 
Widal,^  and  Kline  ^  says,  "  My  impression,  based  on  medical 
literature  and  other  material,  is  that  in  quality  or  intensity 
nostalgia  is  just  as  severe  and,  if  allowed,  will  lead  to  as  fatal 
results  before  as  after  adolescence,  but  that  the  latter  is  more 
predisposed  to  an  attack  than  either  childhood  or  manhood." 
Papillon  ^  says,  "  Nostalgia  attacks  by  preference  young  peo- 
ple and  those  just  entering  youth."  Kline  collected  one  hun- 
dred and  sixty-six  cases,  and  found  that  eighty  per  cent  of 
these  occurred  for  the  first  time  between  twelve  and  eighteen. 
This,  of  course,  is  partly  due  to  the  fact  that  absence  from 
home,  which  is  the  condition  of  nostalgia,  most  frequently 
occurs  then. 

An  interesting  expression  of  a  kindred  instinct  in  older  girls  for 
a  larger  and  freer  social  life  under  the  repressions  to  which  they  are 
subjected  by  modern  conditions  is  seen  in  a  volume  of  letters  from  one 
hundred  girls  in  answer  to  a  personal  advertisement  requesting  cor- 
respondence without  acquaintance  with  young  women  of  means  and 
education,  which  is  full  of  suggestiveness  for  the  psychoses  of  this  age 
of  life,  whatever  be  our  opinion  of  the  method  of  collecting  such  data, 
or  of  the  propriety  of  publishing  them.''  Most  of  the  writers  are  cul- 
tivated, traveled,  and  not  a  few  are  college  graduates,  while  nearly  all 
seem  to  be  themselves  entirely  respectable  and  frequently  have  the  best 
of  homes.  Most  are  conscious  of  the  recklessness  of  answering  per- 
sonals, but  are  fascinated  by  the  mystery  of  the  "  locked  box,"  or  over- 
come by  their  curiosity  to  penetrate  the  incognito  of  the  advertiser, 
who  calls  himself  a  "  gentleman  of  high  social  and  university  position." 
Many  give  their  personal  history,  an  inventory  of  their  likes,  dislikes, 


>  Die.  Eng.  des  Sci.  Mddicales,  pp.  357-380. 

''The  Migratory  Impulse  z>s.   Love  of   Home.     Am.    Tour,  of  Psy.,  October, 
1898.  vol.  X,  pp.  1-81. 

*  Pop.  Sci.  Mo.,  1S74,  vol.  V,  pp.  215-220. 

*  Girls  Who  Answer  Personals,  by  Arthur  MacDonald.     Washington,  Decem- 
ber, 1897,  p.  250. 


382  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

accomplishments  or  points  of  beauty,  and  sometimes  sign  their  true 
name,  enclose  a  photograph,  or  are  ready  to  accept  a  call  or  clandestine 
meeting  or  a  walk.  Most  have  little  to  do,  and  suffer  from  the  monot- 
ony of  an  aimless,  idle,  and  psychically  solitary  life.  Many  have  lost 
one  or  both  parents,  so  that  home  life  is  not  satisfactory.  Reserve  or 
imperfect  relations  of  confidence  toward  those  of  nearer  environment 
tends  to  compensation  by  an  almost  confessional  frankness  to  some 
far-off  unknown  person.  Nearly  all,  in  obvious  innocence,  drift  at  once 
to  the  eternal  theme  of  love,  and  quote  poetry,  philosophical  theories, 
or  current  literature,  or  express  social  and  personal  opinions  that  seem 
decidedly  risque  to  maturer  minds.  Views  of  love,  life,  freedom,  art, 
death,  marriage,  and  even  sex  are  expressed  with  a  dash  and  brilliancy 
that  is  sometimes  as  fascinating  as  anything  in  the  best  current  litera- 
ture, and  which  shows  that  these  young  souls  have  leaped  to  the 
realization  of  many  of  the  deepest  and  truest  insights  which  modern 
culture  can  suggest,  but  are  yet  aimless,  restless  and  vacuous,  and 
although  with  a  passion  for  confessional  outpourings  of  their  own  sen- 
timents and  impulses,  are  essentially  without  self-knowledge,  self-rev- 
erence, or  self-control.  The  best  elements  of  noble  womanhood  are 
present  in  profusion,  but  the  faculties  which  control,  unify,  and  direct 
them  are  elements  which  unfold  later  and  now  are  either  undeveloped 
or  are  decaying  from  overripeness,  so  that  some  of  these  are  as  dis- 
tinctly cases  of  arrested  development  as  if  commissures  or  association 
fibers  failed  to  appear  to  knit  the  brain  regions  together,  so  that  this 
organ  acts  as  it  were  in  spots,  and  without  that  harmony,  moderation, 
and  balance  which  is  a  distinguishing  trait  of  psychic  maturity.  In 
others,  impulsiveness,  fickleness,  vacillation,  a  passion  for  intensity  and 
superlatives  in  word  and  deed,  reactions,  perhaps  from  too  prolonged 
repression,  have  already  begun  the  work  of  psychic  disintegration,  and 
only  a  touch  of  hysteria  and  a  little  more  self-coddling  are  needed  to 
make  these  lives  a  burden,  even  to  those  whom  love  may  make  uncon- 
scious that  they  are  so. 


These  two  opposite  instincts,  which  we  may  dub  oiko- 
tropic  and  oikofugic,  between  which  the  soul  oscillates  espe- 
cially in  youth,  suggest  again  atavistic  psychic  stratifications, 
and  also  a  once  earlier  pubescence.  The  infant  impulse  to  fol- 
low or  to  be  off  may  be  a  survival  of  an  age  when  primitive 
clans  were  on  the  move  and  the  gregarious  instincts  of  the 
child  were  expressed  in  toddling  after  the  mother  as  tribes 
moved  about  seeking  food  or  flying  from  enemies  before  a  ses- 
sile status  was  reached.  The  prepubescent  reductives  of  this 
instinct  may  stand  for  the  evolution  of  permanent  habitation, 
and  the  rise  of  the  curve  again  in  or  before  the  first  teens  sug- 
gests a  past  age  of  earlier  tropical  independence.     But  of  all 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  3^3 

this  we  know  as  yet  too  little  to  speculate.  Certain  it  is  that 
some  years  before  parenthood  is  now  normal  all  statistics  on 
the  subject  show  a  marked  decrease  of  scoliotropism,  when 
docility  to  teachers  and  studies  ends.  While  many  homes  are 
not  attractive  enough  and  some  are  too  much  so,  the  school, 
if  it  is  the  panacea  for  all  individual  and  social  ills  and  the  con- 
dition of  higher  development  we  deem  it,  is  sadly  lacking  in 
meeting  the  needs  and  interests  of  this  transition  age. 

VI.  School  and  teachers  versus  home  and  parents.  In  a 
few  aspects  we  are  already  able  to  trace  the  normal  psychic 
outgrowing  of  the  home  of  childhood  as  its  interests  irradiate 
into  an  ever  enlarging  environment.  Almost  the  only  duty  of 
small  children  is  habitual  and  prompt  obedience.  Our  very 
presence  enforces  one  general  law — that  of  keeping  our  good- 
will and  avoiding  our  displeasure.  They  respect  all  we  smile 
at  or  even  notice,  and  grow  to  it  like  the  plant  toward  the 
light.  Their  early  lies  are  often  saying  what  they  think  will 
please.  At  bottom,  the  most  restless  child  admires  and  loves 
those  who  save  him  from  too  great  fluctuations  by  coercion, 
provided  the  means  be  rightly  chosen  and  the  ascendency  ex- 
tend over  heart  and  mind.  But  the  time  comes  when  parents 
are  often  shocked  at  the  lack  of  respect  suddenly  shown  by 
the  child.  They  have  ceased  to  be  the  highest  ideals.  The 
period  of  habituating  morality  and  making  it  habitual  is  ceas- 
ing and  the  passion  to  realize  freedom,  to  act  on  personal  ex- 
perience, and  to  keep  a  private  conscience  is  in  order.  To  act 
occasionally  with  independence  from  the  highest  possible 
ideal  motives  develops  the  impulse  and  the  joy  of  pure  obli- 
gation, and  thus  brings  some  new  and  original  force  into  the 
world  and  makes  habitual  guidance  by  the  highest  and  best, 
or  by  inner  as  opposed  to  outer  constraint,  the  practical  rule  of 
life.  To  bring  the  richest  streams  of  thought  to  bear  in  inter- 
preting the  ethical  instincts,  so  that  the  youth  shall  cease  to 
live  in  a  moral  interregnum,  is  the  real  goal  of  self-knowl- 
edge. This  is  true  education  of  the  will  and  prepares  the 
way  for  love  of  overcoming  obstacles  of  difficulty,  perhaps 
even  of  conflict.    This  impulse  is  often  the  secret  of  obstinacy.^ 

^  Tarde  :   L'Opposition  Universelle.     Paris,  1897,  p.  461. 


384  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

And  yet,  "  at  no  time  in  life  will  a  human  being  respond  so 
heartily  if  treated  by  older  and  wiser  people  as  if  they  were 
equals  or  even  superiors.  The  attempt  to  treat  a  child  at 
adolescence  as  you  would  treat  an  inferior  is  instantly  fatal  to 
good  discipline."  ^  Parents  still  think  of  their  offspring  as 
mere  children,  and  tighten  the  rein  when  they  should  loosen 
it.  Many  young  people  feel  that  they  have  the  best  of  homes 
and  yet  that  they  will  go  crazy  if  they  must  remain  in  them. 
If  the  training  of  earlier  years  has  been  good,  guidance  by 
command  may  now  safely  give  way  to  that  by  ideals,  which  are 
sure  to  be  heroic.  The  one  unpardonable  thing  for  the  adoles- 
cent is  dulness,  stupidity,  lack  of  life,  interest,  and  enthusiasm 
in  school  or  teachers,  and,  perhaps  above  all,  too  great  strin- 
gency. Least  of  all  at  this  stage  can  the  curriculum  or  school 
be  an  ossuary.  The  child  must  now  be  taken  into  the  family 
councils  and  find  the  parents  interested  in  all  that  interests 
him.  Where  this  is  not  done,  we  have  the  conditions  for  the 
interesting  cases  of  so  many  youth,  who  now  begin  to  suspect 
that  father,  mother,  or  both,  are  not  their  true  parents.  Not 
only  is  there  interest  in  rapidly  widening  associations  with 
coevals,  but  a  new  lust  to  push  on  and  up  to  maturity.  One 
marked  trait  now  is  to  seek  friends  and  companions  older  than 
themselves,  or,  next  to  this,  to  seek  those  younger.  This  is  in 
marked  contrast  with  previous  years,  when  they  seek  asso- 
ciates of  their  own  age.  Possibly  the  merciless  teasing  in- 
stinct, which  culminates  about  the  same  time,  may  have  some 
influence,  but  certain  it  is  that  now  interest  is  transpolarized 
up  and  down  the  age  scale.  One  reason  is  the  new  hunger  for 
information,  not  only  concerning  reproduction,  but  a  vast 
variety  of  other  matters,  so  that  there  is  often  an  attitude  of 
silent  begging  for  knowledge.  In  answer  to  Lancaster's  ^ 
questions  on  this  subject,  some  sought  older  associates  be- 
cause they  could  learn  more  from  them,  found  them  better  or 
more  steadfast  friends,  craved  sympathy  and  found  most  of 
it  from  older  and  perhaps  married  people.  Some  were  more 
interested  in  their  parents'  conversation  with  other  adults  than 

1  The  Adolescent  at  Home  and  in  School,  by  E.  G.  Lancaster.  Proc.  of  the 
N.  E.  A.,  1899,  p.  1039. 

'The  Psychology  and  Pedagogy  of  Adolescence.  Ped.  Sem.,  July,  1897,  vol. 
V,  p.  87. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  3^5 

with  themselves,  and  were  particularly  entertained  by  the 
chance  of  hearing  things  they  had  no  business  to.  There  is 
often  a  feeling  that  adults  do  not  realize  this  new  need  of 
friendship  with  them  and  show  want  of  sympathy  almost 
brutal. 

Stableton/  who  has  made  interesting  notes  on  individual  boys 
entering  the  adolescent  period,  emphasizes  the  importance  of  sympathy, 
appreciation,  and  respect  in  dealing  with  this  age.  They  must  now  be 
talked  to  as  equals,  and  in  this  way  their  habits  of  industry  and  even 
their  dangerous  love  affairs  can  be  controlled.  He  says  "  there  is  no 
more  important  question  before  the  teaching  fraternity  to-day  than 
how  to  deal  justly  and  successfully  with  boys  at  this  time  of  life.  This 
is  the  age  when  they  drop  out  of  school  "  in  far  too  large  numbers, 
and  he  thinks  that  the  small  percentage  of  male  graduates  from  our 
high  schools  is  due  to  "  the  inability  of  the  average  grammar  grade  or 
high-school  teacher  to  deal  rightly  with  boys  in  this  critical  period  of 
their  school  life."  Most  teachers  "  know  all  their  bad  points,  but  fail 
to  discover  their  good  ones."  The  fine  disciplinarian,  the  mechanical 
movement  of  whose  school  is  so  admirable  and  who  does  not  realize 
the  new  need  of  liberty  or  how  loose-jointed,  mentally  and  physically, 
all  are  at  this  age,  should  be  supplanted  by  one  who  can  look  into  the 
heart  and  by  a  glance  make  the  boy  feel  that  he  or  she  is  his  friend. 
"  The  weakest  work  in  our  schools  is  the  handling  of  boys  entering  the 
adolescent  period  of  life,  and  there  is  no  greater  blessing  that  can  come 
to  a  boy  at  this  age,  when  he  does  not  understand  himself,  than  a  good 
strong  teacher  that  understands  him,  has  faith  in  him,  and  will  day  by 
day  lead  him  till  he  can  walk  alone." 

Small '  found  the  teacher  a  focus  of  imitation  whence  many  in- 
fluences, both  physical  and  mental,  irradiated  to  the  pupils.  Every  ac- 
cent, gesture,  automatism,  like  and  dislike  is  caught  consciously  and 
unconsciously.  Every  intellectual  interest  in  the  teacher  permeates 
the  class — liars,  if  trusted,  become  honest;  those  treated  as  ladies  and 
gentlemen  act  so ;  those  told  by  favorite  teachers  of  the  good  things 
they  are  capable  of  feel  a  strong  impulsion  to  do  them ;  some  older 
children  are  almost  transformed  by  being  made  companions  to  teachers, 
by  having  their  good  traits  recognized,  and  by  frank  apologies  by  the 
teacher  when  in  error. 

An  interesting  and  unsuspected  illustration  of  the  growth  of  in- 
dependence with  adolescence  was  found  in  2,411  papers  from  the  second 
to  eighth  grades  on  the  characteristics  of  the  best  teachers  as  seen  by 
children.^     In  the   second  and  third   grades,  all,   and  in   the   fourth, 

'  Study  of  Boys  Entering  the  Adolescent  Period  of  Life.  North-Western  Mo., 
November,   1897,  vol.  viii,  p.  248,  and  a  series  thereafter. 

''The  Sugfjestibility  of  Children.      Ped.  Sem.,  December,  1896,  vol.  iv,  p.  2I»^. 

'  Characteristics   of  the  Best  Teacher  as  Recognized  by  Children,  by  H.   E. 
Kratz.      Ped.  Sem.,  June,  1896,  vol.  iii,  pp.  413-418. 
64 


386  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

ninety-five  per  cent  specified  help  in  studies.  This  falls  off  rapidly  in 
the  sixth,  seventh,  and  eighth  grades  to  thirty-nine  per  cent,  while 
at  the  same  time  the  quality  of  patience  in  the  upper  grades  rises 
from  a  mention  by  tw^o  to  twenty-two  per  cent. 

Sanford  Bell  collated  the  answers  of  four  hundred  and  fifty-three 
males  and  four  hundred  and  eighty-eight  females  as  to  who  of  all 
their  past  teachers  did  them  most  good,  and  wherein ;  whom  they  loved 
and  disliked  most,  and  why.  His  most  striking  result  is  presented  in  a 
curve  which  shows  that  fourteen  in  girls  and  sixteen  in  boys  is  the 
age  in  which  most  good  was  felt  to  have  been  done,  and  that  curves 
culminating  at  twelve  for  both  sexes  but  not  falling  rapidly  until  fifteen 
or  sixteen  represent  the  period  when  the  strongest  and  most  indelible 
dislikes  were  felt.  What  seems  to  be  most  appreciated  in  teachers 
is  the  giving  of  purpose,  arousing  of  ideals,  kindling  of  ambition  to  be 
something  or  do  something  and  so  giving  an  object  in  life,  encourage- 
ment to  overcome  circumstances,  and,  in  general,  inspiring  self-con- 
fidence and  giving  direction.  Next  come  personal  sympathy  and  in- 
terest, kindness,  confidence,  a  little  praise,  being  understood ;  and  next, 
special  help  in  lessons,  or  timely  and  kindly  advice,  while  stability  and 
poise  of  character,  purity,  the  absence  of  hypocrisy,  independence,  per- 
sonal beauty,  athleticism  and  vigor  are  prominent.  It  is  singular  that 
those  of  each  sex  have  been  most  helped  by  their  own  sex  and  that 
this  prominence  is  far  greatest  in  men.  Four-fifths  of  the  men  and 
nearly  one-half  of  the  women,  however,  got  most  help  from  men.  Male 
teachers,  especially  near  adolescence,  seem  most  helpful  for  both  sexes. 

The  qualities  that  inspire  most  dislike  are  malevolence,  sarcasm, 
unjust  punishment,  suspicion,  severity,  sternness,  absence  of  laughing 
and  smiling,  indifference,  threats  and  broken  vows,  excessive  scolding 
and  "  roasting,"  and  fondness  for  inflicting  blows.  The  teacher  who 
does  not  smile  is  far  more  liable  to  excite  animosity.  Most  boys  dislike 
men  most,  and  girls'  dislikes  are  about  divided.  The  stories  of  school 
cruelties  and  indignities  are  painful.  Often  inveterate  grudges  are 
established  by  little  causes,  and  it  is  singular  how  permanent  and  in- 
delible strong  dislikes  are  for  the  majority  of  children.  In  many  cases, 
aversions  engendered  before  ten  have  lasted  with  little  diminution  till 
maturity,  and  there  is  a  sad  record  of  children  who  have  lost  a  term,  a 
year,  or  dropped  school  altogether  because  of  ill  treatment  or  partiality. 

Nearly  two  thousand  children  were  asked  what  they  would  do  in  a 
specific  case  of  conflict  between  teacher  and  parents.  It  was  found 
that,  while  for  young  children  parental  authority  was  preferred,  a 
marked  decline  began  about  eleven  and  was  most  rapid  after  fourteen 
in  girls  and  fifteen  in  boys,  and  that  there  was  a  nearly  corresponding 
increase  in  the  number  of  pubescents  who  preferred  the  teacher's  au- 
thority. The  reasons  for  their  choice  were  also  analyzed,  and  it  was 
found  that  whereas  for  the  young,  unconditioned  authority  was  gen- 
erally satisfactory,  with  pubescents,  abstract  authority  came  into 
marked  predominance,  "  until  when  the  children  have  reached  the  age 
of  sixteen  almost  seventy-five  per  cent  of  their  reasons  belong  to  this 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  3^7 

class,  and  the  children  show  themselves  able  to  extend  the  idea  of 
authority  without  violence  to  their  sense  of  justice." 

VII.  Wider  irradiations  to  adult  ideals  and  plans  for  life. 
On  a  basis  of  1,400  papers  answering  the  question  whom,  of 
any  one  ever  heard  or  read  of,  they  would  like  to  resemble, 
Barnes  ^  found  that  girls'  ideals  were  far  more  often  found 
in  the  immediate  circle  of  their  acquaintance  than  boys,  and 
that  those  within  that  circle  were  more  often  in  their  own 
family,  but  that  the  tendency  to  go  outside  their  personal 
knowledge  and  choose  historical  and  public  characters  was 
greatly  augmented  at  puberty,  when  also  the  heroes  of  philan- 
thropy showed  marked  gain  in  prominence.  Boys  rarely  chose 
women  as  their  ideals,  but  in  America,  half  the  girls  at  eight 
and  two-thirds  at  eighteen  chose  male  characters.  The  range 
of  important  women  ideals  among  the  girls  was  surprisingly 
small.  Barnes  fears  that  if  from  the  choice  of  relatives  as 
ideals,  the  expansion  to  remote  or  world  heroes  is  too  fast, 
it  may  "  lead  to  disintegration  of  character  and  reckless  liv- 
ing." "  If,  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  expanded  too  slowly  we 
shall  have  that  arrested  development  which  makes  good  ground 
in  which  to  grow  stupidity,  brutality,  and  drunkenness — the 
first  fruits  of  a  sluggish  and  self-contained  mind."  "  No  one 
can  consider  the  regularity  with  which  local  ideals  die  out  and 
are  replaced  by  world  ideals  without  feeling  that  he  is  in  the 
presence  of  law-abiding  forces,"  and  this  emphasizes  the  fact 
that  the  teacher  or  parent  does  not  work  in  a  world  governed 
by  caprice. 

The  compositions  written  by  thousands  of  children  in  New 
York  on  what  they  wanted  to  do  when  they  were  grown  up 
were  collated  by  Dr.  Thurber.^  The  replies  were  serious,  and 
showed  that  poor  children  looked  forward  willingly  to  severe 
labor  and  the  increased  earnestness  of  adolescent  years,  and 
the  better  answers  to  the  question  rvhy  were  noteworthy. 
All  anticipated  giving  up  the  elastic  joyousness  of  childhood 
and  felt  the  need  of  patience.  Up  to  ten  there  was  an  increase 
in  the  number  of  those  who  had  two  or  more  desires.  This 
number  declined  rapidly  at  eleven,  rose  as  rapidly  at  twelve, 

'Children's  Ideals.      Fed.  Sem.,  April,  1900,  vol.  vii,  pp.  3-12. 
•  Trans,  of  the  111.  Soc.  for  Child  Study,  vol.  ji,  No.  2,  p.  41. 


388  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

and  slowly  fell  later.  Preferences  for  a  teacher's  life  exceeded 
in  girls  up  to  nine,  fell  rapidly  at  eleven,  increased  slightly  the 
next  year,  and  declined  thereafter.  The  ideal  of  becoming 
a  dressmaker  and  milliner  increased  till  ten,  fell  at  eleven,  rose 
rapidly  to  a  maximum  at  thirteen,  when  it  eclipsed  teaching, 
and  then  fell  permanently  again.  The  professions  of  clerk  and 
stenographer  showed  a  marked  rise  from  eleven  and  a  half. 
The  number  of  boys  who  chose  the  father's  occupation  attained 
its  maximum  at  nine  and  its  minimum  at  twelve,  with  a  slight 
rise  to  fourteen,  when  the  survey  ended.  The  ideal  of  trades- 
man culminated  at  eight,  with  a  second  rise  at  thirteen.  The 
reason  "  to  earn  money  "  reached  its  high  maximum  of  fifty 
per  cent  at  twelve,  and  fell  very  rapidly.  The  reason  "  be- 
cause I  like  it  "  culminated  at  ten  and  fell  steadily  thereafter. 
The  motive  that  influenced  the  choice  of  a  profession  and 
which  was  altruistic  toward  parents  or  for  their  benefit  cul- 
minated at  twelve  and  a  half,  and  then  declined.  The  desire 
for  character  increased  somewhat  throughout,  but  rapidly  after 
twelve,  and  the  impulse  to  do  good  to  the  world,  which  had 
risen  slowly  from  nine,  mounted  sharply  after  thirteen.  Thus, 
"  at  eleven  all  the  ideas  and  tendencies  are  increasing  toward 
a  maximum.  At  twelve  we  find  the  altruistic  desires  for  the 
welfare  of  parents,  the  reason  '  to  earn  money  ' ;  at  thirteen 
the  desire  on  the  part  of  the  girls  to  be  dressmakers,  also  to  be 
clerks  and  stenographers.  At  fourteen  culminates  the  desire 
for  ii  business  career  in  bank  or  ofiice  among  the  boys,  the 
consciousness  of  life's  uncertainties  which  appeared  first  at 
twelve,  the  desire  for  character,  and  the  hope  of  doing  the 
world  good." 

"What  would  you  like  to  be  in  an  imaginary  new  city?  "' 
was  a  question  answered  by  1,234  written  papers.^  One  hun- 
dred and  fourteen  different  occupations  were  given;  that  of 
teacher  led  with  the  girls  at  every  age  except  thirteen  and 
fourteen,  when  dressmaker  and  milliner  took  precedence.  The 
motive  of  making  money  led  among  the  boys  at  every  age 
except  fourteen  and  sixteen,  when  occupations  chosen  because 
they  were  liked  led.    The  greatest  number  of  those  who  chose 

^  Children's  Ambitions,  by  H.    M.   Willard.     Barnes's   Studies  in  Education, 
vol.  ii,  pp.  243-253. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  3^9 

the  parents'  occupation  was  found  at  thirteen,  but  from  that 
age  it  steadily  decHned  and  independent  choice  came  into 
prominence.  The  maximum  of  girls  who  chose  parental  voca- 
tions was  at  fourteen.  Alotives  of  philanthropy  reached  nearly 
their  highest  point  in  girls  and  boys  at  thirteen. 

Jegi  ^  obtained  letters  addressed  to  real  or  imaginary 
friends  from  three  thousand  German  children  in  Milwaukee, 
asking  what  they  desired  to  do  when  they  grew  up,  and  why, 
and  tabulated  returns  from  two  hundred  boys  and  two  hundred 
girls  for  each  age  from  eight  to  fourteen  inclusive.  He  also 
found  a  steadily  decreasing  influence  of  relatives  to  thirteen ; 
early  adolescence  increased  in  the  personal  motive  of  choosing 
an  occupation  because  it  was  liked,  while  from  twelve  in  boys 
and  thirteen  in  girls  the  consideration  of  finding  easy  vocations 
grew  rapidly  strong. 

L.  W.  Kline  ^  studied  by  the  census  method  returns  from 
2,594  children,  who  were  asked  what  they  wished  to  be  and 
do.  He  found  that  in  naming  both  ideals  and  occupations 
girls  were  more  conservative  than  boys,  but  more  likely  to 
give  a  reason  for  their  choice.  In  this  respect  country  chil- 
dren resembled  boys  more  than  city  children.  Country  boys 
were  more  prone  to  inattention,  were  more  independent  and 
able  to  care  for  themselves,  suggesting  that  the  home  life 
of  the  country  child  is  more  effective  in  shaping  ideals  and 
character  than  that  of  the  city  child.  Industrial  occupa- 
tions are  preferred  by  the  younger  children,  the  profes- 
sional and  technical  pursuits  increasing  with  age.  Judg- 
ments of  rights  and  justice  with  the  young  are  more  prone 
to  issue  from  emotional  rather  than  from  intellectual  pro- 
cesses. Country  children  seem  more  altruistic  than  those 
in  the  city,  and  while  girls  are  more  sympathetic  than  boys, 
they  are  also  more  easily  prejudiced.  Many  of  these  returns 
bear  unmistakable  marks  that  in  some  homes  and  schools 
moralization  has  been  excessive  and  has  produced  a  sentimental 
type  of  morality  and  often  a  feverish  desire  to  express  ethical 
views  instead  of  trusting  to  suggestion.  Children  are  very 
prone  to  have  one  code  of  ideals  for  themselves  and  another 


'  Trans,  of  the  111.  Soc.  for  Child  Study,  vol.  iii.  No.  3,  p.  131. 

'  A  Study  in  Juvenile  Ethics.     Fed.  Sem. ,  June,  1903,  vol.  x,  p    239  ct  scq. 


390  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

for  others.  Boys,  too,  are  more  original  than  girls,  and  country 
children  more  than  city  children. 

Friedrich  ^  asked  German  school  children  what  person 
they  chose  as  their  pattern.  The  result  showed  differences  of 
age,  sex,  and  creed.  First  of  all  came  characters  in  history, 
which  seemed  to  show  that  this  study  for  children  of  the  sixth 
and  seventh  grades  was  essentially  ethical  or  a  training  of 
mood  and  disposition  (Gesinnungsunterricht) ,  and  this  writer 
suggests  reform  in  this  respect.  He  seems  to  think  that  the 
chief  purpose  of  history  for  this  age  should  be  ethical.  Next 
came  the  influence  of  the  Bible,  although  it  was  plain  that 
this  was  rather  in  spite  of  the  catechism  and  the  method  of 
memoriter  work.  Here,  too,  the  immediate  environment  at 
this  age  furnished  few  ideals  (four  and  one-fifth  per  cent), for 
children  seem  to  have  keener  eyes  for  the  faults  than  for  the 
virtues  of  those  near  them.  Religion,  therefore,  should 
chiefly  be  directed  to  the  Gemiith  and  not  to  the  understanding. 
This  census  also  suggested  more  care  that  the  reading  of  chil- 
dren should  contain  good  examples  in  their  environment,  and 
also  that  the  matter  of  instruction  should  be  more  fully  adapted 
to  the  conditions  of  sex. 

Friedrich  found  as  his  chief  age  result  that  children  of  the 
seventh  or  older  class  in  the  German  schools  laid  distinctly 
greater  stress  upon  characters  distinguished  by  bravery  and 
courage  than  did  the  children  of  the  sixth  grade,  while  the 
latter  more  frequently  selected  characters  illustrating  piety 
and  holiness.  The  author  divided  his  characters  into  thirty- 
five  classes,  illustrating  qualities,  and  found  that  national 
activity  led,  with  piety  a  close  second ;  that  then  came  in  order 
those  illustrating  firmness  of  faith,  bravery,  modesty,  and 
chastity;  then  pity  and  sympathy,  industry,  goodness,  pa- 
tience, etc. 

Taylor,  Young,  Hamilton,  Chambers,  and  others,  have  also 
collected  interesting  data  on  w^hat  children  and  young  people 
hope  to  be,  do,  whom  they  would  like  to  be,  or  resemble,  etc. 
Only  a  few  at  adolescence  feel  themselves  so  good  or  happy 
that  they  are  content  to  be  themselves.     Most  show  more  or 


'  Die  Ideale  der  Kinder.     Zeits.  f.  Pad.  Psychologic  und  Pathologie,  vol.  iii, 
p.  38. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  39  ^ 

less  discontent  at  their  lot.  From  six  to  eleven  or  twelve  the 
number  who  find  their  ideals  among  their  acquaintances  falls 
off  rapidly,  and  historical  characters  rise  to  a  maximum  at  or 
before  the  earliest  teens.  From  eleven  or  twelve  on  into  the 
middle  teens  contemporary  ideals  increase  steadily.  London 
children  are  more  backward  in  this  expansion  of  ideals  than 
Americans,  while  girls  choose  more  acquaintance  ideals  at  all 
ages  than  do  boys.  The  expansion  these  authors  also  trace 
largely  to  the  study  of  history.  The  George  Washington 
ideal,  which  leads  all  the  rest  by  far  and  is  greatly  overworked, 
in  contrast  with  the  many  heroes  of  equal  rank  found  in  Eng- 
land, pales  soon,  as  imperfections  are  seen,  and  those  now 
making  history  loom  up.  This  is  the  normal  age  to  free  from 
bondage  to  the  immediate  present,  and  this  freedom  is  one 
measure  of  education.  Bible  heroes  are  chosen  as  ideals  by 
only  a  very  small  percentage,  mostly  girls,  far  more  charac- 
ters being  from  fiction  and  mythology ;  where  Jesus  is  chosen, 
his  human  is  preferred  to  his  divine  side.  Again,  it  would 
seem  that  teachers  would  be  ideals,  especially  as  many  girls 
intend  to  teach,  but  they  are  generally  unpopular  as  choices. 
In  an  ideal  system  they  would  be  the  first  step  in  expansion 
from  home  ideals.  Military  heroes  and  inventors  play  leading 
roles  in  the  choices  of  pubescent  boys. 

Girls  at  all  school  ages  and  increasingly  up  the  grades  pre- 
fer foreign  ideals,  to  be  the  wife  of  a  man  of  title,  as  aristoc- 
racies offer  special  opportunities  for  woman  to  shine,  and  life 
near  the  source  of  fashion  is  very  attractive  at  least  up  to 
sixteen.  The  saddest  fact  in  these  studies  is  that  nearly  half 
our  American  pubescent  girls  choose  male  ideals,  or  would 
be  men,  or  nearly  three  times  as  many  as  in  England.  Girls, 
too,  have  from  six  to  fifteen  times  as  many  ideals  as  boys.  In 
this  significant  fact  we  realize  how  modern  woman  has  cut 
loose  from  all  old  moorings  and  is  drifting  with  no  destination 
and  no  anchor  aboard.  While  her  sex  has  multiplied  in  all 
lower  and  high  school  grades,  its  ideals  are  still  too  mascu- 
line. Text-books  teach  little  about  women.  When  a  woman's 
Bible,  history,  course  of  study,  etc.,  is  proposed,  her  sex  fears 
it  may  reduce  her  to  the  old  servitude.  While  boys  rarely,  and 
then  only  when  very  young,  choose  female  ideals,  girls'  prefer- 
ence for  the  life  of  the  other  sex  sometimes  reaches  sixty,  and 


392  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

seventy  per  cent.  The  divorce  between  the  Hfe  preferred  and 
that  demanded  by  the  interests  of  the  race  is  often  absolute. 
Saddest  and  most  unnatural  of  all  is  the  fact  that  this  state  of 
things  increases  most  rapidly  during  just  those  years  when 
ideals  of  womanhood  should  be  developed  and  become  most 
dominant,  till  it  seems  as  if  the  female  character  was  threatened 
with  disintegration.  While  statistics  are  not  yet  sufficient  to 
be  reliable  on  the  subject,  there  is  some  indication  that  woman 
later  slowly  reverts  toward  ideals  not  only  from  her  own  sex 
but  also  from  the  circle  of  her  own  acquaintances. 

The  reasons  for  the  choice  of  ideals  are  various  and  not 
yet  well  determined.  Civic  virtues  certainly  rise;  material 
and  utilitarian  considerations  do  not  seem  to  much,  if  at  all, 
at  adolescence,  and  in  some  data  decline.  Position,  fame, 
honor,  and  general  greatness  increase  rapidly,  but  moral 
qualities  rise  highest  and  also  fastest  just  before  and  near 
puberty  and  continue  to  increase  later  yet.  By  these  choices 
both  sexes,  but  girls  far  most,  show  increasing  admiration  of 
ethical  and  social  qualities.  Artistic  and  intellectual  traits  also 
rise  quite  steadily  from  ten  or  eleven  onward,  but  with  no  such 
rapidity,  and  reach  no  such  height  as  military  ability  and 
achievement  for  boys.  Striking  in  these  studies  is  the  rapid 
increase,  especially  from  eight  to  fourteen,  of  the  sense  of 
historic  time  for  historic  persons.  Those  long  since  dead  are 
no  longer  spoken  of  as  now  living.  Most  of  these  choices  are 
direct  expressions  of  real  differences  of  taste  and  character. 

VIII.  Property,  Kline  and  France  ^  have  defined  as  "  any- 
thing that  the  individual  may  acquire  which  sustains  and  pro- 
longs life,  favors  survival,  and  gives  an  advantage  over  op- 
posing forces."  Many  animals  and  even  insects  store  up  food 
both  for  themselves  and  for  their  young.  Very  early  in  life 
children  evince  signs  of  ownership.  Letourneau  ^  says  that  the 
notion  of  private  property,  which  seems  to  us  so  natural, 
dawned  late  and  slowly,  and  that  common  ownership  was  the 
rule  among  primitive  people.  Value  is  sometimes  measured 
by  use  and  sometimes  by  the  work  required  to  produce  it.    Be- 

•  The  Psychology  of  Ownership.     Ped.    Sem.,   December,    1899,   vol.  vi,  pp. 
421-470. 

'Property:   Its  Origin  and  Development.     London,  1892. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS 


393 


fore  puberty,  there  is  great  eagerness  to  possess  things  that 
are  of  immediate  service,  but  after  its  dawn,  the  desire  of  pos- 
session takes  another  form,  and  money  for  its  own  sake,  which 
is  at  first  rather  an  abstraction,  comes  to  be  respected  or  re- 
garded as  an  object  of  extreme  desire,  because  it  is  seen  to  be 
the  embodiment  of  all  values. 


The  money  sense,  as  it  is  now  often  called,  is  very  complex  and  has 
not  yet  been  satisfactorily  analyzed  by  psychology.  Ribot  and  others 
trace  its  origin  to  prevision  v^hich  they  think  animals  that  hoard  food 
feel.  Monroe '  has  tabulated  returns  from  977  boys  and  1,090  girls 
from  six  to  sixteen  in  answer  to  the  question  as  to  what  they  would 
do  with  a  small  monthly  allowance.  The  following  table  shows  the 
marked  increase  at  the  dawn  of  adolescence  of  the  number  who  would 
save  it: 


Age. 

Boys. 

Girls. 

Age. 

Boys. 

Girls. 

7-- 

.  43  per  cent 

36  per  cent 

12.. 

.  82  per  cent 

64  per  cent 

8.. 

-   45        " 

34       " 

I3-- 

.   88        " 

78       " 

9-- 

-   48       " 

35       " 

14-- 

.   85        " 

80       " 

10.. 

-   58       " 

50      " 

I5-- 

-   83        " 

78       " 

11.. 

-   71        " 

58       " 

16.. 

.-   85        " 

82       " 

This  tendency  to  thrift  is  strongest  in  boys,  and  both  sexes  often 
show  the  tendency  to  moralize  that  is  so  strong  in  the  early  teens. 
Much  of  our  school  work  in  arithmetic  is  dominated  by  the  money 
sense,  and  school  savings-banks,  at  first  for  the  poor,  are  now  extend- 
ing to  children  of  all  classes.  This  sense  tends  to  prevent  pauperism, 
prodigaHty,  is  an  immense  stimulus  to  the  imagination  and  develops 
purpose  to  pursue  a  distant  object  for  a  long  time.  To  see  all  things 
and  values  in  terms  of  money  has,  of  course,  its  pedagogic  and  ethical 
limitations,  but  there  is  a  stage  where  it  is  a  great  educational  advance 
and  it,  too,  is  full  of  phylogenetic  suggestions. 

IX.  Social  judgment,  cronies,  solitude.  The  two  follow- 
ing observations  afford  a  glimpse  of  the  development  of  moral 
judgments.  From  one  thousand  boys  and  one  thousand  girls 
of  each  age  from  six  to  sixteen  who  answered  the  question  as 
to  what  should  be  done  to  a  girl  with  a  new  box  of  paints  who 
beautified  the  parlor  chairs  with  them  with  a  wish  to  please 
her  mother,  the  following  conclusion  was  drawn.^  Most  of 
the  younger  children  would  whip  the  girl,  but  from  fourteen 

^  Money-Sense  of  Children.  Will  S.  Monroe.  Ped.  Sem.,  March,  1899,  vol.  vi, 
p.  152. 

'  A  Study  of  Children's  Rights,  as  Seen  by  Themselves,  by  M.  E.  Schallenberger. 
Ped.  Sem.,  October,  1894,  vol.  iii,  pp.  87-96, 


394  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

on  the  number  declines  very  rapidly.  Few  of  the  young  chil- 
dren suggest  explaining  why  it  was  wrong,  while  at  twelve, 
one  hundred  and  eighty-one,  and  at  sixteen,  seven  hundred 
and  fifty-one,  would  explain.  The  motive  of  the  younger  chil- 
dren in  punishment  is  revenge;  with  the  older  ones  that  of 
preventing  a  repetition  of  the  act  comes  in ;  and  higher  and 
later  comes  the  purpose  of  reform.  With  age  comes  also  a 
marked  distinction  between  the  act  and  its  motive  and  a  sense 
of  the  girl's  ignorance.  Only  the  older  children  would  suggest 
extracting  a  promise  not  to  ofifend  again.  Thus  with  puberty 
comes  a  change  of  view-point  from  judging  actions  by  results 
to  judging  by  motives,  and  only  the  older  ones  see  that  wrong 
can  be  done  if  there  are  no  bad  consequences.  There  is  also 
a  great  development  of  the  quality  of  mercy  with  increased 
years. 

One  hundred  children  of  each  sex  and  age  between  six  and  sixteen 
were  asked  what  they  would  do  with  a  burglar,  the  question  stating 
that  the  penalty  was  five  years  in  prison.^  Of  the  younger  children 
nearly  nine-tenths  ignored  the  law  and  fixed  upon  some  other  penalty, 
but  from  twelve  years  there  is  a  steady  advance  in  those  who  would 
inflict  the  legal  penalty,  while  at  sixteen,  seventy-four  per  cent  would 
have  the  criminal  punished  according  to  law.  Thus  "  with  the  dawn 
of  adolescence  at  the  age  of  twelve  or  shortly  after  comes  the  recogni- 
tion of  a  larger  life,  a  life  to  be  lived  in  common  with  others,  and  with 
this  recognition  the  desire  to  sustain  the  social  code  made  for  the 
common  welfare,"  and  punishment  is  no  longer  regarded  as  an  in- 
dividual and  arbitrary  matter. 

From  another  question  answered  by  1,914  children^  it  was  found 
that  with  the  development  of  the  psychic  faculties  in  youth,  there  was 
an  increasing  appreciation  of  punishment  as  preventive;  an  increasing 
sense  of  the  value  of  individuality  and  of  the  tendency  to  demand 
protection  of  personal  rights;  a  change  from  a  sense  of  justice  based 
on  feeling  and  on  faith  in  authority  to  that  based  on  reason  and  under- 
standing. Children's  attitude  toward  punishment  for  weak  time  sense, 
tested  by  2,536  children  from  six  to  sixteen,'  showed  also  a  marked 
pubescent  increase  in  the  sense  of  the  need  of  the  remedial  function  of 
punishment  as  distinct  from  the  view  of  it  as  vindictive,  or  getting  even, 

'  Children's  Attitude  toward  Law,  by  E.  M.  Darrah.  Barnes's  Studies  in  Edu- 
cation, pp.  213-216. 

*  Class  Punishment,  by  Caroline  Frear.     Barnes's  Studies  in  Education,   pp. 

332-337- 

*  Children's  Attitude  toward  Punishment  for  Weak  Time  Sense,  by  D.  S.  SnecJ- 
den.     Barnes's  Studies  in  Education,  pp.  344-351. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  395 

common  in  earlier  years.  There  is  also  a  marked  increase  in  discrimi- 
nating the  kinds  and  degrees  of  offenses ;  in  taking  account  of  miti- 
gating circumstances,  the  inconvenience  caused  others,  the  involuntary 
nature  of  the  offense  and  the  purpose  of  the  culprit.  All  this  continues 
to  increase  up  to  sixteen,  where  these  studies  leave  the  child. 

An  interesting  effect  of  the  social  instinct  appears  in  August 
Mayer's  ^  elaborate  study  made  upon  fourteen  boys  in  the  fifth  and 
sixth  grade  of  a  Wiirzburg  school  to  determine  whether  they  could 
work  better  together  or  alone.  The  tests  were  in  dictation,  mental  and 
written  arithmetic,  memory,  and  Ebbinghaus's  combination  exercises, 
and  all  were  given  with  every  practicable  precaution  to  make  the  other 
conditions  uniform.  The  conclusions  demonstrate  the  advantages  of 
collective  over  individual  instruction.  Under  the  former  condition, 
emulation  is  stronger  and  work  more  rapid  and  better  in  quality.  From 
this  it  is  inferred  that  pupils  should  not  be  grouped  according  to  ability, 
for  the  dull  are  most  stimulated  by  the  presence  of  the  bright,  the  bad 
by  the  good,  etc.  Thus  work  at  home  is  prone  to  deteriorate,  and  ex- 
perimental pedagogy  shows  that  the  social  impulse  is  on  the  whole  a 
stronger  spur  for  boys  of  eleven  or  twelve  than  the  absence  of  distrac- 
tion which  solitude  brings. 

From  the  answers  of  i,o68  boys  and  1,268  girls  from  seven  to  six- 
teen on  the  kind  of  chum  they  liked  best,^  it  appears  that  with  the  teens 
children  are  more  anxious  for  chums  that  can  keep  secrets  and  dress 
neatly,  and  there  is  an  increased  number  who  are  liked  for  qualities 
that  supplement  rather  than  duplicate  those  of  the  chooser.  "  There  is 
an  apparent  struggle  between  the  real  actual  self  and  the  ideal  self;  a 
pretty  strong  desire  to  have  a  chum  that  embodies  the  traits  youth  most 
desire  but  which  they  are  conscious  of  lacking."  The  strong  like  the 
weak ;  those  full  of  fun  the  serious ;  the  timid  the  bold ;  the  small  the 
large ;  etc.  Only  children  '  illustrate  differing  effects  of  isolation,  while 
"  mashes  "  and  "  crushes  "  and  ultra-cronyism  with  "  selfishness  for 
two  "  show  the  results  of  abnormal  restriction  of  the  irradiation  of 
the  social  instinct  which  should  now  occur.* 

M.  H.  Small,'  after  pointing  out  that  communal  are  more  intelligent 
than  animals  with  solitary  habits,  and  that  to  even  name  all  the  irradia- 
tions of  the  social  instinct  would  be  to  write  a  history  of  the  human 
race,  studied  nearly  five  hundred  cases  of  eminent  men  who  developed 
proclivities  to  solitude.  It  is  interesting  to  observe  in  how  many  of 
these  cases  this  was  developed  in  adolescence  when,  with  the  horror 

>  Ueber  Einzel-  und  Gesammdeistung  des  Schulkindes.  Arch.  f.  d.  Gesammte 
Psychologic,  1903,  pp.  276-416. 

*  Development  of  the  Social  Consciousness  of  Children,  by  Will  S.  Monroe. 
North- Western  Mo.,  September,  1898,  vol.  ix,  p.  31. 

^  Bohannon  :  The  Only  Child  in  a  Family.    Ped.  Sem.,  April,  1898,  vol.  v,  p.  475. 

*  S.  Delitsch :   Schulfreundschaften,  Kinder  Fehlen,  Bd.  v,  p.  150. 

*0n  Some  Psychical  Relations  of  Society  and  Solitude.  Ped.  Sem.,  April, 
1900,  vol.  vii,  pp.  13-69. 


396  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

of  mediocrity,  comes  introspection,  apathy,  irresolution,  and  subjectiv- 
ism. The  grounds  of  repulsion  from  society  at  this  age  may  be  disap- 
pointed hunger  for  praise,  wounded  vanity,  the  reaction  from  over- 
assertion,  or  the  nursings  of  some  high  ideals,  as  it  is  slowly  realized 
that  in  society  the  individual  can  not  be  absolute.  The  motives  to  self- 
isolation  may  be  because  youth  feels  its  lack  of  physical  or  moral 
force  to  compete  with  men,  or  they  may  be  due  to  the  failure  of  others 
to  concede  to  the  exactions  of  inordinate  egotism  and  are  directly  pro- 
portional to  the  impulse  to  magnify  self,  or  to  the  remoteness  of  com- 
mon social  interests  from  immediate  personal  desire  or  need,  and  in- 
versely as  the  number  and  range  of  interests  seen  to  be  common  and 
the  clearness  with  which  social  relations  are  realized.  While  maturity 
of  character  needs  some  solitude,  too  much  dwarfs  it,  and  more  or  less 
of  the  same  paralysis  of  association  follows  which  is  described  in  the 
nostalgia  of  arctic  journeys,  deserts,  being  lost  in  the  j,ungle,  solitary 
confinement,  and  in  the  interesting  stories  of  feral  men.^  In  some  of 
these  cases  the  mind  is  saved  from  entire  stultification  by  pets,  imagi- 
nary companions,  tasks,  etc.  Normally  "  the  tendency  to  solitude  at 
adolescence  indicates  not  fulness  but  want,"  and  a  judicious  balance 
between  rest  and  work,  pursuit  of  favorite  lines,  genuine  sympathy, 
and  wise  companionship  will  generally  normalize  the  social  relation. 

X.  First  forms  of  spontaneous  social  organizations.  Gulick  " 
has  studied  the  propensity  of  boys  from  thirteen  on  to  consort 
in  gangs,  do  "  dawsies  "  and  stumps,  get  into  scrapes  together, 
and  fight  and  suffer  for  one  another.  The  manners  and  cus- 
toms of  the  gang  are  to  build  shanties  or  "  hunkies,"  hunt  with 
sHng  shots,  buikl  fires  before  huts  in  the  woods,  cook  their 
squirrels  and  other  game,  play  Indian,  build  tree-platforms, 
where  they  smoke  or  troop  about  some  leader,  who  may  have 
an  old  revolver.  They  find  or  excavate  caves,  or  perhaps  roof 
them  over;  the  barn  is  a  blockhouse  or  a  battle-ship.  In  the 
early  teens  boys  begin  to  use  frozen  snowballs  or  put  pebbles 
in  them,  or  perhaps  have  stone-fights  between  gangs  than 
wdiich  no  contiguous  African  tribes  could  be  more  hostile. 
They  become  toughs  and  tantalize  policemen  and  peddlers; 
"  lick  "  every  enemy  or  even  stranger  found  alone  on  their 
grounds ;  often  smash  windows ;  begin  to  use  sticks  and  brass 
knuckles  in  their  fights ;  pelt  each  other  with  green  apples ; 
carry  shillalahs,  or  perhaps  air-rifles.     The  more  plucky  ar- 

*  A.  Rauber:    Homo  Sapiens  Ferus.      1888.     See  also  my   Social  Aspects  of 
Education;  Ped.  Sem.,  March,  1902.   Also  Krapotkin :   Mutual  Aid.   London,  1902. 
'  Studies  of  Adolescence.     Classified  Facts. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  397 

range  fights  beforehand ;  rifle  unoccupied  houses ;  set  ambushes 
for  gangs  with  which  they  are  at  feud;  perhaps  have  secrets 
and  initiations  where  new  boys  are  triced  up  by  the  legs  and 
butted  against  trees  and  rocks.  When  painted  for  their  Indian 
fights,  they  may  grow  so  excited  as  to  perhaps  rush  into  the 
water  or  into  the  school-room  yelling;  mimic  the  violence  of 
strikes ;  kindle  dangerous  bonfires ;  pelt  policemen,  and  shout 
vile  nicknames. 

The  spontaneous  tendency  to  develop  social  and  political 
organizations  among  boys  in  pubescent  years  was  well  seen  in 
a  school  near  Baltimore  in  the  midst  of  an  eight-hundred-acre 
farm  richly  diversified  with  swamp  and  forest  and  abounding 
with  birds,  squirrels,  rabbits,  etc.  Soon  after  the  opening  of 
this  school  ^  the  boys  gathered  nuts  in  parties.  When  a  tree 
was  reached  which  others  had  shaken,  an  unwritten  law  soon 
required  those  who  wished  to  shake  it  further  to  first  pile 
up  all  nuts  under  the  tree,  while  those  who  failed  to  do  so 
were  universally  regarded  as  dishonest  and  every  boy's  hand 
was  against  them.  To  pile  them  involved  much  labor,  so  that 
the  second  party  usually  sought  fresh  trees,  and  partial  shak- 
ing practically  gave  possession  of  all  the  fruits  on  a  tree.  They 
took  birds'  eggs  freely,  and  whenever  a  bird  was  found  in  build- 
ing, or  if  a  squirrel's  hole  was  discovered,  the  finder  tacked 
his  name  on  the  tree  and  thereby  confirmed  his  ownership,  as 
he  did  if  he  placed  a  box  in  which  a  nest  was  built.  The  ticket 
must  not  blow  off,  and  the  right  at  first  lasted  only  one  season. 
In  the  rabbit^land  every  trap  that  was  set  preempted  ground 
for  a  fixed  number  of  yards  about  it.  Some  grasping  boys 
soon  made  many  traps  and  set  them  all  over  a  valuable  district, 
so  that  the  common  land  fell  into  a  few  hands.  Traps  were 
left  out  all  winter  and  simply  set  the  next  spring.  All  these 
rights  finally  came  into  the  ownership  of  two  or  three  boys, 
who  slowly  acquired  the  right  and  bequeathed  their  claims 
to  others  for  a  consideration,  when  they  left  school.  The 
monopolists  often  had  a  large  surplus  of  rabbits  which  they 
bartered  for  *'  butters,"  the  unit  being  the  ounce  of  daily 
allowance.    These  could  be  represented  by  tickets  transferred, 

'  Rutiimpntary    Society   among   Boys,   by  John  Johnson,    Jr.      Overland,  Mo., 
October,  1883. 


398  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

so  that  debts  were  paid  with  "  butters  "  that  had  never  been 
seen.  An  agrarian  party  arose  and  demanded  a  redistribution 
of  land  from  the  monopoHsts,  as  Sir  Henry  Maine  shows  often 
happened  in  the  old  village  community.  Legislation  and  ju- 
dicial procedure  were  developed  and  quarrels  settled  by  arbi- 
tration, ordeal,  and  wager,  and  punishment  by  bumping  often 
followed  the  decision  of  the  boy  folkmote.  Scales  of  prices 
for  commodities  in  "  butters  "  or  in  pie-currency  were  evolved, 
so  that  we  here  have  an  almost  entirely  spontaneous  but 
amazingly  rapid  recapitulation  of  the  social  development  of 
the  race  by  these  boys. 

From  a  study  of  i,i66  children's  organizations  described 
as  a  language  lesson  in  school  composition,  Mr.  Sheldon  ^  ar- 
rives at  some  interesting  results.  American  children  tend 
strongly  to  institutional  activities,  only  about  thirty  per  cent 
of  all  not  having  belonged  to  some  such  organization.  Imita- 
tion plays  a  very  important  role,  and  girls  take  far  more  kindly 
than  boys  to  societies  organized  by  adults  for  their  benefit. 
They  are  also  more  governed  by  adult  and  altruistic  motives 
in  forming  their  organizations,  while  boys  are  nearer  to 
primitive  man.  Before  ten  comes  the  period  of  free  spon- 
taneous imitation  of  every  form  of  adult  institution.  The  child 
reproduces  sympathetically  miniature  copies  of  the  life  around 
him.  On  a  farm,  his  play  is  raking,  threshing,  building  barns, 
or  on  the  seashore  he  makes  ships  and  harbors.  In  general, 
he  plays  family,  store,  church,  and  chooses  officers  simply  be- 
cause adults  do.  The  feeling  of  caste,  almost  absent  in  the 
young,  culminates  about  ten  and  declines  thereafter.  From 
ten  to  fourteen,  however,  associations  assume  a  new  char- 
acter; boys  especially  cease  to  imitate  adult  organizations  and 
tend  to  form  social  units  characteristic  of  lower  stages  of  hu- 
man evolution — pirates,  robbers,  soldiers,  lodges,  and  other 
savage  reversionary  combinations,  where  the  strongest  and 
boldest  is  the  leader.  They  build  huts,  wear  feathers  and 
tomahawks  as  badges,  carry  knives  and  toy-pistols,  make  raids 
and  sell  the  loot.  Cowards  alone,  together  they  fear  nothing. 
Their  imagination  is  perhaps  inflamed  by  flash  literature  and 


'  The  Institutional  Activities  of  American  Children.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  July, 
1898,  vol.  ix,  pp.  425-448. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  399 

"penny-dreadfuls."  Such  associations  often  break  out  in  de- 
cadent country  communities  where,  with  fewer  and  feebler 
offspring,  lax  notions  of  family  discipline  prevail  and  hood- 
lumism  is  the  direct  result  of  the  passing  of  the  rod.  These 
barbaric  societies  have  their  place  and  give  vigor,  but  if  un- 
reduced later,  as  in  many  unsettled  portions  of  this  country, 
a  semisavage  state  of  society  results.  At  twelve  the  predatory 
function  is  normally  subordinated,  and  if  it  is  not  it  becomes 
dangerous,  because  the  members  are  no  longer  satisfied  with 
mere  play,  but  are  stronger  and  abler  to  do  harm,  and  the  spice 
of  danger  and  its  fascination  may  issue  in  crime.  Athleticism 
is  now  the  form  into  which  these  wilder  instincts  can  be  best 
transmuted,  and  where  they  find  harmless  and  even  whole- 
some vent.  Another  change  early  in  adolescence  is  the  in- 
creased number  of  social,  literary,  and  even  philanthropic  or- 
ganizations and  institutions  for  mutual  help — perhaps  against 
vice,  for  having  a  good  time,  or  to  hold  picnics  and  parties. 
Altruism  now  begins  to  make  itself  felt  as  a  motive. 

XL  Student  life  and  organisations.  Student  life  is  per- 
haps the  best  of  all  fields,  unworked  though  it  is,  for  studying 
the  natural  history  of  adolescence.  Its  modern  record  is  over 
eight  hundred  years  old  and  it  is  marked  with  the  signatures 
of  every  age,  yet  has  essential  features  that  do  not  vary. 
Cloister  and  garrison  rules  have  never  been  enforced  even  in 
the  hospice,  bursa,  inn,  "  house,"  "  hall,"  or  dormitory,  and 
in  loco  parentis  practises  are  impossible,  especially  with  large 
numbers.  The  very  word  school  means  leisure,  and  in  a  world 
of  toil  and  moil  suggests  paradise.  Some  have  urged  that 
elite  youth,  exempt  from  the  struggle  to  live  and  left  to  the 
freedom  of  their  own  inclinations,  might  serve  as  a  biological 
and  ethnic  compass  to  point  out  the  goal  of  human  destiny. 
But  the  spontaneous  expressions  of  this  best  age  and  condi- 
tion of  life,  with  no  other  occupation  than  their  own  develop- 
ment, have  shown  reversions  as  often  as  progress.  The  rupture 
of  home  ties  stimulates  every  wider  vicarious  expression  of 
the  social  instinct.  Each  taste  and  trait  can  find  congenial 
companionship  in  others  and  thus  be  stimulated  to  more  in- 
tensity and  self-consciousness.  Very  much  that  has  been 
hitherto  repressed  in  the  adolescent  soul  is  now  reenforced 


400  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

by  association  and  may  become  excessive  and  even  aggressive. 
While  many  of  the  race-correlates  of  childhood  are  lost,  those 
of  this  stage  are  more  accessible  in  savage  and  subsavage  life. 
Freedom  is  the  native  air  and  vital  breath  of  student  life.  The 
sense  of  personal  liberty  is  absolutely  indispensable  for  moral 
maturity,  and  just  as  truth  can  not  be  found  without  the  possi- 
bility of  error,  so  the  posse  non  peccare  precedes  the  non  posse 
peccare,  and  professors  must  make  a  broad  application  of  the 
rule  abiisiis  non  tollit  iisiim.  The  student  must  have  much  free- 
dom to  be  lazy,  make  his  own  minor  morals,  vent  his  disre- 
spect for  what  he  can  see  no  use  in,  be  among  strangers  to  act 
himself  out  and  form  a  personality  of  his  own,  be  baptized 
w4th  the  revolutionary  and  skeptical  spirit,  and  go  to  extremes 
at  the  age  when  excesses  teach  wisdom  with  amazing  rapidity, 
if  he  is  to  become  a  true  knight  of  the  spirit  and  his  own 
master.  Ziegler  ^  frankly  told  German  students  that  about 
one-tenth  of  them  would  be  morally  lost  in  this  process,  but 
insisted  that  on  the  whole  more  good  was  done  than  by  re- 
straint, for,  he  said,  youth  is  now  in  the  stage  of  Schiller's 
bell  when  it  was  molten  metal. 

Of  all  safeguards  I  believe  a  rightly  cultivated  sense  of 
honor  is  the  most  effective  at  this  age.  Sadly  as  the  unwritten 
code  of  student  honor  in  all  lands  needs  revision,  and  partial, 
freaky,  and  utterly  perverted,  tainted  and  cowardly  as  it  often 
is,  it  really  means  what  Kant  expressed  in  the  sublime  pre- 
cept, "  Thou  canst  because  thou  oughtest."  Fichte  said  that 
FaiilJicit,  FeigJieit,  and  Falschhcit  were  the  three  dishonorable 
things  for  students.  If  they  would  study  the  history  and  enter 
into  the  spirit  of  their  own  fraternities,  they  would  often  have 
keener  and  broader  ideas  of  honor  to  which  they  are  happily 
so  sensitive.  If  professors  made  it  always  a  point  of  honor  to 
confess  and  never  to  conceal  the  limitation  of  their  knowledge, 
would  scorn  all  pretense  of  it,  place  credit  for  originality 
frankly  where  it  belongs,  teach  no  creeds  they  do  not  pro- 
foundly believe,  or  topics  in  which  they  are  not  interested,  and 
withhold  nothing  from  those  who  want  the  truth,  they  could 
from  this  vantage  with  more  effect  bring  students  to  feel  that 
the  laziness,  that  while  outwardly  conforming  does  no  real 

'  Der  Deutsche  Student  am  Ende  des  19.     Jahrunderts.     Stuttgart,  1895. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  4^1 

inner  work,  that  getting  a  diploma,  as  a  professor  lately  said, 
an  average  student  could  do  on  one  hour's  study  a  day,  living 
beyond  one's  means,  and  thus  imposing  a  hardship  on  parents 
greater  than  the  talent  of  the  sons  justifies,  accepting  stipends 
not  needed,  especially  to  the  deprivation  of  those  more  needy, 
using  dishonest  ways  of  securing  rank  in  studies  or  positions, 
on  teams,  or  social  standing-,  are,  one  and  all,  not  only  ungen- 
tlemanly  but  cowardly  and  mean,  and  the  axe  would  be  laid 
at  the  root  of  the  tree.  Honor  should  impel  students  to  go 
nowhere  where  they  conceal  their  college,  their  fraternity,  cr 
even  their  name,  to  keep  themselves  immaculate  from  all  con- 
tact with  that  class  of  women  which,  Ziegler  states,  brought 
twenty-five  per  cent  of  the  students  of  the  University  of 
Berlin  in  a  single  year  to  physicians,  to  remember  that  other's 
sisters  are  as  cherished  as  their  own,  to  avoid  those  sins 
against  confiding  innocence  which  cry  for  vengeance,  as  did 
Valentine  against  Faust,  and  which  strengthen  the  hate  of 
social  classes  and  make  mothers  and  sisters  seem  tedious 
because  low  ideas  of  womanhood  have  been  implanted,  which 
give  a  taste  for  mucky  authors  that  reek  with  suggestiveness, 
and  to  avoid  the  waste  of  nerve  substance  and  nerve  weakness 
in  ways  which  Ibsen  and  Tolstoi  have  described.  These 
things  are  the  darkest  blot  on  the  honor  of  youth. 

Next  to  this  comes  inebriation.  A  well-known  German 
student  song  says  he  who  has  never  been  drunk  is  not  a  brave 
man.  Plato  seems  almost  to  counsel  occasional  inebriation  be- 
cause it  removes  reserves,  reveals  the  whole  soul,  and  because 
conviviality  makes  men  confidential,  as  men  have  sometimes 
deliberated  at  night  when  drunk  and  decided  in  the  morning 
when  sober.  It  is  often  said  that  intoxication  a  few  times  to 
find  one's  limit  is  a  part  of  self-knowledge;  that  drinking 
together  tends  to  idealize  life,  because  it  is  a  symbol  of  the 
spiritual.  It  is  somewhat  akin  to  the  overflowing  joy  of  youth 
which  makes  us  glow  with  life,  but,  on  the  other  hand,  very 
few  drink  to  make  themselves  bold,  to  overcome  pessimism, 
or  are  inspired  by  any  muse  thereby.  If  total  abstinence  seem 
a  little  too  clerical,  ascetic,  or  an  undue  restriction  of  academic 
freedom,  certain  it  is  that  excess  weakens  all  the  zest  and 
interest  of  life  and  makes  the  drinker  more  and  more  unin- 
teresting.    Strong  drinks  burn  out  the  finer  joys  of  life,  if 

Go 


402  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

they  do  not  actually  consume  the  substance  of  the  neurones  and 
injure  the  elasticity  of  the  blood-vessels.  Stronger  lights  kill 
weaker  ones,  and  the  exaltation  of  wine  in  excess  makes  in- 
tellectual pleasures  seem  dim  and  pallid. 

The  years  of  academic  life  are  like  a  high  table-land  or  a 
mountain  ridge  which  we  cross  in  passing  from  infancy  to 
old  age.  At  each  point  on  it  we  can  see  and  feel  both  ways — 
protensively  toward  the  future  and  retrotensively  toward  the 
past — as  at  no  other  stage  of  life.  Childish  memories  and 
feelings  will  soon  become  pallid,  unreal,  desiccated  things  for 
memory,  preserved  as  useless  rudiments  and  consisting  only 
in  a  few  chance  images,  or  quite  lost  to  view.  Before  this, 
all  adult  life  has  seemed  remote  and  unreal,  but  now  the  soul 
is  Janus-faced,  looking  before  and  after  in  a  very  peculiar 
sense.  Thus  we  may  understand  another  new  principle,  which 
I  propose,  viz.,  that  of  range  and  mobility  up  and  down  the 
genetic  ladder  peculiar  to  this  age.  It  is  never  so  easy  to  sink 
far  below  the  normal  or  average  common  sense,  intelligence, 
or  effort,  to  abject  silliness,  but  these  moods  alternate  with 
the  most  strenuous  and  lofty  aspirations  toward  the  highest. 
Collegians  often  seem  to  find  distinct  relief  from  the  hardest 
and  most  intellectual  activity  in  a  degree  of  banality  that 
would  defy  belief  save  among  the  circle  of  intimate  friends 
who  had  actually  seen  it.  Perhaps  those  whose  wisdom  is 
veined  with  the  most  prelusions  of  senescence  are  those  who 
can  be  most  babyish.  Some  serious  young  men  seem  born  old 
and  very  early  lose  the  power,  if  they  ever  had  it,  to  be  or  feel 
young,  while  others  remain  all  their  lives  conserved  youth,  if 
not  children.  This  power  of  free  and  ready  movement  up  and 
down  the  Jacob's  ladder  of  phylogeny  I  believe  to  be  a  resource 
of  very  great  economic  value  for  achievement.  This  functional 
reversion  enables  us,  at  it  were,  to  tap  the  freshness  and  re- 
sources of  earlier  years  and  prevents  the  ossification  of  each 
stage  of  the  past,  like  death  closing  in  upon  us. 

This,  of  course,  may  be  excessive  and  savor  of  neurotic  instability, 
but  adults  who  can  play  renew  the  charm  of  youth  and  gather  momen- 
tum for  great  efforts  to  attain  higher  levels.  This  elasticity  is  one 
trait  in  the  psychology  of  genius.  Play  is  essentially  reversion,  as  we 
saw  in  Chapter  IIL  Its  charm  consists  in  dropping  back  to  older 
levels,  in  leaving  the  stress  of  the  battle  line  at  the  front  and  dipping 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  403 

into  the  experiences  of  earlier  stages  of  life.  Thus  the  overflowing 
animal  spirits  of  young  gentlemen  with  the  first  tender  crop  of  beard, 
and  with  faces  that  suggest  an  owlish  and  Minerva  wisdom,  often,  in 
songs,  yells,  or  even  in  college  journals,  give  vent  to  downright  baby- 
ism, imitate  infant  talk  and  even  forms  of  crying,  parody  spanking  and 
putting  to  sleep  with  serio-comic  nocturnes,  ape  the  most  silly  and  fatu- 
ous effusions  of  maternal  tenderness,  etc.  Early  boyhood  is  imitated, 
mocked  and  mimicked  with  great  gusto  by  collegians.  All  the  ways 
of  the  good  and  bad  pupil  at  school  and  the  Sunday-school  scholar  are 
the  theme  of  many  an  extravaganza  in  game,  college  theatrical,  etc. 
At  Yale,  seniors  for  many  student  generations  have  taken  pleasure 
in  reserving  for  themselves  alone  the  right  to  play  top,  marbles,  and 
hoop.  The  annual  peanut  "  bum  "  at  Yale,  the  molasses-candy  society 
at  Amherst,  the  hawkey-hurley  club,  are  similar  reservations.  College 
songs  often  abound  in  animal  noises,  made-up  words,  parodies  and 
caricatures  of  religion,  bibulousness,  society,  the  negro  and  Chinaman, 
medleys  which  Lotze  so  deplored  in  modern  life,  ultra-feminization 
and  even  impersonation  in  such  detail  of  woman's  ways  and  manners, 
every  act  of  the  coquette  and  even  the  allumeuse ,  that  they  suggest 
defective  masculinity.  Students  lapse  to  interjectural  speech,  gibber- 
ish, mimic  any  dialect,  brogue,  defect  and  affectation  of  speech.  The 
bathos  of  nonsense  or  "  silly  cures  "  that  flourish  like  rank  weeds  in 
the  mental  acreage  where  professors  strive  to  cultivate  purity  and 
precision  of  diction,  suggest  that  the  mind  may  love  to  revert  thus  to 
primitive  chaos  to  find  surcease  from  every  constraint,  even  those  of 
sense  and  sanity.  These  are  often  so  saponaceously  silly  that  the 
serious  adult  may  be  almost  as  much  impelled  to  cry  as  to  laugh.  The 
wine  of  life  is  now  most  actively  fermenting,  depositing  its  lees,  and 
evolving  a  higher  spirituality. 

Student  social  organizations,  too,  are  often  predatory,  like 
those  of  street  boys.  Sheldon  ^  describes  a  cave  elaborately 
fitted  up  in  a  prominent  college  by  a  student  society,  with  the 
beginnings  of  a  kitchen-middens  of  bottles  and  chicken  bones, 
the  "  ranters  "  of  another  old  university  who  robbed  hen  and 
turkey  roosts,  and  committed  other  kinds  of  theft,  clubs  de- 
voted to  corn  and  watermelons  and  roast  pigs,  the  collection 
of  gates  and  other  forms  of  pilfering.     In  one  code  a  fresh- 

'  See  his  Student  Life  and  Customs  ;  New  York,  1901,  p.  366.  A  thesis  for  the 
degree  of  Ph.  IX  in  Clark  University,  with  a  select  and  critical  bibliography  of 
forty-five  pages.  A  work  of  great  value  and  interest.  See  also  Oskar  Dolch : 
Ceschichte  des  deutschen  Studententhums;  Leipzig,  1858,  p.  300.  Also  the 
works  of  Lerber,  E.  David,  Forel,  and  the  .'Vkademische  Monatshefte.  I.  Theile  ; 
1S86,  and  following.  See  also  my  Student  Customs;  Proc.  Am.  Antiq.  Soc, 
vol.  xiv,  1900,  pp.  83-124. 


404  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

man's  room  and  even  his  trunk  may  be  robbed  of  all  valuables 
and  only  pipes,  collars,  neckties,  and  canes  kept.  Edibles  of 
all  sorts,  whether  a  box  from  home  or  a  class  banquet,  are 
the  property  of  whoever  can  get  them  by  strategy  or  force, 
while  booty  or  plunder  is  sometimes  preserved  and  handed 
down  to  classes  or  societies  as  tokens  of  prowess.  Some  of 
these  societies  are  akin  to  the  tribal  system,  others  to  the 
medieval  guilds. 

In  striking  and  most  significant  contrast  to  the  mobility 
of  this  age  up  and  down  the  developmental  stages,  from  in- 
fantilism to  the  highest  adult  aspiration,  and  even  the  affecta- 
tion of  senescent  wisdom,  stands  the  opposite  instinct  of  seg- 
mentation and  intense  consciousness  and  accentuation  of  the 
annual  nodes  of  psychic  evolution.  This  is  seen  in  the  way 
in  which  each  class  looks  upon  the  next  lower  class  as  a  pit 
from  which  he  has  been  digged,  and  magnifies  the  really  great 
advance  which  at  this  period  the  mere  growth  of  a  year  in- 
volves. The  sophomore  has  put  off  the  freshman  and  all  his 
works  and  ways.  All  this  is  richly  illustrated  in  academic 
literature,  sentiment,  and  custom.  In  Germany  the  Fiichs, 
brander  Fucks,  junger  Bursch,  alter  Bursch,  bcmooster  Kopf, 
almost  mark  great  epochs  in  human  evolution.  The  Bcjanus  or 
yellow  bill  is  a  callow  lout  or  hayseed  who  must  be  made  over  by 
upper  classmen  into  a  civilized  being.  The  freshman  must  be 
salted,  his  greenness  seasoned,  his  credulity  and  insouciance 
satirized,  and  perhaps  his  innocence  deflowered.  The  roll  of 
the  ingenue  and  everything  naive  is  never  so  contemptible  as 
when  self-consciousness  is  developing  by  leaps  and  bounds. 
The  savage  state  of  slavery  long  persisted  in  penalism  and 
still  survives  in  fagging.  The  fags  were  once  branded, 
tattooed,  beaten,  sent  on  distant  fake  errands,  must  play  or 
sing  and  help  their  masters  home  if  drunk.  All  must  run 
when  any  upper  classman  called  and  the  last  to  arrive  must 
do  his  bidding,  while  now  each  is  assigned  to  a  member  of 
the  upper  form  who  protects  him  from  alien  imposition  but 
requires  certain  services  definitely  prescribed  by  tradition, 
copying,  serving  breakfast,  keeping  accounts,  etc. 

Hazing,  which  literally  means  hamstringing,  may  be  described  as 
breaking  in  raw  student  recruits,  teaching  them  respect  and  obedience. 
In  the  ancient  universities  of  Paris  and  Bologna  the  newcomer  was 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  4^5 

described  as  a  wild  beast  to  be  tamed  or  subjugated  to  the  harness.  He 
was  dressed  as  a  boar,  his  ears  were  cHpped,  his  teeth  filed,  his  hair 
or  beard  cut,  or  even  singed.  He  was  green  grass  to  be  cured,  wood  to 
be  seasoned,  unclean  and  in  need  of  purification ;  he  was  scoured  with 
soap  and  sand,  and  bodily  mutilations,  sometimes  leaving  scars  for  life, 
were  occasionally  inflicted.  In  early  German  universities,  he  must  be 
passive  and  let  others  work  their  complete  will  upon  him.  He  was 
made  to  eat  dirt  and  grass,  to  drink  from  a  shoe,  and  to  make  him  drunk 
was  a  common  diversion.  In  one  old  New  England  college  the  custom 
of  parodying  the  "  infare  "  still  exists,  and  the  new  student  is  finally 
put  to  bed  with  a  pumpkin  nightcap.  In  another  institution  a  similar 
custom  still  survives,  with  the  variant  that  portions  of  his  body  are 
smeared  with  molasses.  In  the  colonial  college  he  was  mulcted,  and  in 
one  large  institution  still  has  to  supply  balls  and  bats  for  the  upper 
classmen.  In  various  others,  certain  articles  of  clothing  are  forcibly 
appropriated.  The  Yale  freshman  was  elaborately  tutored,  the  upper- 
class  orator  expatiated  for  his  benefit  in  a  mock  heroic  way  first  upon 
the  dangers,  second  upon  the  honors  of  college  life,  and  then  came  a 
program  of  physical  treatment.  Every  one  knows  the  current  modes  of 
smoking  out,  enforced  speeches  and  songs,  tossings  in  a  blanket,  isola- 
tion in  remote  places  blindfolded,  perhaps  bound  and  gagged,  etc.,  the 
suppression  of  which  neither  law,  college  discipline  nor  the  disapproval 
of  the  academic  sentiment  of  the  overwhelming  majority  can  effect. 

The  class  as  an  organization,  now  dying  out  under  the  in- 
fluence of  the  elective  systems  and  secret  and  other  inter-class 
societies,  had  its  golden  period  in  the  first  three-fourths  of  the 
last  century.  The  very  term  classmate  suggested  lifelong 
ties  when  the  class  was  small  enough  so  that  all  members  were 
mutually  acquainted,  and  retmions,  triennials,  class-books, 
histories,  gifts,  and  memorials  to  the  Alma  Mater  represented 
a  form  of  comradeship  especially  valuable  because  of  the  wide 
range  of  types  represented.  Sheldon  thinks  three-fourths  of 
the  conversation  in  this  charmed  circle  was  of  each  other,  and 
that  to  judge  character  and  eternally  revise  estimates  of  in- 
dividuals is  a  great  school  of  human  nature.  Again,  subordi- 
nation of  educational  stages,  each  lower  to  the  next  higher, 
favors  docility,  keeps  open  sutures  which  might  close  pre- 
maturely, brings  pliability,  offsets  tendencies  to  precocity  and 
a  sense  of  attainment  and  finality,  keeps  the  psychophysic 
organism  young  and  growing,  and  impresses  humility  without 
humiliation,  because  self-respect  can  keep  itself  in  countenance, 
if  endangered,  by  turning  to  the  stage  below.  Again,  and  what 
is  perhaps  more  important,  this  tends  to  widen  sympathy  hori- 


406  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

zontally,  as  it  were,  so  that  the  tendency  to  exhaust  at  each 
stage  all  its  possibilities  before  advancing  to  the  next  is  favored. 
The  American  Greek  letter  fraternities  are  an  unique  or- 
ganization, developing  to  some  extent  at  the  expense  of 
the  old  debating  societies,  a  little  as  the  Corps  grew^  from 
the  Burschenschaften.  Sheldon  estimates  that  there  are 
now  one  hundred  and  thirty  thousand  fraternity  men ;  thirty- 
eight  different  organizations  for  men  and  fourteen  for  women, 
with  more  than  five  million  dollars  expended  in  buildings. 
Few  things  were  once  so  hotly  debated  as  their  net  good  or 
evil.  All  the  anti-Masonic  sentiment  has  been  directed  against 
them,  and  it  was  this  that  compelled  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa  to 
drop  its  secrecy.  By  students  outside  them,  they  often  are 
called  undemocratic,  exclusive,  and  clannish  as  developing 
closer  friendship  between  those  alike,  narrowing  sympathy  and 
knowledge  of  other  types  and  classes  of  men,  and  making  life 
seem  cold  and  hopeless.  They  are  accused  of  unduly  influen- 
cing college  politics  or  of  rivaling  commencement  exercises  in 
attraction  for  visiting  alumni,  of  developing  luxurious  habits, 
and  perhaps  worse,  under  the  guise  of  secrecy,  of  injuring  class 
sentiment,  of  short-circuiting  the  expressions  of  the  powerful 
social  instinct  which  might  otherwise  be  turned  into  religious 
work  or  larger  literary  organizations,  and  of  narrowing 
loyalty  that  ought  to  be  broad  enough  to  include  the  entire  col- 
lege. On  the  other  hand,  many  of  the  ablest  and  most  judicious 
men  in  the  country  have  not  only  been  members,  but  keep  up 
their  interest  by  large  subscriptions  and  annual  visits  to  the 
society  houses,  and  several  experienced  authorities,  like  Presi- 
dent White,  have  vigorously  defended  them. 

Their  strength  is  great.  The  effort  of  Purdue  in  1881  to  compel 
freshmen  to  sign  a  pledge  not  to  join  the  fraternities  met  with  disas- 
trous failure.  California  in  1896  was  defeated  in  this  issue.  Vander- 
bilt  strove  to  prevent  members  from  competing  for  college  honors. 
Michigan  once  expelled  all  members,  and  the  Masons  in  retaliation 
expelled  the  president.  Princeton,  which  abolished  these  organizations 
in  1855,  is  perhaps  the  only  large  college  to  prohibit  them.  In  some 
small  colleges  they  may  have  great  power  over  the  administration. 
The  movements  against  these  societies  are  spasmodic  and  sometimes, 
if  organized,  end  in  the  formation  of  a  new  secret  society.  The  charm 
of  secrecy  is  great  and  the  discipline  of  reticence  perhaps  has  some- 
thing to  be  said  in  its  favor.     Its  fascination  is  greatly  heightened  by 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  407 

wearing  the  badge  somewhat  concealed  or  by  never  referring  to  the 
organization  to  outsiders,  as  is  the  custom  among  members  of  the 
"  Skull  and  Bones  "  and  of  the  "  Scroll  and  Key  "  societies  of  Yale. 

I  have  elsewhere  advocated  at  length  as  an  experiment  worthy  of 
trial  the  appointment  of  some  graduate  member,  who  perhaps  has 
specialized  abroad  and  is  waiting  for  a  professorship,  as  resident  tutor 
or  mentor  in  a  few  of  these  larger  society  houses.  The  expense  would 
be  slight,  and  the  presence  of  such  a  member  would  be  a  most  salutary 
tonic  to  the  morale  of  the  organization ;  he  could  have  ample  time  and 
opportunity  for  advancing  his  own  studies  and  could  set  apart  an  hour 
for  coaching  fellow  undergraduate  members  in  his  field.  If  several 
adjacent  chapter-houses,  representing  different  fraternities  in  the  same 
college,  each  had  such  a  member,  a  specialist  in  different  branches, 
interfraternity  cooperation,  and  exchanges  might  be  arranged.  In 
this  way  the  strength  and  wealth  of  the  fraternity  might  be  made  to 
support  the  academic  work  of  the  institution,  the  college  might  possibly 
find  here  suitable  candidates  for  vacant  places  in  its  professorial  staff, 
and  the  friction  now  often  felt  between  the  administration  and  the 
fraternity  might  be  reduced.  Again,  the  growth  of  these  organiza- 
tions, if  it  continues,  may  develop  ultimately  into  powerful  institu- 
tions which  may  some  day  become  the  analogues  of  the  colleges  of  Ox- 
ford and  Cambridge,  which  the  tutorial  methods  here  might  represent. 

Initiations  can  best  be  treated  as  a  class  of  subjections  by  them- 
selves. The  more  we  know  of  savage  life  the  larger  we  find  the  role 
of  such  ceremonies.  Not  only  the  great  cycle  of  initiations,  sometimes 
occupying  weeks,  by  which  boys  are  inducted  to  early  manhood,  but 
many  a  secret  order  constructs  ceremonials  of  a  very  high  degree  of 
symbolic  significance,  designed  to  impress  those  without,  and,  of 
course,  especially  the  candidates  themselves,  as  well  as  the  tribesmen 
within,  of  the  great  importance  of  membership.  A  ritual  is  composed 
mainly  from  such  elements  as  we  see  unorganized  in  hazing,  and  to 
this  a  sacred  character  attaches.  This  was  the  case  with  the  Eleusinian 
and  other  ancient  mysteries.  The  novice  is  observed  and  studied,  and 
his  eligibility  is  the  result  of  diverse  comparative  estimates.  He  then 
sometimes  undergoes  a  period  of  probation,  with  certain  duties  or 
restrictions.  The  ceremonial  is  generally  made  up  of  two  parts :  one 
that  is  elaborately  prescribed  and  must  be  followed  with  the  utmost 
precision,  and  another  that  is  extemporized  and  sometimes  with  special 
individual  adaptations.  The  impressiveness,  and  sometimes  the  terrors, 
of  mystery  are  always  appealed  to.  There  are  perhaps  elements  from 
judicial  procedure,  like  accusation  and  defense;  statement  of  the  can- 
didate's good  and  bad  traits ;  sometimes  he  is  symbolically  condemned, 
executed,  nailed  into  his  coffin,  and  perhaps  buried  and  resurrected  to 
a  new  life.  These  procedures  are  well  concealed,  but  those  I  know 
bear  plain  traces  of  a  depressive  minatory  or  descending  phase,  which 
are  sharply  contrasted  with  an  ascending,  regenerative,  and  restorative 
one.  The  ethnopsychic  relationship  between  these  rights  and  those 
indicating  the  new  birth  of  the  soul,  with  a  background  to  both  of  the 


A-oS  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

resurrection  of  spring  following  the  death  of  autumn,  or  the  Balder 
motive,  is  unmistakable. 

The  Nations  were  spontaneous  and  democratic  associations  of 
students  in  the  great  medieval  universities,  who  came  from  the  same 
place.  They  found  themselves  without  political  rights  in  a  strange 
town,  with  their  property  and  even  life  insecure;  hence  they  united 
for  mutual  protection,  to  tend  the  sick,  defend  the  weak,  help  the 
poor,  and  soon  succeeded  in  establishing  a  kind  of  artificial  citizen- 
ship which  obtained  legal  recognition.  These  were  most  fully  de- 
veloped in  Italy,  where  the  power  of  student  organizations  was  great- 
est and  where  the  Cismontanes  had  seventeen  and  the  Ultramontanes 
sixteen  Nations.  In  the  thirteenth  and  fourteenth  centuries  they 
were  strong  in  the  University  of  Paris  with  its  four  Nations — French, 
Normans,  Picards,  and  English  or  Germans.  At  Oxford  they  were 
feeble,  and  the  two  organizations — the  Boreals  and  Australes — fused 
in  1274.  In  Aberdeen  the  Nations  lingered  until  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, and  traces  of  them  are  still  found  in  the  Finnish  Universities 
of  Helsingfors.  In  Prague  and  Vienna,  the  two  oldest  German  uni- 
versities, these  societies  existed ;  in  the  former  the  Czechs  and  the 
Germans  have  been  opposed  for  six  centuries,  and  in  1409  the  German 
students  withdrew  to  Leipzig.  In  England  in  the  fifteenth  century  the 
college  slowly  succeeded  the  Nation  as  a  unit  of  student  organization. 

The  Landsmannschaften,  the  German  analogue  of  the  Nations,  after 
an  eventful  career,  were  forbidden  in  the  eighteenth  century,  but 
dragged  out  a  long  subterranean  existence.  They  were  originally  ter- 
ritorial and  soon  adopted  some  of  the  features  of  penalism  for  their 
novices  inducted  to  full  membership  with  initiation  ceremonies,  held  a 
catechism  on  the  beer  Komment,  with  awful  condemnations  to  infamy 
of  all  "  renoncers  "  or  betrayers  of  secrets  or  those  who  refused  to  obey 
orders  of  the  council,  and  had  their  ribbons,  caps,  ciphers,  and  a  cere- 
monial kiss.  The  Landsmann  could  be  decreed  dishonorable  on  sixteen 
points ;  knew  no  obligations  to  Philistines  or  townsmen ;  was  a  good 
swordsman,  the  best  of  them  ambitious  to  score  a  hundred  duels ;  must 
fight  all  former  colleagues  if  he  wished  to  enter  another  society;  and 
was  sometimes  guilty  of  riots,  marauding,  and  of  excesses,  occasionally 
almost  bestial,  in  his  beer  duels  and  other  drinking  habits.  It  was 
two  of  these  societies  that  the  philosopher  Fichte  actually  persauded  to 
disband  and  give  their  regalia  to  him. 

The  Burschenschaften,  which  originated  at  Jena  in  1816,  sought  to 
introduce  higher  and  reformatory  ideals.  The  famous  Wartburg  fes- 
tival was  held  in  1817,  on  the  three  hundredth  anniversary  of  Luther's 
defiance  of  the  Pope,  just  at  the  period  of  Germany's  most  intense  re- 
action after  the  fall  of  Napoleon.  The  Burschen  delegates  partook  of 
the  sacrament,  listened  to  an  oration  by  a  fellow  tribesman,  Riemann, 
already  knighted  by  the  Iron  Cross  for  bravery  in  the  French  wars, 
who  invoked  Luther  to  hear  his  vow,  in  behalf  of  all,  to  serve  the  spirit 
of  truth  and  justice,  to  repel  invaders,  and  not  to  be  dazzled  by  the 
splendor  of  the  monarch's  throne  from  speaking  the  strong  free  word 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  4^9 

of  freedom  and  individuality.  In  the  evening  twenty-eight  books, 
thought  to  contain  un-German  views,  were  burned,  and  not  long  after 
the  Russian  court  chancellor,  Kotzebue,  whose  book  had  been  burned 
with  the  others,  to  the  great  scandal  of  the  court,  was  stabbed  by  a 
Burschen  theological  student,  Sand.  Before  this  a  small  minority  led 
by  Carl  Follen,  a  leader  of  the  blacks  or  extreme  left  wing,  a  disciple 
of  Fichte,  and  who  afterward  taught  gymnastics  at  Harvard  College, 
advocated  an  appeal  to  force  to  accomplish  at  once  a  republican  form 
of  government,  which  the  moral  reason  demanded.  The  government 
accordingly,  in  1819,  abolished  the  order,  removed  suspected  profess- 
ors, appointed  an  inspector  for  each  university,  and  banished  or  im- 
prisoned those  who  still  maintained  membership.  Although  the  Tu- 
gendbund  of  1822  sought  to  perpetuate  the  salvable  part  of  the  organ- 
ization, the  Burschenschaften  soon  died  out,  after  having  greatly 
reduced  gambling  and  dueling,  and  having  otherwise  moralized  stu- 
dent life. 

The  more  aristocratic  Corps  developed  as  this  latter  organization 
declined.  These  are  the  outgrowth  of  an  extravagant  chivalric  sense 
of  personal  dignity,  self-respect  and  honor,  of  the  passion  to  enjoy  life 
at  the  stage  of  it  when  hilarity  is  most  attractive,  of  a  desire  to  knit 
the  ties  of  friendship  as  closely  as  possible  and  with  a  love  of  sentiment 
unknown  to  our  American  life.  The  Corps,  almost  as  much  as  the 
Nations,  had  power  to  boycott.  As  representing  the  student  body  they 
could  launch  the  ban  of  excommunication  against  a  student,  city,  or 
landlord ;  they  developed  a  beer-drinking  Komment  with  an  elaborate 
ritual,  and  held  that  dueling  was  the  only  dignified  way  of  resenting  an 
insult.  Some  American  writers  have  defended  it  as  preferable  to 
hazing,  but  the  code  lapsed  to  decreeing  as  insults  the  most  fanciful 
of  offenses,  and  even  to  the  arrangement  of  almost  utterly  causeless 
encounters  for  the  delectation  of  spectators. 

The  duel  was  originally  an  invocation  of  a  divine  judgment  and 
flourished  on  religious  and  romantic  grounds.  It  assumed  that  victory 
proved  righteousness.  Xow  that  we  know  that  the  bad  often  conquers, 
it  means  staking  life  upon  one's  honor.  It  appeals  to  youth.  Although 
physical  and  moral  courage  do  not  always  go  together,  the  former  is 
often  a  good  fore-school  for  the  latter.  Jacob  Grimm,  Treitsche,  Bis- 
marck, Paulsen,  and  the  theologian  Schrempf  advocated  it.  In  a 
country  with  a  standing  army  which  sanctions  it,  it  has  a  certain 
nimbus  which  it  lacks  here.  To  refuse  to  give  satisfaction  for  an 
insult  is  disgraceful,  but  a  court  of  honor  that  could  arbitrate  and 
determine  and  declare  dishonorable,  might  serve  to  keep  alive  the  high 
chivalric  sense  of  personal  self-respect,  which  at  no  age  is  it  so 
injurious  to  grievously  wound.  Secrecy  has  in  the  past  given  the 
duel  an  heroic  glamour.  In  1800,  Ziegler  tells  us,  a  Corps  of  sixteen 
members  fought  two  hundred  duels  in  seven  weeks.  A  wholesome 
course  of  physical  training  with  real  achievement  and  glory  for  the 
victors  gives  some  hardihood  in  carrying  off  the  slight  and  inevitable 
frictions  of  student  life,  which  the  habits  of  the  Komment  so  aggravate. 


410  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Academic  history  abounds  in  illustrations  of  the  instinct  of  combat. 
In  1345  the  Oxford  students  disliked  the  wine  which  the  college  pro- 
vided. A  mug  was  thrown  at  the  head  of  the  steward  and  the  broil 
grew  into  a  battle  between  town  and  gown,  where  books  were  torn, 
buildings  pillaged  and  burned,  students  migrated,  and  the  Pope  with- 
drew privileges.  As  late  as  1854,  in  a  row,  a  Yale  student  stabbed  a 
rioter ;  the  mob  tried  to  loot  the  college  and  to  batter  its  building  with 
a  cannon,  which  was  fortunately  spiked  by  the  police.  For  years  the 
Yale  bully  club,  captured  in  a  scrimmage  with  the  sailors,  was  trans- 
mitted from  class  to  class  to  the  strongest  man.  Residents  of  a  college 
town,  as  a  class,  are  often  dubbed  muckers,  barbarians,  philistines,  and 
have  always  been  victims  of  destructiveness,  vandalism  and  sometimes 
outrage,  especially  where  the  town  was  too  small  to  easily  dominate 
morally  and  physically  the  hostile  instincts  of  students.  The  latter  as 
a  class  are  more  select,  learned,  clever,  richer  than  the  average  resi- 
dents of  their  age,  and  are  preferred  by  the  young  ladies  who  live 
there,  so  that  jealousy  in  its  most  acrid  form  is  almost  inevitable  on  the 
side  of  the  town,  while  this  is  repaid  with  contempt  and  anonymous 
and  protected  insult  on  the  part  of  the  better  organized  and  usually 
more  resourceful  students.  Between  boarding-house  keepers  and  their 
guests,  tailors  and  the  haberdashers  of  all  sorts,  and  students,  there 
is  always  a  large  surface  of  friction  where  antagonisms  are  gener- 
ated, and  all  is  heightened  by  the  license  and  irresponsibility  of 
the  more  transient  collegians,  their  exuberant  animal  spirits,  practical 
jokes,  etc. 

Group  antagonisms  with  each  other  are  still  more  frequent  and 
take  many  forms  from  the  elaborate  code  of  the  duello  in  its  several 
academic  forms,  rushes  between  classes,  cane  fights,  bowl  fights  as  in 
the  University  of  Pennsylvania,  and  the  personal  scrapping  involved 
in  these  and  actually  incited  by  football,  especially  when  between 
sophomore  and  freshman  classes.  Class  battles  under  various  names, 
now  only  a  survival,  are  still  sometimes  carefully  arranged  by  seconds 
and  set  rules  enforced,  whereby  the  parties  are  equally  matched. 
Wrestling  contests  which  once  played  an  important  role  are  now  prac- 
tically extinct,  and  pugilism  has  never  flourished  save  under  the  strict 
control  of  the  gymnasium  as  boxing.  At  Princeton,  freshmen,  for 
generations,  challenged  the  sophomores  to  fight,  in  immense  posters 
surreptitiously  placarded  at  night  in  letters  that  could  be  read  a  mile 
off,  although  interest  centered  mainly  in  the  challenge  and  its  efface- 
ment.  Personal  dignity,  honor,  prescriptive  and  traditional  rights,  a 
factitious  and  testy  honor  still  arouse  hostile  sentiments,  now  generally 
kept  in  leash.  The  same  propensity  in  a  still  more  attenuated  form  is 
seen  in  the  tendency  of  debates  to  lapse  into  petty  wrangles  and  per- 
sonalities, in  the  rivalries  and  competitions  of  emulation  between  the 
various  organizations,  and  in  intercollegiate  contests  of  various  kinds. 

Sedentary  habits  predispose  to  every  kind  of  outbreak  and  excess 
especially  in  youth,  and  the  evolution  of  the  college  gymnasium  from 
the  feeble  beginnings  a  few  decades  ago  at  Amherst,  Princeton,  and 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  4il 

Yale,  and  the  athletic  movement,  have  proven  the  best  safety-valve  and 
aid  to  college  discipline.  The  best  ideal  in  this  respect  is  now  seen 
in  England,  where  many  if  not  all  of  the  colleges  of  Oxford  and  Cam- 
bridge often  have  their  own  crews  as  well  as  other  teams  and  inter- 
collegiate races,  which  attract  great  attention  and  in  which  the  repre- 
sentatives of  the  university  teams  are  selected;  here  all  types  of 
mankind  meet  and  mingle  in  the  most  democratic  fashion,  and,  in 
general,  the  position  of  a  college  on  the  river  is  the  best  index  of  its 
intellectual  status.  Before  this  ideal  is  realized,  we  have  a  long  way 
yet  to  travel  in  the  abandonment  of  all  secret  practise  and  tricks,  the 
cultivation  of  a  true  spirit  of  sportsmanship,  the  appreciation  of  the  real 
points  of  the  game  by  the  public,  too  often  animated  by  the  same  zest 
that  has  sustained  ancient  gladiatorial  contests  in  modern  bull-fights 
and  pugilism,  active  participation  of  larger  numbers  of  students 
through  this  entire  course  in  the  benefits  of  these  forms  of  exercise, 
and  the  more  complete  subordination  of  the  passion  for  individual 
distinction  to  that  of  winning  honor  for  the  team  and  of  making  the 
glory  of  the  team  tributary  to  that  of  the  college,  on  the  principle 
that  the  larger  and  higher  the  unit  toward  which  the  loyalty  is  de- 
veloped, the  better  the  moral  training  of  athletics.  The  removal  of  the 
real  dishonor  so  often  revealed  by  the  disqualification  of  men  tainted 
with  professionalism,  less  perfervid  Americanitis  at  games  and  in 
celebrating  victories,  less  newspaper  exploitation  and  a  better  regula- 
tion of  the  rapidly  growing  pecuniary  side  of  these  spectacles — these 
yet  remain  to  be  accomplished  here. 

The  ideal  relations  between  student  and  professor  are  those 
of  the  antique  friendship  as  described  by  Socrates,  Aristotle, 
and  Cicero.  The  teacher,  as  it  were,  incubated  the  pupil's  soul, 
loved  him  and  was  loved  in  return.  The  joy  of  infecting  the 
youthful  mind  with  the  insights  of  maturer  years  is,  as  Phillips 
has  shown,  the  culminating  function  of  parenthood.  Induction 
into  the  mysteries  of  the  universe  more  than  the  transmission 
of  information  was  the  ideal.  The  instructor  dealt  out  knowl- 
edge as  stages  of  initiation  into  the  esoteric  mysteries  of  life, 
and  thus  not  only  was  youth  taught,  but  the  inculcator  himself 
felt  inspiration  to  avoid  everything  unworthy  in  word,  deed, 
or  manner,  and  to  be  an  heroic  ideal,  if  not  an  object  of  worship, 
for  his  protege. 

Academic  teaching  has  lapsed  far  from  this  ideal,  partly 
because  it  is  no  longer  individual  but  in  ever  enlarging  groups, 
partly  because,  instead  of  being  chiefly  ethical  guidance  and 
inspiration,  it  has  declined  to  merely  conveying  information, 
or  lower  yet,  to  lesson  setting  and  tests  for  assigned  tasks 


412  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

prescribed  in  laboratories  and  libraries.  Now  pupils  are  driven, 
not  led.  Their  highest  powers  of  endeavor  were  once  evolved ; 
now  they  are  often  suppressed.  Hard  as  is  the  doctrine  for 
us  pedagogues,  I  am  convinced  that,  in  general,  disciplinary- 
troubles  have  been  inversely  as  the  power  of  teachers  to  rise 
to  the  ideal  of  their  vocation.  The  history  of  academic  life 
shows  that  just  at  those  periods  when  curricula  have  been 
most  impoverished,  method  most  unnatural,  and  matter  most 
remote  from  the  great  natural  springs  of  human  interest, 
student  life  has  degenerated.  Just  in  proportion  as  young 
men  are  absorbed  in  intellectual  interests,  and  as  professors 
are  able  and  inspiring  enough  to  dominate  these,  this  antago- 
nism diminishes.  It  increases  just  in  proportion  as  the  chief 
interests  of  students  are  outside  the  special  work  of  the  class- 
room, laboratory,  or  seminary,  and  as  the  professor  becomes 
arid  and  barren.  We  often  see  the  spectacle  of  new  men  or 
new  subjects  acting  as  the  nucleus  of  a  radical  change  of  senti- 
ment throughout  the  student  body  in  this  respect.  Youthful 
sentiment  is  right.  There  is  nothing  more  worthy  of  being 
the  butt  of  all  the  horse  play  of  ephebic  wit  or  practical  joke 
than  an  instructor  from  whose  soul  the  enthusiasm  of  hu- 
manity his  vanished,  who  has  ceased  to  know  and  grow,  and 
who  serves  up  the  dry  husks  of  former  knowledge  and  peddles 
second-  and  third-hand  information  warmed  up  from  year  to 
year,  rather  than  opening  new  living  fountains  in  which  the 
burning  thirst  of  youth  can  be  slaked.  The  latter's  instincts 
are  far  wiser  than  they  know,  for  iconoclasm  is  never  better 
directed  than  against  the  literalist,  formalist,  and  sophronist. 
The  well-fed  mind,  like  the  well-fed  body,  settles  to  a  state 
of  complacency  and  satisfaction,  while  hunger  of  mind,  like 
hunger  of  body,  is  the  greatest  incentive  of  restlessness  and 
discontent.  In  this  direction  a  work  of  inner  reorganization 
in  our  large  colleges  and  universities,  far  greater  and  harder 
than  the  late  magnificent  exterior  development,  is  the  inevi- 
table next  step.  ^Masses  of  students  and  scores  of  profess- 
ors absorbed  in  the  mechanics  of  teaching,  increasing  even 
more  rapidly  than  numbers  of  studies,  examination  and  reci- 
tation methods  that  belong  to  lower  grades,  faculties  kept 
on  the  alert  in  striving  to  outwit  the  ever  new  and  fertile 
devices    of   laziness    and    laboring   to    exact    of   preparatory 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  4^3 

schools  a  degree  of  industry  they  can  not  stimulate  in  their 
own  students;  this  is  not  the  university  invisible,  not  made 
with  hands,  but  only  its  whited  sepulture. 

In  place  of  the  ideal  amity,  students  and  professors  have  ceased 
to  trust  and  have  even  grown  suspicious  of  each  other.  Within  very- 
recent  decades  and  often  now,  student  censure  is  meted  out  to  those 
who  call  upon  an  instructor  socially,  or  seek  information  about  reading 
or  studies  from  one  who  if  he  made  a  friendly  call  on  a  student  would 
be  suspected  to  be  a  spy,  and  the  familiar  terms — bootlicks,  blues,  cur- 
riers, piscatores — indicate  the  ostracism  experienced  by  those  who  seek 
the  good-will  of  instructors.  Wide-spread  convention  sanctions  reti- 
cence and  perhaps  even  lies  to  the  faculty,  and  every  act  known  only  to 
one's  fellow  students  is  almost  as  secure  of  betrayal  as  if  done  in  some 
organization  pledged  to  secrecy.  The  earlier  history  of  American  col- 
lege life  abounds  in  both  open  and  covered  hostilities,  sometimes  with 
personal  assaults  upon  the  members  of  the  faculty,  but  more  often  in 
the  form  of  concerted  rebellion.  College  revolts  of  old  were  based 
more  often  upon  complaints  regarding  commons'  food,  but  suspicions 
of  favoritism,  any  increase  of  the  wonted  stint  of  study  or  augmented 
rigor  of  examination,  suffice.  The  latter  caused  the  famous  Harvard 
outbreak  of  1790  which  was  not  settled  for  seven  years.  The  Harvard 
rebellion  of  1766  interrupted  work  for  about  a  month.  Still  more 
serious  rebellions  occurred  there  in  1807  and  1830.  In  the  Southern 
colleges  riots  have  been  not  infrequent.  In  1808  about  one-half  the 
students  were  expelled  from  Princeton;  in  1845  ^H  the  students  but 
two  freshmen  were  expelled  from  another  institution ;  a  State  univer- 
sity not  many  years  ago  expelled  the  entire  senior  class.  An  attempt  a 
few  decades  since  to  pledge  each  college  to  refuse  admission  to  students 
expelled  from  another  soon  failed,  and  in  many  faculties  there  is  still 
a  fear  that  the  whole  student-body  is  capable  of  being  unified  and  ar- 
rayed in  organization  against  their  authority. 

In  Bologna  and  in  Paris  there  were  student  strikes  and  boycotts, 
and  more  than  once  the  entire  body,  under  the  lead  of  the  Nations, 
withdrew  from  town  and  either  dictated  terms  before  they  would  re- 
turn, defying  sometimes  even  the  Pope,  or  withdrew  to  another  seat. 
The  migration  of  five  thousand  students  from  Prague  to  Leipzig  and 
the  hegira  from  Williams  to  Amherst  are  also  in  point  in  more  recent 
times.  Oxford  asserted  the  right  of  appeal  from  the  chancellor.  Stu- 
dent life  always  insists  upon  privileges  which  of  old  were  granted  in 
abundance  in  the  form  of  immunities  from  taxation,  arrest  save  by  the 
university  beadle  and  in  the  college  prison  with  trial  by  a  college 
court.  Until  very  recent  years  the  German  student  who  had  offended 
the  city's  ordinances  merely  showed  his  legitimation  card  to  a  police- 
man and  thereby  escaped  arrest.  Free  passes,  exemptions  from  military 
service,  reduced  fees  at  theaters  and  concerts,  were  almost  universal. 
To-day  wherever  students  are  threatened  with  the  withdrawal  of  what 


414  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

seem  prescriptive  and  traditional  rights,  they  assert  themselves  with  a 
force  that  few  faculties  can  successfully  cope  with,  as  witness  the 
efforts  at  Purdue  and  elsewhere  to  exterminate  secret  societies.  The 
right  to  celebrate  important  events  in  very  irregular  ways  is  an  im- 
memorial tradition  perhaps  even  more  difficult  to  suppress  than  hazing. 

Most  American  colleges,  despite  the  growing  freedom  of  life  and 
efforts  at  self-government,  still  insist  upon  a  state  of  pupilage,  es- 
pecially in  matters  of  study,  which  favors  the  tendency  to  regard  teach- 
ers as  natural  enemies.  Resident  tutors  and  night-watchmen  about 
dormitories,  attempts  to  control  hours  of  study  and  retiring  now  gen- 
erally abandoned,  the  time  of  being  in,  of  rising,  attending  chapel  and 
recitation,  punctuality,  etc.,  devolve  a  mass  of  disciplinary  details  upon 
college  and  university  faculty  which  ought  to  be  outgrown.  One  of 
these  institutions  had  lately  eighty-three  punishable  offenses  specified 
in  its  rules,  and  the  parental  theory  requires  great  discretion  in  its 
administration.  The  New  England  professor  of  the  old  type  feels  that 
there  is  almost  no  folly  of  which  a  class  is  not  capable. 

Professorial  inadequacy  to  know  the  nature  and  meet  the  real  needs 
of  youth  is  not  only  one  theme  but  one  cause  of  the  spirit  of  parody, 
caricature,  and  satire  which  is  so  essential  a  trait  of  academic  youth. 
Mock  heroics  and  serio-comedies  have  this  advantage,  if  high  themes 
are  essayed,  that  they  afford  a  ready  shelter  for  the  disappointed  sus- 
ceptibilities of  ambition.  Efforts  of  this  class  are  effervescences  of 
good-natured  cleverness,  but  they  are  often  directed  against  objects, 
ideals,  or  sentiments  which  are  not  deeply  felt  by  their  authors,  and 
this  instinct  is  a  beneficent  agent  in  destroying  the  old  clothes  of  cul- 
ture, and  doing  its  May-day  house-cleaning.  There  is  always  much  in 
every  age  and  community  that  greatly  needs  to  be  executed  and  buried 
and  yet  is  so  entrenched  that  only  the  shafts  of  ridicule  can  reach  it. 
While  this  often  goes  too  deep  and  attacks  that  which  is  intrinsically 
and  always  good,  true,  and  beautiful,  on  the  whole  its  benefits  probably 
outweigh  its  harm.  We  live  in  an  old  age  of  civilization  that  has  ac- 
cumulated vast  cultural  impedimenta  that  ought  to  be  given  to  some 
wholesome  scavenger  agency  of  oblivion.  The  second  best  ought  now 
to  pall  on  the  palate.  This  instinct,  too,  performs  the  gadfly  function 
which  Socrates  praised  in  spurring  on  arid  professors  to  keep  their 
powers  mobilized,  to  grind  out  ever  new  and  better  grists,  and  to 
touch  the  deeper  powers  of  appreciation  and  affirmation. 

Recent  efforts  at  self-government  by  students  are  essentially  an 
American  experiment  and  have  taken  many  different  forms.  One  is 
that  of  a  student  court  like  that  of  the  junior  and  senior  classes  at 
Trinity;  another  is  the  selection  of  student  representatives  to  confer 
with  the  faculty  on  matters  within  fields  carefully  defined;  in  still  an- 
other form  the  faculty  selects  an  advisory  board  and  invests  it  with 
power  to  determine  and  control  certain  matters  along  with  members 
of  the  student  body.  Disciplinary  committees  with  power  over  certain 
offenses,  even  vigilance  committees  to  patrol  the  halls,  censors,  as  in 
the  University  of  Virginia  with  its  unique  honor  system,  in  vogue  since 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  4^5 

1865,  a  student  Senate  and  House  like  that  of  Amherst  with  power  to 
enact  laws,  illustrate  the  various  types  and  degrees  of  student  auton- 
omy. Other  interesting  forms  are  on  trial  at  Stanford,  Maine,  South 
Carolina,  Indiana,  and  elsewhere.  Nearly  one-half  of  the  smaller 
American  colleges  have  adopted  some  form  of  self-government,  which 
in  some  is  carried  to  an  extreme.  There  is  great  diversity  of  need  and 
capacity  in  this  respect  between  different  institutions  and  different  sec- 
tions of  the  country.  Many  irregularities  of  student  life,  especially 
outbreaks  of  lawlessness  and  sometimes  dishonesty  in  examinations, 
have  been  materially  checked.  Students  can  best  detect  and  best  judge 
students.  The  success  of  all  these  schemes  depends  very  largely  upon 
the  tact  and  discretion  of  the  president  and  faculty.  In  some  institu- 
tions students  on  entering  are  requested  to  sign  a  form  of  contract ;  in 
others  they  pledge  adherence  to  carefully  drawn  rules.  The  indefinite 
and  volatilized  freedom,  which  is  advocated  for  the  period  of  student 
life  in  continental  Europe,  it  is  often  said,  is  less  needed  in  a  land  where 
the  liberty  of  subsequent  life  is  so  unrestricted  as  in  a  republic.  One 
of  the  last  sentiments  to  be  developed  in  human  nature  is  the  sense 
of  responsibility,  which  is  one  of  the  highest  and  most  complex  psychic 
qualities  and  in  the  development  of  which  our  carefully  nurtured  and 
protected  youth  of  student  age,  although  perhaps  more  matured  in  this 
respect  than  in  any  other  land,  have  had  little  training.  Necessary  as 
is  the  discipline  of  this  experience,  the  college  is  less  fitted  to  give  it 
than  the  outside  world.  The  learner  is  necessarily  receptive,  under 
authority,  in  a  state  of  pupilage,  and  premature  independence  is  always 
dangerous  and  tempts  to  excesses. 


Morals  and  religion  have  had  a  very  diverse  history  illus- 
trating all  extremes ;  at  several  periods  almost  every  form  of 
dissipation  has  existed.  Drunkenness  has  sometimes  prevailed 
in  its  most  repulsive  form,  where  at  stated  bouts  students  drank 
out  of  their  boots  or  the  shoes  of  dissolute  women,  under  their 
arms,  or  lay  upon  the  floor  while  their  mates  poured  beer  into 
their  mouths  through  a  funnel  to  enable  them  to  wan  a  drink- 
ing wager.  Gambling  has  been  a  passion,  burglaries  have 
abounded  in  open  day.  During  a  good  part  of  the  fifteenth 
and  sixteenth  centuries  the  habits  of  German  students  were 
particularly  bad,  and  when  Vienna  undertook  to  expel  harlots 
from  town  for  the  benefit  of  students,  it  was  unsafe  for  women 
to  go  on  the  streets  unprotected.  All  the  more  elegant  dissi- 
pations of  club  life  have  promptly  found  their  way  into  aca- 
demic circles,  and  conviviality  and  gourmandism  have  run 
riot.  Special  forms  of  sexual  vice  have  at  several  times  and 
places  wrought  their  devastations,  and  cock  fights,  falcon  hunt- 


4i6  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

ing,  the  chase  with  dogs  and  birds,  bowHng,  poaching,  and 
many  other  practises  which  fashion  sanctioned,  but  which 
sometimes  a  too  strict  morahty  condemned,  have  found  a  con- 
genial home  in  the  universities. 

The  opposite  extremes  have  been  no  less  accentuated.  The 
ecclesiastical  character  of  early  university  life  insisted  upon 
almost  every  monastic  rigor,  was  marked  by  fast  days,  early 
matins,  and  later,  college  prayers  before  daylight,  hard  beds, 
no  fire,  the  severest  parietal  regulations,  and  enforced  the  rule 
of  poverty,  chastity,  and  obededence.  In  the  Scotch  universi- 
ties most  students  were  poor,  sometimes  walked  to  the  college 
barefoot  to  save  their  shoes,  carried  all  their  possessions, 
worked  hard,  and  had  no  time  for  play.  The  old  Lycurgus 
society  at  Yale  advocated  a  plain  Quaker-like  dress  and  life, 
but  the  costume  was  so  unbecoming  that  the  custom  died  out. 
Amherst  had  a  vigorous  anti-venerean  society,  and  benevolent 
organizations  in  great  numbers  flourished. 

Religious  reactions  have  been  extreme.  After  the  French 
Revolution  a  wave  of  skepticism  swept  over  nearly  every  Eu- 
ropean and  American  institution  of  learning.  PVeethinking 
was  the  fashion,  while  the  very  small  minority  who  strove  to 
be  religious  were  ridiculed,  dubbed  religiosi,  or  lap-ears,  and 
held  prayer-meetings,  if  at  all,  in  secret.  In  1813  Prince- 
ton had  grown  very  lax  till  four  young  men  met  covertly 
for  prayer  and  started  a  religious  movement.  In  1802 
a  society  was  founded  at  Harvard  to  arrest  the  decay  of 
religion.  In  1850  the  Wingolf  societies  of  theological  stu- 
dents only  were  established  in  Germany  for  the  cultivation  of 
religious  sentiments.  The  data  are  not  at  hand  to  trace  all 
these  fluctuations.  In  general,  in  Anglo-Saxon  lands  religious 
sentiments  have  dominated  at  nearly  all  times  and  in  nearly 
all  seats  of  learning,  while  on  the  Continent,  especially  in  Ger- 
many, universities  have  been  seats  of  free  thought.  Perhaps 
the  greatest  laxity  in  early  times  was  that  which  Puritanism 
at  its  rise  strove  so  hard  to  correct.  We  have  elsewhere  seen 
the  effects  of  revivalism  on  the  American  colleges  since  the 
days  of  Whitefield. 

Thus  the  history  of  student  life  shows  clubs,  sodalities, 
associations  of  almost  every  conceivable  sort  and  for  all  pur- 
poses, clubs  for  eating,  drinking,  hunting,  hawking,  for  every 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  417 

kind  of  indoor  and  outdoor  sport,  for  the  most  diverse  political 
ends,  for  all  social  reforms,  clubs  representing  nearly  all  of  the 
great  philosophical  systems — stoics,  cynics,  skeptics,  platonists, 
scholastics,  idealists,  and  all  the  rest — clubs  for  banterers,  for 
drinking  young  hyson  and  stronger  beverages,  gambling, 
shooting,  fishing,  acting,  playing  practical  jokes,  nonsense 
clubs,  wine  clubs,  essay  clubs,  associations  for  dietary  reforms, 
for  fighting,  for  wearing  plain  or  eccentric  clothing,  elaborate 
organizations  for  those  who  stand  low^est  in  class,  clubs  of  liars, 
of  petty  pilferers,  associations  for  charity,  for  the  propaganda 
of  religion  and  even  atheism,  for  traveling,  for  every  special 
branch  of  intellectual  culture,  and  interest  both  in  the  sciences 
and  the  humanities,  and  besides  these,  hundreds  of  pure  funk 
organizations  with  nothing  about  them  but  high-sounding 
names  and  officers,  who  never  had  a  meeting  and  were  never 
elected — all  these  bear  witness  to  the  intense  pleasure  at  this 
age  of  life  of  simply  being  together  or  even  imagining  social 
bonds.  It  is  a  pathetic  fact  that  ethical  teaching  which  should 
so  largely  consist  in  developing  the  social  instincts  aright  has 
not  treated  and  but  slightly  influenced  this  side  of  academic 
life,  which  for  the  average  student  perhaps  outw^eighs  all  other 
college  influences,  but  still  hovers  about  abstract  theories  of 
morality. 

XII.  Associations  for  youth  devised  or  guided  by  adults. 
Here  we  enter  a  very  different  realm.  Forbush  ^  undertakes 
an  analysis  of  many  such  clubs  w4iich  he  divides  according  to 
their  purpose  into  nine  chief  classes :  physical  training,  handi- 
craft, literary,  social,  civic  and  patriotic,  science-study,  hero- 
love,  ethical,  religious.  These  he  classifies  as  to  age  of  the 
boys,  his  purview  generally  ending  at  seventeen,  discusses  and 

'The  Social  Pedagogy  of  Boyhood;  Pad.  Sem.,  October,  1900,  vol.  vii,  pp. 
307-346.  See  also  his  The  Boy  Problem,  with  an  introduction  by  G.  Stanley 
Hall,  Boston,  1901,  p.  194.  Also  Buck  (Boys'  Self-governing  Clubs,  New  York, 
I903),  who  thinks  ten  million  dollars  could  be  used  in  training  club  advisers  who 
should  have  the  use  of  schools  and  grounds  after  hours  and  evenings,  conduct  ex- 
cursions, organize  games,  etc.,  but  avoid  all  direct  teaching  and  book  work  gener- 
ally. This  writer  thinks  such  an  institution  would  soon  result  in  a  marked  increase 
of  public  morality  and  an  augmented  demand  for  technical  instruction,  and  that  for 
the  advisers  themselves  the  work  would  be  the  best  training  for  high  positions  in 
politics  and  reform.  Clubs  of  boys  from  eight  to  si.\teen  or  eighteen  must  noi 
admit  age  disparities  of  more  than  two  years. 
GG 


41 8  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

tabulates  the  most  favorable  number,  the  instincts  chiefly 
utilized,  the  kinds  of  education  gained  in  each  and  its  percent- 
age of  interest,  and  the  qualities  developed.  He  commends 
Riis's  mode  of  pulling  the  safety-valve  of  a  rather  dangerous 
boy-gang  by  becoming  an  adult  honorary  member,  and  inter- 
preting the  impulsions  of  this  age  in  the  direction  of  adventure 
instead  of  in  that  of  mischief.  He  reminds  us  that  nearly  one- 
third  of  the  inhabitants  of  America  are  adolescents,  that  three 
millions  are  boys  between  twelve  and  sixteen,  "  that  the  so- 
called  heathen  people  are,  whatever  their  age,  all  in  the  adoles- 
cent stage  of  life." 

A  few  American  societies  of  this  class  we  may  briefly  char- 
acterize as  follows : 

(a)  Typical  of  a  large  class  of  local  juvenile  clubs  is  the  "  Cap- 
tains of  Ten,"  originally  for  boys  of  from  eight  to  fourteen,  and  with 
a  later  graduate  squad  of  those  over  fifteen.  The  "  Ten  "  are  the 
fingers ;  and  whittling,  scrap-book  making,  mat-weaving,  etc.,  are 
taught.  The  motto  is,  "  The  hand  of  the  diligent  shall  bear  rule  "  ;  its 
watchword  is  "  Loyaky  " ;  and  the  prime  objects  are  "to  promote  a 
spirit  of  loyalty  to  Christ  among  the  beys  of  the  club,"  and  to  learn 
about  and  work  for  Christ's  kingdom.  The  members  wear  a  silver 
badge ;  have  an  annual  photograph ;  elect  their  leaders ;  vote  their 
money  to  missions  (on  which  topic  they  hold  meetings)  ;  act  Bible 
stories  in  costume ;  hear  stories  and  see  scientific  experiments ;  enact 
a  Chinese  school ;  write  articles  for  the  children's  department  of  re- 
ligious journals ;  develop  comradeship,  and  "  have  a  good  time." 

(b)  The  Agassiz  Association,  founded  in  1875  "to  encourage 
personal  work  in  natural  science,"  now  numbers  some  25,000  mem- 
bers, with  chapters  distributed  all  over  the  country,  and  was  said  by 
the  late  Professor  Hyatt  to  include  "the  largest  number  of  persons  ever 
bound  together  for  the  purpose  of  mutual  help  in  the  study  of  nature." 
It  furnishes  practical  courses  of  study  in  the  sciences ;  has  local 
chapters  in  thousands  of  towns  and  cities  in  this  and  other  countries; 
publishes  a  monthly  organ,  The  Swiss  Cross,  to  facilitate  cor- 
respondence and  exchange  of  specimens ;  has  a  small  endowment,  a 
badge,  is  incorporated,  and  is  animated  by  a  spirit  akin  to  that  of 
University  Extension  ;  and,  although  not  exclusively  for  young  people, 
is  chiefly  sustained  by  them. 

(c)  The  Catholic  Total  Abstinence  Union  is  a  strong,  well- 
organized,  and  widely  extended  society,  mostly  composed  of  young 
men  whose  pledge  required  of  all  members  explains  its  object.  "  I 
promise,  with  the  Divine  assistance  and  in  honor  of  the  Sacred  Thirst 
and  the  Agony  of  our  Saviour,  to  abstain  from  all  intoxicating  drinks 
and  to  prevent  as  much  as  possible  by  advice  and  example  the  sin 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  4^9 

of  intemperance  in  others  and  to  discountenance  the  drinking  customs 
of  society."  A  general  convention  of  the  Union  has  been  held  an- 
nually since  1877. 

((/)  The  Princely  Knights  of  Character  Castle  is  an  organiza- 
tion founded  in  1895  ^^^  boys  from  twelve  to  eighteen  to  "  inculcate, 
disseminate,  and  practise  the  principles  of  heroism — endurance — 
love,  purity,  and  patriotism."  The  central  incorporated  castle  grants 
charters  to  local  castles,  directs  the  ritual  and  secret  work.  Its  offi- 
cers are  supreme  prince,  patriarch,  scribe,  treasurer,  director,  with 
captain  of  the  guard,  watchman,  porter,  keeper  of  the  dungeon, 
musician,  herald,  and  favorite  son.  The  degrees  of  the  secret  work 
are  shepherd  lad,  captive,  viceroy,  brother,  son,  prince,  knight,  and 
royal  knight.  There  are  jewels,  regalia,  paraphernalia,  and  initia- 
tions. The  pledge  for  the  first  degree  is,  "  I  hereby  promise  and 
pledge  that  I  will  abstain  from  the  use  of  intoxicating  liquor  in  any 
form  as  a  beverage ;  that  I  will  not  use  profane  or  improper  language ; 
that  I  will  discourage  the  use  of  tobacco  in  any  form;  that  I  will 
strive  to  live  pure  in  body  and  mind;  that  I  will  obey  all  rules  and  reg- 
vilations  of  the  order,  and  not  reveal  any  of  the  secrets  in  any  way." 
There  are  benefits,  reliefs,  passwords,  a  list  of  offenses  and  penalties. 

(e)  Some  35,000  Bands  of  Mercy  are  now  organized  under  the 
direction  of  the  American  Humane  Education  Society.  The  object  of 
the  organization  is  to  cultivate  kindness  to  animals  and  sympathy  with 
the  poor  and  oppressed.  The  prevention  of  cruelty  in  driving,  cattle 
transportation,  humane  methods  of  killing,  care  for  the  sick  and  aban- 
doned or  overworked  animals,  are  the  themes  of  most  of  its  voluminous 
literature.  It  has  badges,  hymn-books,  cards,  and  certificates  of  mem- 
bership, and  a  motto,  "  Kindness,  Justice,  and  Mercy  to  All."  Its  pledge 
is,  "  I  will  try  to  be  kind  to  all  harmless  living  creatures,  and  try  to  pro- 
tect them  from  cruel  usage,"  and  is  intended  to  include  human  as  well 
as  dumb  creatures.  The  founder  and  secretary,  with  great  and  com- 
mendable energy,  has  instituted  prize  contests  for  speaking  on  humane 
subjects  in  schools,  and  has  printed  and  circulated  prize  stories;  since 
the  incorporation  of  the  society  in  1868,  he  has  been  indefatigable 
in  collecting  funds,  speaking  before  schools  and  colleges,  and  prints 
fifty  to  sixty  thousand  copies  of  the  monthly  organ.  In  addition  to 
its  mission  of  sentiment,  and  cO  make  it  more  effective,  this  organiza- 
tion clearly  needs  to  make  more  provision  for  the  intellectual  element 
by  well-selected  or  constructed  courses,  or  at  least  references  on  the 
life,  history,  habits,  and  instincts  of  animals,  and  it  also  needs  more 
recognition  that  modern  charity  is  a  science  as  well  as  a  virtue. 

(/)  The  Coming  Men  of  America,  although  organized  only  in 
1894,  now  claims  to  be  the  greatest  chartered  secret  society  for  boys 
and  young  men  in  the  country.  It  began  two  years  earlier  in  a 
lodge  started  by  a  nineteen-year-old  boy  in  Chicago  in  imitation  of 
such  ideas  of  Masons,  Odd-Fellows,  etc.,  as  its  founder  could  get 
from  his  older  brother,  and  its  meetings  were  first  held  in  a  base- 
ment.    On  this  basis  older  heads   aided  in  its  development,  so  that 


420  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

it  is  a  good  example  of  the  boy-imitative  helped  out  by  parents.  The 
organization  is  now  represented  in  every  State  and  Territory,  and 
boys  travel  on  its  badge.  There  is  an  official  organ,  The  Star,  a 
badge,  sign,  and  a  secret  sign  language  called  bestography.  Its  secret 
ritual  work  is  highly  praised.  Its  membership  is  limited  to  white 
boys  under  twenty-one. 

(g)  The  first  Harry  Wadsworth  Club  was  established  in  1871 
as  a  result  of  E.  E.  Hale's  Ten  Times  One,  published  the  year  before. 
Its  motto  is,  "  Look  up,  and  not  down ;  look  forward,  and  not  back ; 
look  out,  and  not  in ;  lend  a  hand,"  or  "  Faith,  Hope,  and  Charity." 
Its  organ  is  the  Ten  Times  One  Record;  its  badge  is  a  silver  Maltese 
cross.  Each  club  may  organize  as  it  will,  and  choose  its  own  name, 
provided  it  accepts  the  above  motto.  Its  watchword  is,  "In  His  Name." 
It  distributes  charities,  conducts  a  Noonday  Rest,  outings  in  the  coun- 
try, and  devotes  itself  to  doing  good.^ 

Within  the  last  third  of  a  century  the  Christian  Church  has 
awakened  to  the  fact  that  its  duty  to  the  young  is  not  complete 
when  they  are  confirmed  or  even  converted,  but  that  they  need 
organizations  of  a  kind  very  different  from  those  of  adults,  and 
these  have  now  been  developed  in  every  great  religious  body. 
They  are  not  only  initiated  but  largely  sustained  by  older  peo- 
ple, but  unfortunately,  like  the  Sunday-school,  almost  always 
by  those  who  have  little  knowledge  of  adolescent  nature  or 
needs.  Most  of  them  make  later  adaptations  to  fit  academic 
students,  but  these  are  still  inadequate.  The  spirit  of  these 
societies  is  warm-hearted,  positive,  optimistic,  enthusiastic, 
and  loyal  to  the  great  Head  of  the  Church.  This  is  their  glory. 
Most  of  them  have  progressively  recognized  the  need  of 
amusement,  recreation,  and  athletics  to  counteract  the  tempta- 
tions of  city  life,  and  a  more  youthful  buoyancy  and  a  broader 
charity  have  thus  been  given  to  the  Church.  Classes,  lectures, 
evening  homes  have  been  opened ;  special  directors  and  trainers 
are  increasingly  competent  and  give  expert  training,  and  per- 
haps this  is  the  most  important  advance  of  the  Church  in  the 
last  generation.  Far  more  than  teachers  in  high  school  or 
college,  or  pastors,  these  leaders  are  ready  to  profit,  as  far  as 
their  still  too  limited  training  permits,  by  every  aid  that  recent 
ephebic  studies  can  ofTer.  When  the  stage  of  external  or- 
ganization is  less  absorbing  and  more  effort  can  be  given  to 

>  See  Young  People's  Societies,  by  L.  W.    Bacon;   New  York,    1900,  p.   265. 
Also,  F.  G.  Cressey;  The  Church  and  Young  Men;   New  York,  1903,  p.  233. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  4^1 

improving  the  quality  of  real  inner  work,  these  recent  organ- 
izations will  perhaps  sometime  lead  all  others  in  ministering 
to  the  deepest  needs  of  youth.  Their  attractiveness  to  people 
older  than  those  primarily  in  view  shows  how  in  maturity 
men  love  to  hark  back  to  this  best  age  of  life,  both  to  make 
up  what  they  missed  at  its  true  season  and  to  conserve  into 
age  the  freshness  of  earlier  years.  Even  the  affected  fervor 
and  effusiveness  of  hearts  that  have  begun  to  show  the  chill  of 
age  and  the  sometimes  gushy  and  shallow  enthusiasms  that 
persist  well  on  into  the  great  fatigue  that  slowly  supervenes 
with  advancing  senescence,  are  an  often  pathetic  testimony  to 
the  fact  that  in  our  age  and  land  youth  rules,  and  all  love  to 
pay  an  almost  passionate  tribute  wherever  it  holds  sway.  I 
can  here  specify,  and  that  very  briefly,  only  a  few  of  the  most 
characteristic  of  these  new  societies. 

(h)  The  Young  Men's  Christian  Association*  was  founded  in 
1844,  in  London,  to  meet  the  needs  of  clerks  and  other  young  men 
who  had  been  drawn  from  the  country  by  the  fascinations  of  the  city, 
and  many  of  whom  had  few  opportunities  for  forming  fit  acquaint- 
ances, had  no  home  but  a  bedroom,  and  so  no  place  to  go  to,  and 
were  exposed  to  the  fiercest  temptation.  In  1851  it  was  established 
in  this  country  and  has  now  spread  to  every  civilized  land.  In  1800 
one  in  twenty-five  of  our  population  lived  in  cities  of  8,000  or  over, 
and  in  1880  one  in  four.  The  attraction  of  cities,  those  great  hives 
of  industry  and  trade,  where  great  stakes  are  lost  and  won,  where  life 
is  so  hot  and  fast,  where  the  nerves  are  tense  and  tingle,  and  compe- 
tition and  vice  both  stimulate  and  enervate,  is  shown  by  the  fact 
that  from  eighteen  to  twenty  per  cent  of  our  great  urban  population 
is  made  up  of  males  between  fifteen  and  thirty-six,  while  in  the  coun- 
try this  class  constitutes  only  about  fourteen  per  cent.  The  American 
associations  now  own  property  valued  at  nearly  thirty  million  dol- 
lars, and  hold  musical  and  other  public  entertainments,  sociables,  meet- 
ings, Bible  classes,  evening  schools,  and  occasionally  conduct  hospitals, 
issue  traveling  certificates,  act  as  employment  bureaus,  and  organize 
local  and  departmental  centers  for  railroad  men,  students,  etc.  There 
are  now   (1903)   28,000  active  student  members  out  of  62,000  evan- 

1  Fifty  Years'  Work  among  Young  Men  in  all  Lands.  Published  in  June, 
1894,  on  the  occasion  of  the  semi-centennial  of  the  founding  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.; 
London,  1894,  pp.  326.  Year-Book  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  of  North  America,  1903. 
History  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.,  by  L.  L.  Doggett,  Ph.D.,  1896,  vol.  i,  p.  191. 
Continued  in  some  sense  in  his  Life  of  R.  R.  McRurney,  1902.  See  also,  for 
principles  and  method,  Religious  Work  for  Men,  with  Bibliography,  New  York, 
1903,  p.  90. 


422  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

gelical  church  members  in  nearly  450  colleges  of  this  country  where 
these  associations  exist,  or  about  one-fourth  of  the  entire  collegiate 
body.  That  there  are  no  more  members,  despite  all  the  efforts  put 
forth,  shows  that  the  needs  of  academic  youth  are  not  yet  met.  This 
organization  flourishes  best  in  the  State  universities  where  religion 
can  not  be  officially  taught.  Four  or  five  thousand  young  men  are 
pledged  to  the  work  of  foreign  missions  and  engaged  in  their  study, 
a  far  greater  number  than  can  be  employed.  The  ideals  of  militant 
Christianity  are  in  a  measure  here  revived.  Their  intercollegiate 
meetings,  summer  conferences,  receptions  to  freshmen,  their  wisdom 
in  abstaining  from  class  politics,  their  hospitable  buildings,  have  in- 
troduced a  new  spirit  of  confraternity.  Very  often  Sunday-school 
and  reform  work  is  undertaken  of  an  aggressive  kind,  and  headed 
by  the  Prospect  Union  at  Harvard,  valuable  extension  work  is  done 
among  laboring  men,  women,  and  clerks.  In  August,  1895,  just  forty 
years  after  the  World's  Alliance  of  the  Y.  M.  C.  A.  was  formed, 
there  was  organized  at  a  congress  of  delegates  in  Sweden  a  World's 
Student  Christian  Federation  representing  33,000  members,*  which 
has  since  steadily  increased. 

In  Germany  these  organizations  were  established  chiefly  to  meet 
the  strong  wave  of  reaction  against  religion  that  pervaded  that  coun- 
try, a  movement  that  was  so  aggressive,  especially  in  1848,  as  to 
threaten  social  and  political  as  well  as  religious  institutions  and 
beliefs.  In  Japan,  India,  and  Catholic  lands  they  have  had  to  resist 
the  influences  of  preexisting  faiths,  in  industrial  centers,  the  grow- 
ing indifference  or  hostility  of  working  men  to  religion,  and  toward 
the  western  frontier  where  men  exceed  women,  lawlessness  and  vice 
are  entrenched  and  have  to  be  met.  The  interdenominational  char- 
acter of  this  organization  opened  a  new  field  of  fellowship  with  an 
inspiration  both  strong  and  new.  A  new  force  of  lay-activity,  which 
inherited  all  the  best  traditions  of  revivalism  of  the  Puritans  and  the 
original  Protestant  and  early  Catholic  propaganda  movements,  was 
harnessed  and  put  to  work;  honor,  conscience,  and  Christianity  were 
advocated  in  the  methods  of  business,  that  monster  that  so  dominates 
the  modern  world,  whose  organizations,  motives,  laws  are  as  yet, 
despite  all  our  studies,  so  little  known,  fruitful  affiliation  effected  with 
the  Bible,  Tract,  Sunday-school,  and  other  societies,  and  by  these 
and  other  co-ordinate  efforts  the  dwindling  percentage  of  male  mem- 
bers of  Protestant  churches,  now  estimated  at  only  thirty-five  per 
cent  of  all,  sensibly  increased.  It  permits  no  theological  discussions, 
and  accepts  no  responsibility  for  the  dogmatic  beliefs  of  its  members. 

(i)  The  Christian  Endeavor  Society  was  practically  the  first  of 
a  new  type  of  religious  organization  for  both  sexes.  It  owes  alle- 
giance only  and  altogether  to  the  church  with  which  it  is  connected  and 
to  which  it  reports,  and  all  its  acts  are  subject  to  revision  and  veto  by 


1  Strategic  Points  in  the  World's  Conquest,  by  J.  R.  Mott.     New  York,  1897, 
p.  218. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS   AND  INSTITUTIONS  4^3 

the  church  of  which  it  is  a  part.  Its  fellowship  with  sister  organiza- 
tions throughout  the  world  is  based  on  a  common  pledge,  methods, 
organization  name,  and  State,  national  and  international  conven- 
tions. Its  junior  branch  of  boys  and  girls  under  fourteen  reports 
to  it.  It  has  information,  Sunday-school,  calling,  prayer-meeting, 
music,  missionary,  flower,  temperance,  relief,  good  literature,  and 
sometimes  other  committees,  each  of  which  is  expected  to  magnify 
its  office  into  more  or  less  of  a  specialty,  both  for  its  own  benefit 
and  that  of  the  society  and  the  local  church.  Active  members  must 
believe  themselves  Christians.,  associate  members  must  be  of  worthy 
character,  and  affiliated  or  honorary  members  need  be  "  no  longer 
young."  There  are  badges,  charms,  banners,  a  copious  literature 
of  books,  and  especially  leaflets  and  periodicals,  songs,  diplomas, 
programs  for  rallies  and  other  special  meetings,  masses  of  sugges- 
tions, "  credit  systems,"  "  next  steps,"  methods,  temperance  pledges, 
etc.    The  devotion  and  organizing  ability  of  the  founder  are  undoubted. 

The  preparatory  members,  whose  parents  are  not  ready  to  approve 
the  full  pledge,  sign  the  following :  "  I  promise  to  be  present  at  every 
meeting  when  I  can,  and  to  be  quiet  and  reverent  during  the  meet- 
ing." The  model  constitution  says  "  they  will  be  expected  to 
attend  meetings  regularly."  ^  Thus  the  first  duty  of  these  young  chil- 
dren, mostly  from  seven  or  eight  to  twelve,  is  meeting-going  when- 
ever they  "  can  " — a  word  of  as  many  meanings  as  there  are  tempera- 
ments and  moods.  The  temptations  to  juvenile  casuistry  here  opened 
as  to  what  they  can  and  can  not  do  are  already  enough  studied  to 
show  that  at  least  in  some  cases  a  tender  conscience  often  becomes 
either  flabby  or  callous  under  this  precocious  strain. 

Each  Junior  member  signs  a  pledge  "  that  I  will  pray  and  read 
the  Bible  every  day,"  and  "  I  will  be  present  at  every  meeting  of  the 
society  when  I  can  and  will  take  some  part  in  every  meeting,"  as  well 
as  that  he  will  try  to  lead  a  Christian  life  and  do  what  Jesus  would 
like.  The  response  to  every  monthly  roll-call  is  considered  a  renewal 
of  the  pledge.  Against  this  last  Gesinnungs  promise  to  try  added 
for  this  grade  I  have  nothing  here  to  say.  It  probably  does  good 
and  is  a  vow  of  a  very  different  order.  Some  soon  doubt  whether 
Jesus  wishes  them  to  take  part  in  every  meeting,  because  it  is  too 
hard  or  because  others  can  edify  so  much  more,  and  fear  thus  that 
in  keeping  one  part  of  the  covenant  they  violate  another.  They  find 
themselves  reading  Scripture  and  praying  daily  because  they  prom- 
ised, and  so  are  sometimes  constrained  to  do  both  when  it  must  be 
under  such  adverse  conditions  as  to  be  mechanical,  or  they  do  it  be- 
cause they  fear  the  awful  sacrilege  of  a  broken  vow  to  God.  They 
might  do  both  on  Sundays  with  due  solemnity  of  spirit  and  under- 
standing, and  they  often  wish  this  had  been  the  extent  of  their  cove- 
nant.    It  is  not  quite  clear  to  me  that  the  average  normal  child  of 

^  The  Christian  Endeavor  Manual,  1903,  and  Training  the  Church  of  the  Future, 
1902,  both  by  Francis  E.  Clark,  D.  D. 


424  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

these  tender  years  ought  to  be  constrained  to  pray  or  read  the  Bible 
daily  alone,  still  less  to  do  the  former  in  public,  or  that  he  can  do  so 
without  rubbing  some  of  the  bloom  off  these  solemn  exercises  at  the 
time  when  they  acquire  a  great  access  of  inner  meaning,  for  reasons 
stated  in  Chapter  XIV;  nor  am  I  sure  of  the  propriety  of  his  attend- 
ing and  taking  part  in  every  meeting  under  pain  of  expulsion  for 
three  consecutive  and  unexcused  absences  from  monthly  meetings, 
or  of  the  nature  of  the  work  of  the  committee  to  obtain  excuses  and 
reclaim  those  grown  indifferent  to  their  pledge.  Some  can  be  true 
Christian  "  endeavorers  "  without  participating  in  or  even  attending 
meetings,  and  this  recruiting  feature  is  made  too  central.  This  kind 
of  pledge  to  a  specific  ecclesiastical  function  is  indeed  a  new  thing 
in  religious  history.  Children  are  impressionable  and  easily  guided 
by  adult  or  clerical  advice  to  mortgage  their  lives  in  the  interests  of 
the  Church,  and  the  evils  of  an  analogous  pledge  to  attend  school  and 
to  recite  or  to  study  at  home  daily  would  be  apparent. 

To  do  such  things  because  they  have  been  vowed  is  to  act  from 
a  relatively  low  motive.  The  phobia  of  breaking  a  pledge  is  often 
intense,  as  we  saw  in  Chapter  IV.  This  obscures  higher  motives 
and  robs  these  acts  of  the  spontaneity  that  is  half  their  charm  and 
all  their  virtue.  The  rewards  of  conscience  for  doing  them  are  those 
of  simple  honesty,  which  is  very  different  from  the  exaltation  of  soul  by 
true  worship.  One  meeting,  prayer,  testimony^  or  one  Bible-reading 
a  year,  out  of  a  full  heart,  expresses  and  fosters  more  true  piety  than 
a  daily  but  constrained  service.  For  parent  or  religious  teacher  to 
ask  it  on  this  motive  is  also  a  lazy  shirking  of  their  higher  duty  to 
develop  these  exercises  on  the  basis  of  love  and  spontaneity.  Would 
an  iron-clad  oath  upon  honor  in  a  French  class  in  a  boarding-school 
to  speak  French  only,  at  breakfast,  and  in  English  to  read  a  little 
Shakespeare  daily,  or  to  attend  every  exercise  when  they  can  on  pain  of 
expulsion,  promote  a  love  of  these  things,  and  would  teachers  thereby 
tend  to  more  or  less  impulsion  to  make  their  work  interesting  and 
attractive  for  its  own  merits?  As  I  have  observed  the  working  of 
this  part  of  the  Junior  pledge,  it  seems  sometimes  a  cheap  and  easy 
and  almost  cowardly  trick  to  ease  the  conscience  of  parent  or  religious 
teacher  by  devolving  on  the  child  what  they  should  do  themselves 
by  higher  but  harder  motives ;  and  the  smug  complacency  of  adults 
at  having  secured  and  counted  these  pledges  as  if  they  had  thereby 
discharged  in  any  sense  their  duty  seems  a  pious  delusion  that  veils 
a  partial  abdication  of  the  highest  function  of  parenthood.  For  the 
young  child  it  is  giving  his  religious  life  and  nurture  precociously 
over  into  his  own  keeping  at  the  very  age  when  he  most  of  all  needs 
constant  adult  aid  and  is  least  able  to  assume  responsibility  for  the 
keeping  of  his  own  soul. 

The  vow  of  the  full  active  member,  called  the  backbone  of  the 
society,  repeated  in  concert  and  each  phrase  made  the  basis  of  exegesis 
and  exhortation,  is  still  more  formidable,  and  is  as  follows  [italics 
mine]  : 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  4^5 

"Trusting  in  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  for  strength,  I  promise  Him  that  I  will 
strive  to  do  whatever  He  would  like  to  have  me  do;  that  I  will  make  it  the  rule 
of  my  life  to  pray  and  to  read  the  Bible  every  day,  and  to  support  my  own  church 
ill  every  way,  especially  by  attending  her  regular  Sunday  and  mid-week  services, 
unless  prevented  by  some  reason  which  I  can  conscientiously  give  to  my  Saviour ; 
and  that,  just  so  far  as  I  know  how,  throughout  my  whole  life,  I  will  endeavor  to 
lead  a  Christian  life." 

"As  an  active  member,  I  promise  to  be  true  to  all  my  duties,  to  be  present  at, 
and  to  take  some  pari,  aside  from  singing,  in  every  Christian  Endeavor  prayer- 
meeting,  unless  hindered  by  some  reason  which  I  can  conscientiously  give  to  my 
Lord  and  Master.  If  obliged  to  be  absent  from  the  monthly  consecration  meeting 
of  the  society,  I  will,  if  possible,  send  at  least  a  verse  of  Scripture  to  be  read  in 
response  to  my  name  at  the  roll-call." 

The  associate  members'  pledge  is  as  follows : 

"  I  promise  to  attend  the  prayer-meetings  of  the  society  habitually,  and  declare 
my  willingness  to  do  wJiat  I  may  be  called  upon  to  do  as  an  associate  member  to 
advance  the  interest  of  the  society." 

Preparatory  and  associate  members  vow  only  meeting  and  society 
duties,  and  here,  too,  these  are,  relatively  to  Christian  living,  far  too 
prominent.  An  oath  to  support  one's  own  church  in  every  way  may 
involve  unchristian  conduct  in  many  an  emergency;  to  do  all  duties 
is  absolutely  impossible,  as  any  knowledge  of  ethics  would  show,  and 
to  vow  to  do  what  is  asked  by  another  member  is  a  gross  violation 
of  the  high  prerogative  of  personal  liberty.  Any  real  religious  or 
moral  maturity  requires  that  great  personal  problems  like  these  be 
not  prematurely  closed.  The  religious  oath-craze  may  go  further, 
and  those  who  desire  may  become  "  Comrades  of  the  quiet  hour  "  by 
vowing  as  a  rule  of  life  "  to  set  apart  at  least  fifteen  minutes  every 
day,  if  possible  in  the  early  morning,  for  quiet  meditation  and  direct 
communion  with  God."  The  vow  of  the  Tenth  Legion  is  the 
"  practise  "  "  to  give  God  the  tithe."  The  Home  Circle  pledge  is  to 
endeavor  "  to  maintain  family  worship  in  the  home,  and  to  strive  to 
make  it,  through  kindness,  courtesy,  and  mutual  helpfulness,  a  house- 
hold of  God." 

Add  all  these  oaths,  which  with  their  implications  cover  the  entire 
field  of  life,  and  we  have  almost  a  noTi  posse  pcccare  without  incurring 
the  awful  curse  of  perjury.  The  judicial  oath  to  tell  the  whole  and 
only  truth  in  a  specific  case,  supported  by  ordeals  and  compurgating 
wraithsmen,  contracts  to  pay  or  do  definite  things ;  pledges  of  general 
loyalty,  fidelity,  allegiance,  and  of  good  endeavor,  all  have  their 
place,  as  do  temperance  and  white  cross  pledges,  perhaps  as  individual 
remedial  instrumentalities.  Society  and  business  rest  upon  trust  and 
confidence  and  the  fulfilment  of  promised  obligations.  The  Jewish 
dispensation  was  a  contract  with  Jehovah.'     The  oath  instinct  that 

1  Das  Eid  im  Alten  Testament,  von  Julius  Happel,  p.  92. 


426  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

violates  the  precept  "  swear  not  at  all "  is  very  strong  in  youth/  and 
its  moral  leverage  is  great  and  needs  more  study  to  utilize  aright,  but 
the  endeavorer's  method,  even  if  more  good  than  harm  is  done  on  the 
whole,  is  clearly  and  certainly  unfavorable  to  those  capable  of  higher 
moral  and  religious  development. 

(/)  The  Epworth  League  originated  in  1872  in  an  effort  toward 
a  uniform  organization  of  the  young  people  of  the  Methodist  Episco- 
pal Church,  and  received  its  formal  endorsement  of  the  General  Con- 
ference which  made  it  a  part  of  the  Church  work  in  1892.  Its  ob- 
ject is  "  to  promote  intelligent  and  loyal  piety  in  young  members  and 
friends  of  the  Church,  to  aid  them  in  the  attainment  of  purity  of 
heart  and  in  constant  growth  in  grace,  and  to  train  them  in  works 
of  mercy  and  help."  There  are  prescribed  reading  courses  with  diplo- 
mas therefor  with  seals  affixed,  suggestive  plans  for  meetings,  etc. 
The  league  is  offensive  and  defensive,  and  exists  to  increase  love  to 
every  Christian  Church,  and  to  make  its  own  a  power  in  the  land. 
Although  in  relations  of  cordial  sympathy  with  the  Christian  En- 
deavor Society,  which  it  resembles  in  spirit  and  methods,  it  has  its 
own  badges,  pledges,  literature,  methods,  etc.  The  Epworth  Guards 
is  an  auxiliary  organization  to  develop  Christian  manliness  in  young 
men  and  boys  who  are  members  and  adherents  of  the  Methodist  Epis- 
copal Church,  and  is  organized  in  companies,  regiments,  battalions, 
etc.     The  Junior  pledge  is  as  follows : 

"  I  do  hereby  promise,  with  the  help  of  God,  to  try  always  to  do  right ;  to  pray 
every  day ;  to  read  every  day  in  the  Word  of  God ;  to  abstain  from  profane  lan- 
guage, from  the  use  of  tobacco,  and  from  all  intoxicating  liquor;  to  attend  the 
morning  church  service  and  the  regular  meeting  of  the  Junior  Epworth  League." 

The  regular  pledge  is : 

"  I  will  earnestly  seek  for  myself  and  will  do  what  I  can  to  help  others  attain 
the  highest  New  Testament  standard  of  experience  and  life.  I  will  abstain  from 
all  those  forms  of  worldly  amusement  forbidden  by  the  Discipline  of  the  Methodist 
Episcopal  Church.  I  will  attend,  so  far  as  possible,  the  religious  meetings  of  the 
chapter  and  the  church,  and  take  some  active  part  in  them." 

Every  member  of  the  Guards  must,  in  the  presence  of  an  officer, 
both  repeat  and  sign  the  following  obligation : 

"  I  do,  upon  honor,  solemnly  promise  and  pledge  that,  while  a  member  of  the 
Epworth  Guards,  I  will  not  use  tobacco,  profane  or  obscene  language,  or  intoxi- 
cating liquors  as  a  beverage ;  that  I  will  keep  myself  pure,  will  be  loyal  to  my 
country,  will  obey  faithfully  the  laws  and  rules  of  the  Epworth  Guard,  and  all  of 
the  officers  over  me;  and  that  I  will,  at  all  times,  endeavor  to  be  an  example  of 
good  conduct,  and  strive  to  develop  Christian  manliness  in  myself  and  others." 

Here,  too,  besides  the  pledge  of  effort  to  lead  a  moral  and  relig- 
ious life,  there  are  still   more  specific  pledges,  even  that  to  abstain 

^  M.  H.  Small :  Methods  of  Manifesting  the  Instinct  for  Certainty.  Fed.  Sem., 
January,  1898,  vol.  v,  pp.  313-380. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND  INSTITUTIONS  427 

from  forms  of  amusement  which  the  Church  disapproves  and  obe- 
dience to  the  rules  of  the  order,  so  that  on  the  whole  this  pledge  is 
perhaps  most  objectionable  of  all. 

(k)  The  Brotherhood  of  St.  Andrew  is  an  Episcopal  organiza- 
tion and  originated  in  Chicago  in  1883  on  St.  Andrew's  Day.  In  1897 
there  were  1,223  chapters  with  13,000  members  pledged  to  pray  and 
work  together.  The  national  brotherhood  is  simply  a  federation  of 
parochial  societies,  and  holds  an  annual  meeting.  Every  member 
must  pledge  to  obey  only  two  rules  so  long  as  he  shall  belong  to  the 
society.  The  first  is,  "  to  pray  daily  for  the  spread  of  Christ's  king- 
dom among  young  men,  and  for  God's  blessing  upon  the  labors  of 
the  brotherhood."  The  second  rule  of  service  is,  "  to  make  an  earnest 
effort  each  week  to  bring  at  least  one  young  man  within  the  hearing 
of  the  gospel  of  Jesus  Christ  as  set  forth  in  the  service  of  the  Church 
and  in  young  men's  Bible  classes."  It  is  thus  a  praying  band  with  a 
mission  motive  of  bringing  individuals  to  the  Church.  The  order 
was  without  precedent  in  this  Church,  and  was  from  the  start  ag- 
gressive, and  had  to  antagonize  many  prevalent  modes  of  life  and 
thought.  It,  too,  has  a  boys'  department,  and  for  all,  there  is  a  special 
service  of  admission,  and  a  litany  for  chapter  meetings.  Altogether 
it  helps  to  spread  the  ideal  of  a  simple,  manly,  earnest  Christianity 
and  Churchmanship.  A  university  settlement  has  been  proposed  for 
the  study  of  social  facts. 

(I)  The  Lutheran  Church  undertook  this  work  only  in  1888,  and 
its  national  league  was  organized  in  1895.  It  lays  less  stress  upon 
oaths.  The  object  sought  is  to  stimulate  the  young  to  greater  activity 
in  their  respective  churches;  to  assist  in  keeping  those  who  have  been 
confirmed  true  to  their  vows ;  to  secure  the  active  aid  of  youth  in 
advancing  local  church  work,  to  cultivate  friendship,  and  to  guard  the 
young  against  vice  and  unbelief. 

Usually  where  these  societies  elect  their  own  officers  they 
must  first  be  approved  by  the  church,  which  not  only  organizes 
but  otherwise  controls  their  actions  as  much  as  college 
fashions  and  requirements  dominate  fitting  schools,  often  to 
their  great  harm,  as  we  shall  see  in  the  next  chapter.  Many  if 
not  most  of  the  younger  societies  are  led  by  women  at  an  age 
when,  if  adult  dominance  is  desirable,  a  man  is  a  far  more 
wholesome  influence  for  boys.  At  this  age,  too.  no  sponta- 
neous boys'  organizations  that  really  represented  their  spirit 
would  admit  girls.  The  most  fluent  in  public  talk  and  prayer 
are  often  just  those  that  need  repression,  and  to  tiptoe  up  to  an 
experience  that  is  beyond  them  and  does  not  fit  their  stage 
of  progress  makes  the  present  seem  more  unreal.  True  re- 
ligious experience  seems  at  this  age  to  come  and  go  in  great, 


428  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

strong,  but  unfrequent  rhythms  with  a  cadence  that  is  perhaps 
more  nearly  seasonal  than  diurnal  or  weekly.  The  juvenile 
branches  of  these  oath-clubs  are  not  only  "  girly  "  in  spirit, 
in  the  boys'  sense  of  that  term,  but  they  offer  little  incentive 
or  opportunity  for  physical  or  athletic  exercise,  which  is  a 
necessary  ingredient  of  everything  which  captivates  a  boy's 
soul,  and  do  little  to  cultivate  moral  fiber,  to  promote  ethical 
or  civic  and  communal  virtue,  or  to  awaken  and  feed  the  in- 
tellect, but  they  center  in  ecclesiastical  functions.  Children 
should  minister  in  every  helpful  way  to  the  Church,  but  should 
not  be  indentured  to  it  in  ways  analogous  to  those  which 
factory  laws  forbid  in  industrial  life.  The  long  contract 
system  of  securing  labor  from  aborigines  may  be  as  cruel  as 
slavery  itself  despite  the  signed  agreement  into  which  the 
innocent  human  nature  is  beguiled. 

The  above  list  could  be  greatly  extended,  and  embraces 
juvenile  associations  of  all  kinds,  from  those  for  some  one 
specific  object  to  fairly  complete  organizations  of  the  entire 
life,  like  the  George  Junior  Republic.  Girls  accept  earlier  and 
far  more  kindly  than  boys  organizations  made  by  their  elders 
for  their  benefit.  Some  societies  are  more,  and  some  less,  ex- 
otic, and  there  is  always  danger  that  virtues  thus  cultivated  will 
be  premature  and  of  the  hothouse  variety,  incapable  of  bearing 
much  strain  and  liable  to  languish  later  in  life.  In  several  in- 
stances such  clubs  have  flourished  with  every  sign  of  vigorous 
life,  and  then,  on  the  death  or  marriage  of  some  good  woman 
who  had  put  her  life  into  them,  have  suddenly  died  and  left 
no  visible  sign  even  of  regret.  Modern  city  life,  to  a  degree 
which  it  is  hard  to  realize,  is  artificial  and  unnatural  for  youth. 
His  racial  forebears  at  the  stage  he  represents  were  rollicking, 
fighting,  hunting,  courting,  as  they  roved  with  wild  freedom 
in  the  open  in  quest  of  adventure.  He  is  especially  divorced 
in  city  life  from  the  steadying  laws  of  jecapitulation  which 
insure  emergence  in  due  season  into  a  higher  state,  and  so 
is  all  the  more  plastic,  helpless,  disoriented,  and  in  need  of  suc- 
cor. Hence,  in  large  part,  comes  the  immeasurable  waste  of 
adolescent  life.  Church,  home,  school,  and  all  social  life  ought 
to  be  organized  about  youth  like  placenta,  and  should  restore, 
if  possible,  all  of  the  lost  phyletic  elements  that  are  needful, 
while  adult  leaders  should  strive  to  actually  get  back  to  the  real 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  4^9 

life  of  youth,  which  is  almost  like  another  incarnation,  such  as 
theology  describes  as  the  supreme  deed  of  Jesus.  Most 
grown-ups  are  unnatural  in  their  talks  and  even  attitude  to 
youth,  and  it  is  not  the  true  self  of  the  latter  that  goes  out  in 
response  to  such  efforts.  Teaching  is  commonly  a  falsetto 
thing  and  not  an  infection.  So,  too,  if  reserves  are  not  re- 
spected youth  respcnds  by  disguises,  unconscious  though  they 
be.  Too  much  adult  invasion  makes  boys  artificial,  while  their 
deeper  nature  cries  out  for  guidance  that  is  not  coddling. 
Youth  is  in  the  ethical  far  more  than  in  the  spiritual  stage, 
and  this  the  religious  shepherds  of  the  young  find  it  almost 
impossible  to  realize,  and  so  leader  and  led  sustain  a  long  and 
mutually  pleasant  flirtation  with  each  other  that  does  not  ripen 
even  to  that  deep  and  lasting  friendship  which  the  young  so 
readily  develop,  with  lifelong  and  enthusiastic  gratitude  for 
those  that  really  serve  them.  Experience  is  slowly  teaching 
some  elements  of  the  wisdom  as  to  ages,  numbers,  the  propor- 
tions and  themes  for  personal  work,  its  irfodes  and  degrees, 
ends,  organizations,  the  focalization  of  effort  in  "  key-boys," 
fruitful  and  unfruitful  topics,  etc.,  that  need  to  be  collated  and 
sifted  from  organizations  of  all  kinds,  and  expert  knowledge 
is  contributing  an  ever  growing  body  of  facts  and  laws,  but 
both  need  to  be  welded  into  a  born  genius  for  tact,  taste,  and 
sympathy  of  a  rare  and  special  type  before  we  have  a  true 
mentor,  able  to  preside  aright  over  the  budding  social  instincts 
of  this  most  gregarious  of  all  periods  of  life. 

The  following  conclusion  at  least  seems  warranted.  Every 
adolescent  boy  ought  to  belong  to  some  club  or  society 
marked  by  as  much  secrecy  as  is  compatible  with  safety. 
Something  esoteric,  mysterious,  a  symbolic  badge,  counter- 
sign, a  lodge  and  its  equipment,  and  perhaps  other  things 
owned  in  common,  give  a  real  basis  for  comradeship.  7'^''^^ 
permits,  too,  the  abandon  of  freedom  in  its  yeasty  stage,  wdiich 
is  another  deep  phyletic  factor  of  the  social  instinct.  Innocent 
rioting,  reveling  with  much  Saturnalian  license,  vents  the 
anarchistic  instincts  in  ways  least  injurious  to  the  community 
and  makes  docility  and  subordination  more  easy  and  natural 
in  their  turn.  Provision  of  time  and  place  for  barbarisms  or 
idiotic  nonsense  without  adult  restraint  helps  youth  to  pass 
naturally  llircmgh  this  larval  stage  of  candidacy  to  humanity. 


43°  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Their  celebration  of  their  dawning  future  in  an  ascendent 
age  and  race  is  in  many  a  curious  way  the  counterpart  of  the 
Indian  ghost  dance  which  invokes  and  worships  a  lost  glory 
in  its  evening  twilight.  The  commemorations  of  the  lost  para- 
dise of  the  red  men  of  the  stone  age  are  in  some  respects  a  re- 
markable intaglio  of  the  perfervid  ways  in  which  youth  hails 
the  golden  age  to  come.^  Such  an  organization  must  select  its 
members  according  to  the  natural  instincts  of  affinity,  with 
power  to  discipline  or  expel  those  found  too  unlike-minded. 
It  will  probably  have  a  ritual  of  initiation,  with  grades  of  ap- 
prenticeship in  the  novitiate,  the  lowest  involving  much  sub- 
serviency, almost  like  that  of  a  villein  to  a  manorial  court,  and 
all  perhaps  symbolic  of  putting  oflf  the  old  isolated  self  by 
regeneration  into  a  larger  new  social  existence.  There  will 
be  intense  consciousness  of  the  machinery  of  organization, 
constitution,  by-laws,  rules  of  order  and  procedure,  debate, 
election,  and  perhaps  ritual,  etc.  If  such  a  spontaneous  organ- 
ization of  boys  in  the  later  teens  has  any  inner  work,  it  is  not 
likely  to  be  the  direct  promotion  of  piety  or  any  form  of  out- 
side social  service,  but  is  most  likely  to  be  dramatic  or  musical, 
or  next  to  this,  to  promote  debate  or  declamation,  and  to  cul- 
tivate a  peculiar  form  of  group-honor,  the  best  form  of  which 
for  this  age,  as  we  shall  see  later,  is  the  idealized  court  of  King 
Arthur.  In  cultivating  friendship  intensely  for  a  small  circle, 
conscious  of  representing  the  corps  to  others,  as  gentlemen 
practising  noblesse  oblige,  many  academic  youth  would  owe 
more  to  this  circle  than  to  the  curriculum  and  faculty.  But 
as  enjoyment  and  self-culture  must  slowly  yield  to  service, 
so  neither  this  nor  any  one  type  suffices,  and  every  youth  should 
connect  himself  with  as  many  other  associations  of  diverse 
kinds  as  is  practicable,  for  at  this  age,  while  individuality  may 
be  lost  in  one  group  only,  it  is  saved  and  developed  by  several. 
In  fine,  group-selfishness  is  the  first  step  in  overcoming 
individual  isolation.  The  clansman's  group-loyalty  involves 
some,  and  perhaps  the  first  subordination  and  renunciation 
of  self  that  is  free  and  not  enforced  by  those  older,  stronger, 
or  wiser.     Hence,  tribal  allegiance  means  the  spirit  of  con- 

1  James  Mooney :  The  Ghost  Dance  Religion.    Report  of  Bureau  of  Ethnology, 
1892-93,  pp.  653-1104. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND  INSX^rUTIONS  43  ^ 

fraternity  where  each  is  a  member  larger  whole.     The 

exquisite  pleasure  of  merely  beir  ^ing,   feeling,  acting 

together,  with  at  first  a  wide,  y  3us  range,  and,  with 

increasing  age,  more  specific  s'  associations,  tends  to 

broaden  and  exhaust  each  stag  .>pment  before  passing 

to  the  next  and  thus  makes  ar  extreme  precocity  and 

tardiness.    For  most,  humani  e  a  sphere  of  altruism 

to  have  more  than  a  sentimental  gcv  w.^  ?nt,  and  to-day,  when 
so  many  interests  are  taking  on  cosmic  dimensions,  may  be 
liable  to  weaken  demotic  or  yet  narrower  spheres  now  within 
the  range  of  practical  every-day  duties.  Metchnikoff,^  Ost- 
wald,^  Des  Jardin,^  Giddings,*  Laponge,^  Rene  Worms,^ 
Novicow,'''  Boutroux,^  and  others,  have  presented  aspects  of  this 
theme  which  suggest  that,  as  philanthropy  may  be  so  diffused 
as  to  interfere  with  plain,  humble  obligations  to  do  the  nearest 
and  most  immediate  thing,  so,  too,  many  organizations  may 
direct  sympathy  in  so  many  ways  at  once  as  to  paralyze  practi- 
cal service.  The  biological  school  of  sociologists,  Lilienfield, 
Schafifie,  Worms,  which  emphasizes  the  analogy  between  cells 
in  a  body  and  individuals  in  society,  suggests  a  limitation  of 
personal  range  of  coordination  to  avoid  hypertrophy  of  the 
soma  or  of  an  organ  in  it,  and  Le  Bon  shows  how  a  crowd 
lowers  the  standards  of  every  member  in  it.  Youth  is  pecul- 
iarly prone  to  enthuse  for  great  and  distant  causes  and  grow 
myopic  for  homely  every-day  social  duties,  and  to  seek  only 
personal  enjoyment  in  this  companionship.  The  social  in- 
stincts of  girls  are  perhaps  now  still  more  in  danger  of  too  wide 
irradiation,  for  their  normal  sphere  of  influence  is  more  per- 
sonal. A  weak  glow  of  zest  in  all  that  is  great  and  good,  true 
and  beautiful,  at  the  expense  of  fidelity  to  the  small  and  dis- 
agreeable, and  the  American  rage  for  overorganization  and 
social  machinery,  to  act  with  Church,  party,  class,  secret  order, 
trade  or  industrial  order,  business  consolidation  or  trust,  or 

^The  Nature  of  Man.     New  York,  1903,  chap.   xii. 

'  Naturphilosophie.      Leipzig,  1902,  p.  452. 

'  Le  Devois  Present  de  la  Jeunesse,  in  Routroux's  Morale  Sociale,  chap.  xi. 

*  Inductive  Sociology.     New  York,  1901,  chap.  iii. 

^  Les  Selections  Sociales.     Paris,  1S96,  chaps,  viii-xv. 

*  Organisme  et  Societe.     Paris,  1896,  part  v,  p.  313. 
'  Conscience  et  Volontds  Sociales.      Paris,  1897. 

'  Morale  Sociale.     Paris,  1899. 


432  THE  PSv'CHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

society  fashion,  in  a  way  that  interferes  with  individual  free- 
dom, private  judgment,  and  personal  conscience,  are  forms  of 
degeneration  now  too  common. 

XIII.  In  view  of  all  this,  what  is  the  true  inner  purpose 
and  ideal  of  social  organizations  for  youth?  Left  entirely 
to  themselves  they  tend  to  disorder  and  triviality,  and  con- 
trolled too  much  by  adults  they  tend  to  lose  zest  and  spon- 
taneity; thus  the  p:'oblem  is  to  find  the  golden  mean  between 
both,  so  that  the  teaching  instinct,  one  of  the  noblest  and 
strongest  in  adults,  shall  best  utilize  its  counterpart  in  adoles- 
cents, viz.,  the  passion  to  push  on  to  the  standpoint  of  ma- 
turity and  learn  of  it.  The  opposite  tendencies  are  also  always 
present  and  often  dominant.  Adult  guidance,  as  by  an  iron 
law,  always  tends  to  become  formal,  technical,  and  contentless, 
to  rule  instead  of  to  inspire,  to  make  requirements,  like  the 
present  invasion  of  the  high  school  by  the  college,  that  demand 
precocity  to  meet  them,  and  to  distrust  freedom  and  autonomy, 
while  youth  reacts  by  excluding  or  defying  such  guidance,  so 
that  curricula  and  student  life  separate  and  then  both  degener- 
rate,  as  we  now  see  in  many  American  colleges,  which,  because 
they  are  large,  gravitate  all  the  more  to  the  mechanical,  school 
methods  of  teaching  and  disciplining  masses  of  students. 

Now  one  chief  purpose  of  this  chapter  is  to  propose,  as  a 
partial  solution  of  this  problem,  a  radical  change  of  base  in  the 
pedagogy  of  the  vernacular  language,  literature,  and  history, 
and  I  urge  that  the  prime  purpose  in  all  this  field  which  should 
determine  every  choice  of  matter  and  method  is  moral,  viz., 
to  so  direct  intelligence  and  will  as  to  secure  the  largest  meas- 
ure of  social  service,  advance  altruism  and  reduce  selfish- 
ness, and  thus  advance  the  higher  cosmic  order.  Youth  loves 
combat,  and  this  may  be  developed  into  debate ;  it  loves  dis- 
tinction and  to  exert  influence,  and  this  suggests  oratory; 
it  loves  to  assume  roles  and  to  widen  sympathy  by  represent- 
ing at  this  circumnutating  stage,  with  its  keen  sense  of  char- 
acter, manifold  types  of  human  life,  and  has  a  passion  for  the 
theater,  and  this  suggests  the  drama,  which  always  has  this 
supreme  moral  quality — that  the  good  is  victorious.  Its  very 
best  safeguard  and  its  highest  ideal  is  honor,  and  this  has 
its  best  expression  in  what  may  be  called  the  ethnic  Bible  of 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  433 

the  Saxon  race  in  its  adolescent  stage,  the  hterature  of  chiv- 
alry. Its  religious  instincts  are  at  their  very  best,  and  to  these 
our  Scriptures  make  the  noblest  appeal.  One  or  all  of  these 
four  have  been  cultivated  in  all  the  better  spontaneous  organi- 
zations of  youth,  and  in  some  fashion  all  have  at  the  best 
periods  of  education  constituted  the  best  and  most  central 
subject-matter;  while  taught  without  them,  or  when  the 
method  or  matter  is  bad,  education  rings  hollow.  Let  us 
briefly  glance  at  each. 

A.  Rhetoric  means  oratory.  Its  object  is  to  persuade  intel- 
lect, will,  and  heart.  As  Aristotle  conceived  it,  it  comprised 
the  methods  of  giving  truth  the  superiority  which  belongs  to 
it  by  its  nature.  Quintilian  understood  it  to  involve  all  things 
concerning  the  good,  the  beautiful,  and  the  true,  which  could 
be  brought  into  controversy.  It  has  often  been  called  the 
parent  of  liberty,  which  it  is  one  of  the  prime  duties  of  a  free 
State  to  foster  and  one  of  the  chief  duties  of  a  good  man  to 
cultivate.  It  inspires  action,  and  at  its  best  is  impelled  by  a 
sense  of  duty.  Every  youth  with  high  and  true  ambition,  and 
with  that  nobility  which  classic  rhetoric  conceived  as  inherited 
distinction,  turns  to  it  instinctively.  In  Rome  it  had  in  some 
respects  its  most  favorable  environment.  There  was  the  Forum 
with  all  its  temples  and  porticoes,  monuments  of  victories, 
statues  of  great  men,  every  spot  historic,  with  always  forenses 
or  loiterers,  who  made  a  tumultuary  audience.  The  comitia 
or  assembly  of  the  people  for  the  enactment  of  new  laws;  the 
senate  or  conscript  fathers  with  powers  greater  than  the 
Areopagus  or  most  modern  parliamentary  bodies ;  the  danger 
to  every  citizen  of  accusation,  and  to  every  ofiicer  of  impeach- 
ment, so  that  each  must  cultivate  this  art  of  self-defense;  the 
wide  range  of  topics  and  of  methods  of  treatment;  the  free- 
dom of  the  judges  from  constraint  by  law,  which  made  the 
appeal  to  common  sense,  equity,  discretion,  and  even  their 
emotions,  more  effective,  in  striking  contrast  with  the  240,000 
points  which  Hardwicke  says  the  modern  judge  and  lawyer 
may  be  asked  to  consider  from  the  six  hundred  volumes  of 
law  reports;  the  open-mindedness  and  influence  which  is  now 
sometimes  reversed  in  the  fear  of  the  hearer  lest  he  shall  be 
deceived  by  the  orator's  arts — no  wonder  that  under  such  con- 
ditions the  triumphs  of  eloquence  were  almost  unprecedented. 


434  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

The  Athenians,  roused  from  apathy  to  the  unanimous  cry  to 
be  led  to  Hberty  or  death  against  PhiHp;  the  bestowal  of  the 
golden  crown  despite  the  plea  of  y^schines;  the  precipitate 
flight  of  Catiline ;  the  voluntary  exile  of  Verres,  etc. ;  these 
incidents  we  all  know,  and  they  fire  the  heart  of  youth. 

In  Greece,  Rome,  and  in  modern  times  it  was  after  the 
golden  period  that  teachers  of  rhetoric  arose  who  gradually 
grew  trifling,  artificial,  and  sophistical.  One  prime  secret  of 
the  achievements  of  the  ancient  orators  was  that  the  best  of 
them  were  good  men,  honest,  disinterested,  patriotic,  and  loved 
liberty.  Quintilian  deemed  it  a  crime  against  the  public  to 
give  skill  in  speaking  to  bad  men.  All  that  they  said  was  reen- 
forced  by  their  character,  and  often  by  their  acts.  Rhetoric 
was  directly  based  upon  ethics  and  enriched  by  literature  and 
history.  In  Rome  there  was  no  other  education  from  the 
cradle  than  to  be  an  orator.  Higher  than  proof  stood  virtue 
and  credibility.  Some  of  the  most  eloquent  Stoics  lacked,  if 
they  did  not  despise,  every  personal  and  stylistic  grace,  but 
spoke  concisely  and  with  an  intensity  of  conviction  and 
solidity  of  judgment  that  carried  everything  before  them. 
The  best  rhetoricians  of  classic  times  not  only  argued  and 
arrayed  motives  of  action,  but  knew  how  to  work  upon  the 
heart  as  we  do  not.  The  earliest  preparation  for  this  was 
by  teaching  music,  including  rhythm,  harmony,  lyre-playing, 
modulation  of  the  voice,  and  often  dancing,  to  give  harmony 
and  grace  to  the  body  and  to  cadence  the  soul.  Youth  were 
told  legend  and  history,  paraphrased  Homer  and  the  drama- 
tists, and  formed  their  style  upon  the  content  of  this  backbone 
of  ethnic  culture.  They  were  apprenticed  to  orators,  who  felt 
it  their  duty  to  let  no  great  and  noble  deed  go  without  eulogy 
or  no  hero  die  without  a  panegyric.  They  must  also  influence 
the  emotions.  Aristotle,  as  we  can  not  too  often  remember, 
defined  education  as  teaching  men  to  fear  aright.  The  orator 
must  see  public  danger  afar  off  and  sound  the  alarm,  wherever 
power  became  united  with  criminal  disposition.  Prudence  is 
to  some  extent  anticipatory  pain.  To  direct  this,  one  of  the 
most  fundamental  instincts  of  the  soul,  so  that  all  dangers  and 
vices  shall  be  feared  in  the  right  proportion  and  with  rightly 
graduated  intensity,  sometimes  to  inflame  fear  to  a  panic,  but 
more  often  to  allay  it — this  was  one  of  the  orator's  chief  tasks. 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  435 

Again,  he  must  guide  anger  in  the  same  way  against  those 
objects  which  are  most  worthy  of  righteous  indignation.  The 
noble  man  or  State  will  brook  no  insult  or  insolence,  will  resent 
spite  and  contempt,  and  will  feel  strong,  deep  rage  only  at  great 
wickedness.  The  orator  was  thus  in  a  sense  the  keeper  and 
director  of  the  public  and  sometimes  private  ire,  which  might 
now  be  kindled  in  invective  or  impeachment  and  fanned  to 
a  flame  of  retaliatory  rage,  or,  where  irascibility  was  excessive, 
it  must  be  placated.  Pity,  too,  had  wide  range  which  the  ora- 
tor must  control.  Pleaders  tore  open  the  clothes  of  their 
clients  in  the  Forum  to  show  their  wounds,  or  brought  in  tear- 
ful wives  and  children  and  described  in  glowing  terms  the 
cruelties  and  tortures  that  procurators  and  others  had  inflicted 
upon  their  victims,  often  addressing  the  sympathy  of  the 
judges  or  the  people  rather  than  law.  Pathos  is  one  of  the 
strongest  passions  of  the  human  soul,  which  may  be  wrought 
almost  to  a  frenzy,  and  of  which  Christian  oratory  has  the 
story  of  the  Cross  as  its  masterpiece.  To  love  aright  is  religion 
as  taught  by  Jesus  and  Paul ;  so  of  shame,  benevolence,  emu- 
lation, right  ambition,  of  all  these  the  orator  should  be  master, 
and  he  must  play  upon  the  heart  and  bring  out  all  its  rich 
diapason  of  emotion  and  make  the  good  and  the  true  and  beau- 
tiful glow  and  everywhere  prevail. 

When  the  pugnacious  instincts  develop,  and  when,  as  we 
shall  see  in  the  next  chapter,  reason  begins  to  knit  the  mental 
centers  to  a  higher  unity,  both  ethics  and  logic  have  here  a  new 
union  and  a  new  function.  Controversy  is  often  a  rage,  and 
disputation  is  a  higher  vent  for  the  new  zest  for  conflict.  The 
charm  of  a  thesis  to  be  defended  before  the  world,  of  pointing 
out  a  flagrant  fallacy,  of  refutation  and  rebuttal,  was  the  life 
of  the  old  academic  debating  society,  of  which  down  to  the 
last  third  of  the  last  century  nearly  every  college  and  prepara- 
tory school  had  two,  with  weekly  discussions  of  great  political, 
moral,  and  literary  themes  of  current  interest,  and  with  fre- 
quent joint  debates.  These  societies  in  the  days  of  their  prime 
were  always  the  centers  of  interest  for  some  of  the  best  men, 
and  generally  brought  to  the  surface  another  class  of  leaders 
than  those  who  excelled  in  scholarship.  Plere  all  social  dis- 
tinctions were  forgotten ;  courses  in  rhetoric  and  even  logic, 
and  perhaps  history  and  related  subjects,  were  given  a  new 


43^  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

interest;  the  library  was  ransacked  for  authorities  and  points 
for  citation ;  competition  prompted  men  to  buy  and  beg  books 
for  society  Hbraries,  and  a  new  order  of  champions  and  of 
hero  worship  was  sometimes  developed.  As  these  societies 
declined,  debates  became  less  studied  and  serious.  The  social 
features  that  had  made  their  very  names  attractive  paled 
before  the  closer  friendships  of  the  Greek  letter  fraternities, 
in  some  of  which  debates  still  hold  a  place,  but  they  are  sus- 
tained with  abated  ardor,  perhaps  because  conversation  has 
steadily  developed  in  range  of  topics,  freedom,  and  animation, 
so  that  the  growing  social  instincts  afford  other  vents  and 
channels  for  the  same  interplay  of  facts  and  opinions. 
;  In  all  the  German  universities,  Vereine  exist  for  the  dis- 
cussion, formal  and  informal,  of  general  and  of  special  topics. 
The  "  unions  "  of  Oxford  and  Cambridge,  which  have  existed 
with  unabated  interest  for  a  number  of  decades,  are  organized 
and  conducted  in  every  possible  detail  like  Parliament.  Ques- 
tions take  the  form  of  bills  which  are  in  the  end  passed  or  lost 
by  vote.  When  these  were  organized,  they  were  almost  the 
only  medium  of  intercourse  between  the  different  colleges, 
many  of  which  had  their  own  debating  clubs.  These  unions 
are  often  able  to  bring  down  leading  members  of  Parliament 
to  defend  bills  which  they  are  advocating  at  Westminster,  and 
statesmen  have  found  themselves  attacked  here  always  with 
the  greatest  freedom,  and  sometimes  with  a  rare  force  and 
acumen.  Here,  as  in  all  such  organizations,  young  men  are 
great  sticklers  for  rules  and  technicalities,  and  the  details  of 
parliamentary  usage  are  insisted  on  with  extreme  strictness 
and  literalness.  The  Scotch  universities  have  always  shown 
great  fondness  for  these  organizations  and  for  discussion. 

Since  1889,  on  the  initiative  of  Harv^ard  College,  which  had 
for  a  few  decades  conspicuously  neglected  if  not  disparaged 
this  work,  a  new  stimulus  has  been  given,  and  over  one  hun- 
dred colleges  are  now  organized  into  a  league  for  inter- 
collegiate debate.  This  movement  has  introduced  a  new 
method  and  even  style  of  work.  Champions  are  very  care- 
fully chosen  after  a  competition  which  animates  a  good  deal 
of  previous  preparation,  and  the  subject  is  divided  so  that  each 
debater  presents  a  definite  part  of  it.  College  rivalry  is  much 
involved,  and  generally  its  representatives  are  very  carefully 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  437 

coached  by  the  professors,  under  whose  tuition  they  rehearse 
and  are  prepared  to  meet  the  arguments  of  the  other  side. 
This  work  has  reacted  upon  the  curriculum,  and  in  1898 
Sheldon  found  twenty-seven  colleges  offering  one  hundred  and 
four  courses  in  forensics  and  allied  subjects.  These  debates 
rarely  reach  a  high  level  of  interest  or  ability,  and  are  sadly 
lacking  in  spontaneity.  Unlike  the  Oxford  and  Cambridge 
discussions,  they  are  very  rarely  enlivened  by  a  free  play  of 
wit  and  humor  or  repartee. 

The  dangers  of  these  academic  debates  are  great  and  ob- 
vious, but  not  insuperable.  Often  individuals  have  no  free- 
dom of  choosing  their  own  sides,  and  occasionally  young  de- 
baters prefer  to  talk  against  their  convictions  as  an  exercise 
in  cleverness.  It  is  unfortunate,  too,  to  become  prematurely 
interested  in  one  side  of  any  great  open  question,  but  perhaps 
the  gravest  evil  is  the  danger  of  cultivating  too  great  readiness 
in  speech.  This  tends  to  superficiality,  loose  thinking,  and 
rabulistic  ratiocination.  It  is  a  mental  calamity  to  be  able  to 
talk  glibly  upon  any  subject.  Form  should  be  based  on  and 
come  after  matter,  and  the  judicial  type  of  mind  which  finds 
or  maintains  equanimity  against  the  widest  diversity  of  view 
is  not  favored.  Young  debaters,  especially  of  the  preparatory, 
and,  to  a  less  extent,  of  the  collegiate  stage,  are  also  too  prone 
to  wrangle,  to  raise  specious,  factitious,  and  even  verbal  issues, 
and  sometimes  to  lapse  to  personalities. 

The  modern  instructor  of  elocution  or  declamation  is  as 
unqualified  as  his  colleagues,  who  teach  English,  rhetoric, 
ethics,  or  logic,  to  meet  this  need.  Only  a  reconstruction  and 
new  focalizing  cooperation  of  these  can  effect  what  is  required. 
The  present  tendencies  in  this  direction  are  perhaps  the  very 
best  in  the  field,  but  are  still  feeble. 

As  I  write,  I  have  before  me  twenty-eight  text-books, 
mostly  new,  for  high  school  and  college,  devoted  solely  or 
chiefly  to  what  is  usually  entitled  rhetoric.  Many  frankly  as- 
sume that  the  chief  business  of  the  teacher  of  English  is  "  with 
the  art  of  composition  strictly  understood."  It  is  his  function 
to  make  what  the  pupil  has  to  say  tell  for  all  it  is  worth,  and 
it  is  no  part  of  his  function  to  supply  the  pupil  with  something 
worth  saying.  One  says  that  rhetoric  teaches  "  proper  words 
in  proper  places.''     The  teacher  must  be  "  all  the  time  on  the 


43^  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

watch  for  errors  "  and  never  let  one  pass.  He  confesses  that 
not  one  student  in  ten  thousand  has  anything  to  say;  that 
during  the  preceding  eleven  years,  up  to  1884,  after  reading 
thousands  of  students'  themes,  "  an  onerous  and  thankless 
task,''  he  found  only  a  "  tedious  mediocrity  " ;  and  states  that 
every  year  a  certain  college  sends  out  men,  some  of  them  high 
scholars,  whose  manuscripts  would  disgrace  a  boy  of  twelve. 
A  college  "  can  not  conduct  an  infant  school  for  adults,"  etc. 
These  are  precisely  the  results  which  a  method  so  degenerate, 
all  form  and  no  substance,  is  calculated  to  produce.  Even 
Abbott,  who  insists  that  clear  writing  can  be  reduced  to  fifty- 
six  rules  and  taught,  states  that  this  ''  does  not  imply  think- 
ing clearly."  Nearly  all  expatiate  on  the  comma,  colon, 
semicolon,  period,  and,  especially  of  late,  the  paragraph,  to 
which  one  devotes  nine  chapters ;  some  treat  of  spelling  and 
give  copious  details  about  proof-reading,  and  many  have  one 
or  more  chapters  on  English  grammar.  Nearly  all  discuss 
style  under  the  captions  of  clearness,  force,  and  elegance;  or 
purity,  propriety,  and  precision  of  diction,  and  expatiate  on 
the  differences  between  narration,  description,  and  argument. 
Some  discuss  versification,  elocution,  and  figures  of  speech. 
Good  use  is  often  defined  at  great  length  with  copious  ex- 
amples of  vulgarisms ;  some  are  nearly  half  made  up  of  quota- 
tions from  eminent  writers  largely  borrowed  from  other  text- 
books, which  use  them  as  a  common  fund  of  example  and  illus- 
tration. One  has  over  250  topics  for  composition,  and  another 
author  prints  original  compositions  of  his  own  for  illustra- 
tive purposes.  Some  give  long  vocabularies  of  words  often 
misused.  One  gives  six  lines  on  invention ;  another  treats  the 
art  of  authorship,  and  lays  great  stress  on  a  schematic  analysis 
of  topics  preparatory  to  writing  compositions  upon  them. 
Long  lists  of  reference  books  are  sometimes  given.  In  one, 
Whittier's  Snow-Bound  suggests  sixty-seven  different  topics, 
and  composition  from  pictures  is  a  specialty.  Some  lay 
great  stress  on  purity  and  would  exclude  every  foreign  phrase 
that  has  an  English  equivalent.  Euphony  is  emphasized  by 
another,  who  also  declares  that  to  warp  a  word  from  its  estab- 
lished usage  is  like  defacing  a  public  monument.  A  few  treat 
of  beauty  and  sublimity.  One  would  give  practise  in  writing 
book  reviews,  analyzing  sermons,  and  expatiating  on  proverbs. 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  439 

Nearly  all  the  modern  works  proclaim  in  the  preface  that  they 
are  more  "  practical  "  than  other  works;  some  that  they  have 
aimed  to  be  chiefly  interesting  and  stimulating;  and  many  that 
they  are  expressly  intended  to  meet  the  needs  of  both  high 
school  and  college.  Many  modern  works  on  rhetoric  have 
nothing  to  say  of  oratory  in  any  of  its  aspects,  and  but  few 
speak  of  the  drama.  These  things  have  their  place,  but  the 
decadence  is  that  they  have  usurped  the  central  places  and  all 
perspective  and  proportion  are  lost. 

B.  The  drama  (from  drao,  I  act)  at  its  best  represents 
moral  collisions  and  their  results,  and  is  a  kind  of  solution 
of  ethical  problems  which  often  best  takes  the  place  of  experi- 
ence, the  fees  of  which  are  high.  To  be  impressive  its  theme 
must  be  lofty  and  its  treatment  ideal.  It  ought  to  express 
national  life,  although  it  has  done  so  only  in  Greece,  Spain, 
and  especially  in  England,  where  it  has  been  most  national.  In 
its  early  modern  development  it  was  a  powerful  tool  in  the 
hands  of  the  clergy  in  the  days  of  the  mysteries  in  presenting 
religious  ideals,  with  its  three  platforms,  representing  heaven, 
earth,  and  hell.  In  the  moralities,  where  it  was  laicized,  it 
was  more  or  less  a  school  of  virtue.  The  many  hundred  char- 
acters that  have  been  created  for  the  stage  are  typical  more 
than  personalities  in  life  or  history;  the  unity  of  time,  place, 
and  action  is  greater  and  more  condensed  than  in  novels;  the 
clash  of  opposing  individualities,  the  crises  of  action,  and  the 
whole  ethology  of  hypocrites,  misers,  heroes,  soldiers,  shrews, 
cowards,  pedants,  misanthropes,  doubters,  optimists,  pessi- 
mists, beggars,  irascibles,  villains,  saints,  spendthrifts,  who 
are  set  in  action,  are  greater.  At  its  best  the  drama  presents 
events  that  are  typical  or  central  in  interest  for  human  life, 
perhaps  those  which  are  cardinal  or  epoch-making  in  history, 
or  even  national.  It  always  involves  conflict,  collision,  and 
passion  between  good  and  evil  characters  and  motives.  Per- 
haps the  denouement  of  the  tragedy  involves  an  apparition 
of  fate  in  which  the  great  but  hard  lesson  is  taught  that  the 
individual  is  forever  subordinate  to  the  race  or  social  com- 
munity. Perhaps  the  conflict  is  between  sense  and  duty ;  be- 
tween innocent  purity  and  bedizened  vice ;  between  the  meshes 
of  conventional  lies  and  honest  truth.  Tempests  of  passion, 
which  sometimes  howl  through  human  life,  are  let  loose,  but 


440  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

in  the  end  there  is  a  great  calm  because  we  rise  to  a  higher 
plane.  All  true  tragedy,  therefore,  is  one  of  the  most  effective 
ways  of  teaching  morals,  of  revealing  God  to  man.  It  pre- 
sents beauty  and  sublimity  for  the  sake  of  truth ;  it  can  not  be 
separated  from  morals  or  entirely  from  religion  without  lan- 
guishing and  lapsing.  The  drama  ought  to  be  truer  than 
history.  Art  is  man's  addition  to  nature;  it  is  his  contribu- 
tion to  the  continuance  and  consummation  of  creation;  it 
anthropomorphizes  nature  and  history  on  ever  higher  planes 
by  humanizing  both  more  and  more. 

The  drama  thus  reveals  the  human  heart  and  will,  and 
teaches  the  way  of  the  power  that  makes  for  righteousness 
in  the  world.  It  strengthens,  inspires,  perfects,  and  gives 
moral  exaltation.  We  leave  an  ideal  dramatic  presentation 
with  nervous  tension  physically  relieved.  We  have  had  a  great 
moral  experience  by  proxy,  and  feel  that  the  good  rules.  We 
have  fought  Apollyon  vicariously  and  seen  him  fly,  and  we 
glow  with  a  wholesome  ethical  exhilaration.  Everything  has 
converged  toward  the  end  in  a  climax,  after  which  rewards 
are  meted  out  with  poetic  justice  in  a  way  that  gives  ethical 
satisfaction.  The  emotional  nature,  which  so  tends  to  grow 
dull  and  inert  or  to  vent  itself  in  partial  and  thus  over-intense 
expression,  has  been  broadened,  deepened,  and  sanified.  If 
similar  experiences  await  us,  we  are  predisposed  and  our 
decisions  preformed  aright,  and  the  suspense  is  not  tediously 
protracted  to  the  point  of  moral  enervation  as  in  a  long  novel. 
The  reforms  of  the  drama  have  been  to  dethrone  artifice,  af- 
fectation, formality,  and  above  all,  flippant  and  mawkish  melo- 
dramatization  of  novels  that  represent  only  physical  emotion, 
tawdriness  and  vulgarity,  and  its  object  still  is  to  hold  a 
"  mirror  up  to  nature;  to  show  virtue  her  own  features,  scorn, 
her  own  image,  and  the  very  age  and  body  his  form  and 
pressure.''  Lamb  was  perhaps  right  that  much  of  Shakespeare 
is  obsolete  and  hardly  suited  to  represent  modern  life  on  the 
stage,  and  that  the  Greek  drama  rightly  edited  is  more  akin  to 
our  own  life ;  and  yet  acting,  says  Froude,  has  been  the  special 
amusement  of  the  English  and  was  the  "  result  of  the  strong, 
tranquil  expression  of  their  lives,  of  their  thorough  power 
over  themselves  and  power  over  circumstances."  Thus, 
troubled   with   no   speculations   or   social   problems,   and   ex- 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  44 1 

iiberant  and  vigorous  in  spirit,  "  they  were  able  in  the  strict 
and  Hteral  sense  of  the  word  to  play  with  life."  "  Thus  the 
lesson  given  by  long  experience,  by  the  certain  punishment  of 
ill-doing,  by  the  rewards  that  follow  on  bravery,  forbearance, 
and  self-sacrifice,  is  on  a  mimic  stage  conveyed  to  men;  and 
thus  every  actor,  who  is  more  than  a  mere  machine,  and  who 
has  an  ideal  of  any  kind,  has  a  duty  which  lies  beyond  the 
scope  of  his  personal  ambition.  His  art  must  be  something 
to  hold  in  reverence." 

The  decay  of  the  modern  theater  from  this  high  ideal  is 
most  unfortunate  for  youth,  the  nature  and  needs  of  which, 
few  institutions  in  history  have  ever  been  so  adequate  to  deal 
with  in  a  helpful  and  exalting  way.  Not  merely  for  literature 
but  for  life,  it  is  well  for  academic  youth  to  interest  them- 
selves in  the  way  great  actors  conceive  and  interpret  great 
characters  on  the  stage;  to  see  true  love  glorified  and  made 
ideal  and  triumphant;  to  see  hate,  rage,  and  jealousy  over- 
whelmingly defeated;  to  hear  taught  in  song  what  great  lives 
have  learned  by  suffering;  to  feel  the  influence  of  noble  per- 
sonalities that  *'  pay  with  what  they  are,"  and  of  smaller  ones 
that  pay  with  what  they  do;  to  thrill  with  the  triumphs 
of  moral  and  even  physical  heroes ;  to  criticize  and  compare 
characters  and  plots,  and  the  degree  of  stageability  of  the  crea- 
tions of  Shakespeare,  Goethe,  Schiller,  Tennyson,  and  Ibsen; 
to  define  the  personalities  of  Siegfried,  Parsifal,  Othello, 
Senta,  Goetz,  Egmont,  Faust,  Cymbeline,  Miranda,  Ophelia, 
Hamlet,  Tell,  and  some  scorces  of  others,  as  a  lesson  in  the 
study  of  characters  that  are  clear,  generic,  and  simple,  per- 
haps the  personification  of  only  a  single  motive,  less  intricate 
than  the  problems  of  life  but  a  good  preliminary  to  them.  Cor- 
son thinks  that  the  time  will  come  when  the  only  examina- 
tion in  literature  will  be  oral  impersonation. 

A  recent  writer  demands  a  theater  in  every  high  school, 
where  young  people  should  be  encouraged  to  read  and  some- 
times act  parts,  and  to  assume  in  fancy  the  roles  of  the  char- 
acters of  great  men.  Others  have  urged  that  if  we  could  have 
a  national  drama  conducted  by  the  state  which  directs  schools, 
railroads,  libraries,  museums,  post-offices,  art  galleries,  etc., 
that  the  Government  itself  would  be  helped  by  placing  noble 
political  ideals  upon  the  stage  and  giving  them  worthy  repre- 


442  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

sentation.  We  are  often  reminded  that  the  Greek  theater  was 
a  place  of  worship;  that  entrance  was  free,  paid  for  from  the 
pubhc  treasury;  that  relaxation  and  even  amusement  can  just 
as  well  be  secured  on  a  high  educational  plane,  and  that  even 
recreation  can  be  made  to  elevate  taste,  spread  knowledge,  and 
dignify  ideals.  The  ideal  pedagogy  of  the  social  nature  of 
youth  demands  a  national  drama  as  a  school  of  domestic,  civic, 
and  patriotic  virtue.  The  lack  of  this  devolves  upon  educa- 
tion the  arduous  duty  of  developing  from  the  best  dramatic 
literature  of  the  world  a  school  canon  composed  of  the  best 
plays,  acts,  and  scenes  so  edited  as  to  be  most  effective,  not 
primarily  for  art  or  literature  but  for  morality,  and  giving  its 
various  parts  such  varying  degrees  of  dramatic  rendering  from 
merely  reading  up  to  full  impersonation  of  parts — staging, 
scenery,  etc. — as  may  be  practicable  to  fit  the  all-dominant 
nature  and  needs  of  youth  of  different  ages. 

C.  I  am  persuaded  that  Quintilian  was  right  when  he  de- 
clared that  the  simple  reading  of  great  works,  such  as  national 
epics,  "  will  contribute  more  to  the  unfoldment  of  students 
than  all  the  treatises  of  all  the  rhetoricians  that  ever  wrote." 
At  the  dawn  of  adolescence  I  am  convinced  that  there  is  noth- 
ing more  wholesome  for  the  material  of  English  study  than 
that  of  the  early  mythic  period  in  Western  Europe.  I  refer  to 
the  literature  of  the  Arthuriad  and  the  Sangrail,  the  stories  of 
Parsifal,  Tristram,  Isolde,  Galahad,  Gawain,  Geraint,  Sieg- 
fried, Brunhilde,  Roland,  the  Cid,  Orlando,  Lancelot,  Tann- 
hauser,  Beowulf,  Lohengrin,  Robin  Hood,  and  Rolando. 
This  material  is  more  or  less  closely  connected  in  itself,  al- 
though falling  into  large  groups.  Much  of  it  bottoms  on  the 
Nibelungen  and  is  connected  with  the  old  Teutonic  mythology 
running  back  to  the  gods  of  Asgard.  We  have  here  a  vast 
body  of  ethical  material,  characters  that  are  almost  colossal 
in  their  proportions,  incidents  thrilling  and  dramatic  to  a 
degree  that  stirs  the  blood  and  thrills  the  nerves.  It  is  a 
quarry  where  Chaucer,  Shakespeare,  Spenser,  Scott,  Tenny- 
son, Wagner,  Ibsen,  and  scores  of  artists  in  various  lines  have 
found  subject-matter.  The  value  of  this  material  makes  it  al- 
most Biblical  for  the  early  and  middle  teens,  and  is  increased, 
from  whatever  point  of  view  we  scrutinize  it,  for  this  purpose. 
In  a  sense  it  is  a  kind  of  secular  New  Testament  of  classical 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS  AND   INSTITUTIONS  443 

myths.  Lancelot's  quarrel  with  Arthur  parallels  in  more 
modern  form  that  between  Achilles  and  Agamemnon.  The 
skalds,  bards,  troubadours,  meistersingers,  and  old  chroniclers 
and  romancers  compare  with  the  Homeridse;  the  quest  of  the 
Grail  with  the  argonautic  expedition  for  the  Golden  Fleece; 
Vivian  with  Circe ;  Merlin  with  Nestor ;  Asgard  with  Olym- 
pus. The  northern  myths  are  more  sublime  and  less  beautiful ; 
content  predominates  more  over  form;  there  is  more  of  the 
best  spirit  of  modern  romance,  and  woman's  position  is  higher. 
This  rich  field  represents  perhaps  the  brightest  spot  of  the 
dark  ages  and  the  best  expression  of  feudalism.  It  teaches  the 
highest  reverence  for  womanhood,  piety,  valor,  loyalty,  cour- 
tesy, munificence,  justice,  and  obedience.  The  very  life  blood 
of  chivalry  is  heroism.  Here  we  find  the  origin  of  most  of  the 
modern  ideas  of  a  gentleman,  who  is  tender,  generous,  and 
helpful,  as  well  as  brave;  the  spirit  which  has  given  us  Bayard 
and  Sidney,  as  well  as  the  pure,  spotless,  ideal  knight.  Sir 
Galahad.  These  stories  are  not  mechanically  manufactured, 
but  they  grew  slowly  and  naturally  in  the  soul  of  the  race. 
They,  too,  shape  and  direct  fear,  love,  pity,  anger,  essentially 
aright.  The  Anglo-Saxon  writer  never  legislates  more  wisely 
for  the  feelings  or  for  the  imagination  than  when  he  is  in- 
spired by  and  uses  this  material  well.  It  stirs  those  subtle  per- 
ceptions, where  deep  truths  sleep  in  the  youthful  soul  before 
they  come  to  full  consciousness.  Although  they  have  no  very 
definite  geography  or  date,  so  that  such  events  and  persons 
existed  nowhere,  they  might  be  realized  anywhere.  To  the 
mind  at  this  stage  of  growth  nothing  seems  quite  complete  or 
quite  actual.  The  air  whispers  secrets  of  something  about 
to  happen,  because  to  nascent  faculties  the  whole  world  seems 
a  little  mystic,  though  very  friendly.  It  is  this  kind  of  muthos 
that  is  the  mother  of  poetry,  religion,  art,  and,  to  some  extent, 
of  morals,  philosophy,  and  science.  It  is  not  very  examinable 
material,  for  it  works  too  deeply  and  unconsciously,  and  the 
best  and  largest  objects  of  the  soul  have  not  yet  come  to  con- 
sciousness at  this  age,  but  the  great  lines  of  cleavage  between 
right  and  wrong,  beauty  and  ugliness,  truth  and  falsehood, 
are  being  controlled,  and  the  spiritual  faculties  developed. 
IMorals  and  esthetics,  which  are  never  so  inseparable  as  at 
this  period,  aie  here  found  in  normal  union. 


444  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

This  material  educates  the  heart  at  an  age  when  sentiment 
is  predominant.  The  very  minghng  of  some  of  the  best  pagan 
with  some  of  the  more  rudimentary  Christian  elements  gives 
it  added  power.  The  spirit  of  fealty  and  piety  in  it  is  very  akin 
to  that  which  animates  the  best  religious  organizations  of 
young  men.  It  stimulates  what  the  French  praise  in  gloire 
and  the  Germans  in  Gemuth,  combines  esthetic  and  ethical 
enthusiasm  in  a  wholesome  way,  ideally  subordinates  form  to 
content,  and  is  the  best  expression  of  the  adolescent  stage  of 
our  race.  If  we  have  anywhere  the  material  for  an  ethnic 
Bible  left  at  the  most  interesting  and  promising  stages  of  in- 
completeness by  the  advent  of  the  alien  culture  material 
brought  to  the  Teutonic  races  by  Christianity,  it  is  here.  I 
have  looked  over  eight  of  the  best  known  popular  digests  of 
all  or  principal  parts  of  this  matter  and  many  lesser  para- 
phrases, but  do  not  find  quite  the  right  treatment,  and  I  be- 
lieve that  a  great  duty  is  laid  upon  high  school  teachers  now, 
namely,  that  of  reediting  this  matter  into  form  that  shall  be 
no  less  than  canonical  for  their  pupils.  Pedagogic  art  is  often, 
as  Walter  Pater  says  of  art  in  general,  the  removal  of  rubbish. 
Excrescences  must  be  eliminated,  the  gold  recoined,  its  culture 
power  brought  out,  till,  if  the  ideal  were  fully  realized,  the 
teacher  would  almost  become  a  bard  of  these  heroic  tales,  with 
a  mind  saturated  with  all  available  literature,  pictures,  and 
even  music  bearing  on  it,  requiring  written  and  oral  reproduc- 
tion from  the  pupils  to  see  what  sinks  deepest.  Some  would 
measure  the  progress  of  culture  by  the  work  of  reinterpreting 
on  ever  higher  planes  the  mythic  tradition  of  a  race,  and  how 
this  is  done  for  youth  is  a  good  criterion  of  pedagogic 
progress. 

This  spirit  is  organized  in  and  its  fitness  shown  in  the 
growth  and  success  of  the  Knights  of  King  Arthur,  an  unique 
order  of  Christian  knighthood  for  boys,^  "  based  upon  the 
romantic  hero-loving,  play-constructive,  and  imaginative  in- 
stincts which  ripen  at  about  fourteen."  "  Its  purpose  is  to 
bring  back  to  the  world,  and  especially  to  its  youth,  the  spirit 
of  chivalry,   courtesy,   deference  to  womanhood,   recognition 

1  Described  in  The  Boy  Problem,  by  its  founder,  William  B.  Forbush,  Chicago, 
1901,  p.  91. 


SOCIAL   INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  445 

of  the  noblesse  oblige  and  Christian  daring  of  that  kingdom 
of  knightHness  which  King  Arthur  promised  that  he  would 
bring  back  when  he  returned  from  Avalon.  In  this  order  he 
appears  again."  It  is  formed  on  the  model  of  a  college 
Greek  letter  fraternity,  with  satisfaction  for  the  love  of  ritual, 
mystery,  and  parade.  The  boys  march  into  their  hall  in  con- 
clave and  sit  in  a  circle  in  imitation  of  the  Round  Table,  with 
a  king  at  their  head,  with  Merlin,  an  adult  leader,  at  his  side, 
and  the  various  functionaries  of  the  castle  in  their  places. 
There  is  constant  rotation  in  office.  Each  boy  takes  the  name 
of  a  hero,  either  an  ancient  knight  or  a  modern  man  of  noble 
life,  whose  history  he  must  know  and  whose  virtues  he  must 
emulate.  The  initiation  is  brief,  but  impressive,  with  the 
grades  of  page,  esquire,  and  knight,  and  room  for  the  con- 
structive instinct  in  making  regalia,  banners,  swords,  spears, 
throne,  etc.  "  Hero  worship  is  developed  by  a  role  of  noble 
deeds,  a  castle  album  of  portraits  of  heroes,  the  reading  to- 
gether of  heroic  books,  the  offering  of  ranks  in  the  peerage, 
and  the  sacred  honor  of  the  siege  perilous  for  athletic,  schol- 
arly, or  self-sacrificing  attainments.  The  higher  ranks  can 
be  attained  after  probation  by  those  who  voluntarily  accept 
a  simple  covenant  of  purity,  temperance,  or  reverence.  The 
instinct  of  roaming  and  adventure  is  in  part  gratified  by  ex- 
cursions to  historic  sites  and  deeds  of  kindness."  In  the  sum- 
mer-camp the  environs  are  the  land  of  the  Paynims,  to  be  pro- 
tected and  not  ravaged.  The  ball  team  is  the  castle  army,  and 
its  victories  are  celebrated  by  a  mild  wassail. 

D.  The  Bible  is  coming  to  be  understood,  not  only,  as  we 
saw  in  the  last  chapter,  as  man's  great  text-book  in  psychology, 
but  as  a  library  which  justifies  its  supreme  title  by  its  merits. 
It  is  marvelously  adapted  to  successive  ages ;  the  earlier  parts 
of  the  Old  Testament  for  childhood,  the  Prophecies  and  the 
New  Testament,  with  its  great  message  of  love,  for  adolescence. 
Progressive  ignorance  of  it  is  amazing,  especially  in  view  of 
the  fact  that  its  literary  form  as  well  as  its  content  is  adapted 
to  the  nature  and  needs  of  youth  like  nothing  else.  We  have 
lately  had  many  revelations  of  amazing  ignorance  of  the  Bible 
among  the  young,  so  that  the  school  itself  now  often  takes  up 
the  work  of  its  study.  The  London  School  Board  has  a  full 
syllabus  of  it  occupying  half  or  three-quarters  of  an  hour  daily 


446  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

with  semiannual  examinations,  portions  being  selected  upon 
which  denominations  agree.  Prussia  requires  five  hours  a  week 
of  religious  instruction,  a  good  portion  of  which  is  biblical,  by 
teachers  specially  trained  and  examined  for  eight  years,  largely 
by  the  method  of  narration  with  subsequent  examinations, 
while  the  Schulz-Klix  Biblische  Lesebuch  reached  its  fifty- 
third  edition  in  1896.  Even  in  France,  despite  the  recent 
laicizing  movement  where  religious  instruction  is  forbidden 
in  the  school,  every  Thursday  entire  is  a  holiday,  so  that 
parents  can  have  their  children  taught  the  religion  they  prefer 
outside  the  school,  but  the  instructors,  although  selected  by 
their  respective  churches  as  in  Germany,  must  pass  an  exami- 
nation. In  the  volumes  of  the  Chicago  Educational  Union  and 
in  Moulton's  well-known  selections  we  have  the  beginnings  of 
pedagogic  adaptation  of  this  material.  In  Germany  the  Rhine 
system  spends  one  of  the  first  three  years  of  school  entirely 
on  the  Old  Testament.  Ahrens  would  place  classical  literature 
between  the  Old  and  New  Testaments  as  helping  connection 
between  them,  and  one  of  our  largest  universities  is  satisfied 
with  the  English  admission  requirements  of  youth  who  know 
the  English  Bible  only. 

E.  The  studies  reported  above  in  Section  VII  suggest  that 
history  also  at  this  time  of  life  should  first  of  all  both  follow 
and  guide  the  social  instincts,  should  go  backward  from  the 
temporal,  and  irradiate  from  the  spatial  present  as  its  point 
of  departure,  instead  of  starting  with  antiquity  and  the  East 
and  reaching  our  own  country  in  the  last  high  school  year, 
when  two-thirds  of  the  pupils  have  dropped  out,  as  the  college- 
dominated  committee  of  seven  prescribe.  Heroes  with  bio- 
graphic elements  prominent,  decisive  events,  great  institutions, 
movements  with  a  unity  of  their  own,  are  felt  long  before 
the  unity  of  the  historic  whole,  and  the  method  and  stand- 
point of  chroniclers  and  the  idealizing  literary  treatments  pre- 
cede much  appeal  to  original  sources  or  the  scientific  methods 
of  Stubbs  and  Gardiner,  or  even  Freeman  and  Green.  For 
the  larger  movements  of  history  greater  use  should  be  made 
of  all  kinds  of  charts,  tables,  diagrams,  maps,  and  especially 
of  physico-geographical  influences,  and  perhaps  even  of  the 
glimpses  and  apcr(^ns  of  the  various  philosophers  of  history, 
from  Hegel  to  Henry  Adams,  partial  and  inadequate  as  they 
are  to  scholars.     Social  organizations  and  spiritual  and  ethical 


SOCIAL  INSTINCTS   AND   INSTITUTIONS  447 

direction  should  be  the  prime  ends  sought,  and  the  appeal  to 
the  heart  should  only  slowly  and  late  give  place  to  the  intellect. 
Historic  scholarship  itself  is  too  noble  a  thing  to  ripen  properly 
without  this  long  incubation,  and  to  develop  political  and  com- 
munal virtue  is  higher  and  should  be  ever  its  condition  pre- 
cedent. To  train  youth  to  social  service  as  useful  members 
of  society  is  primarily  the  education  of  the  feelings  and  the 
will,  that  are  both  larger  and  older  than  the  intellect,  which 
is  their  servant,  and  even  self-interest  rightly  understood 
ripens  naturally  into  altruism.^  The  few  years  of  schooling  is 
only  the  very  end  of  a  process  that  in  a  sense  has  run  through 
eons.  The  school  merely  puts  on  the  final  touches ;  for  all 
organic  evolution  may  be  regarded  as  educational.  Letour- 
neau  speaks  of  spontaneous  and  organic  training.  Nature 
first  adjusts  the  body  to  the  physical  environment;  then  the 
social  adjustment  marks  a  higher  stage.  The  body  is  now 
essentially  complete.  Heredity  is  stored-up  experience.  The 
second  stage  or  division  of  education  we  may  call,  with  I.  W. 
Howerth,^  artificial  or  telic.  Art  is  here  teleological  control 
of  nature;  if  directed  by  another  it  is  altrotelic;  and  when  it 
becomes  subjective,  it  is  autotelic.  The  telic  aspect  begins 
when  we  enter  the  social  sphere. 

Literature  and  history  should  teach  moral  experience  by 
proxy  and  should  shed  the  light  of  other  days  on  present  duties, 
so  that  we  may  avoid  error  and  waste  and  organize  our  social 
relations  and  institutions  aright.  Faithful  as  the  historian 
may  be  to  his  task  of  letting  no  good  example  or  warning  go 
unrecorded,  zealous  as  literature  may  be  to  set  forth  all  man's 
reactions  to  his  environment,  and  greatly  as  all  their  products 
exceed  the  utmost  power  of  individual  comprehension,  each 
soul  abounds  in  traces  of  long  series  of  events  in  the  history 
of  the  race  that  are  utterly  lost,  and  of  impulsions  not  yet  ex- 
pressed in  all  the  world  of  letters  and  institutions.  There  are 
momenta  in  each  soul  from  phyletic  periods  that  have  utterly 
lapsed  from  racial  memory,  unconscious,  half-organic  pro- 
cesses and  instincts,  the  correlates  of  which  in  the  macrocosm 
now  seem  hopelessly  lost.  The  individual  who  has  studied  his 
own  stages  of  development  as  faithfully  as  Goethe  did  his  to 


1  See  my  Methods  of  Teaching  History.      Boston,  1889,  pp.  391. 
'  Educational  Review,  January,  1902. 


448  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

acquire  the  maximum  of  self-knowledge  of  each  stage  in  the 
attainment  of  maturity,  always  finds  much  he  can  not  explain, 
and  even  when  he  turns  to  the  history  of  the  race  for  additional 
help  there  is  still  residuary  mystery.  So  the  effort  to  explain 
all  the  present  by  the  historic  past  is  forever,  at  best,  but 
partially  successful.  Only  the  superficial  half  of  history  is  past 
politics,  only  a  part  of  the  rational  has  become  real,  and  the 
final  philosophy  has  not  taught  all  its  lessons  by  example. 
When  men  thought  they  were  doing  these  things  by  these 
means,  it  was  later  apparent  that  they  were  really  doing  very 
different  things  by  different  means.  History,  in  fact,  is  at  every 
period  very  different  from  the  history  of  the  conscious  pur- 
poses of  those  who  made  it.  Hence  it  must  ever  be  rewritten 
from  new  and  higher  standpoints.  So  the  literature,  philoso- 
phy, and  institutions  of  one  age  become  only  data,  like 
questionnaire  returns,  for  the  psychological  critic  of  the  next, 
who  finds  in  them  very  different  meanings  from  those  in  the 
intent  of  their  makers.  The  conscious  intellect  and  will  of  an 
individual,  a  period,  or  a  race  are  only  a  partial  and  inadequate 
expression  of  the  whole  soul,  and  one  must  always  reason  from 
what  is  said  to  what  is  meant  in  quest  of  another  and  deeper 
continuum,  always  finding  what  were  thought  to  be  causes 
turning  out  to  be  only  effects,  what  seemed  finalities  to  be  be- 
ginnings or  means,  forces  deemed  supreme  only  provocatives 
of  others  that  lie  deeper.  Could  we  reconstruct  the  buried  ob- 
jective, phyletic  correlates  of  all  the  social  and  other  tentatives 
that  stir  in  the  soul  of  youth,  we  should  have  the  real  and  truly 
formative  history  of  that  period  which  is,  for  every  age,  of 
greatest  practical  importance,  and  if  we  can  ever  create  the 
literature  and  the  types  of  associations  that  best  express  youth- 
ful needs,  it  will  be  the  realization  of  the  highest  of  all  human 
ideals.  Youth,  when  properly  understood,  will  seem  to  be  not 
only  the  revealer  of  the  past  but  of  the  future,  for  it  is  dimly 
prophetic  of  that  best  part  of  history  which  is  not  yet  written 
because  it  has  not  yet  transpired,  of  the  best  literature  the  only 
criterion  of  which  is  that  it  helps  to  an  ever  more  complete 
maturity,  and  of  better  social  organizations,  which,  like  every- 
thing else,  are  those  that  best  serve  youth.  The  belief  that 
progressive  ephebic  needs  will  be  met  is  the  chief  resource 
against  pessimism  in  the  modern  world,  for  there  is  no  better 
standard  of  the  true  worth  of  every  human  institution. 


CHAPTER    XVI 

INTELLECTUAL     DEVELOPMENT     AND     EDUCATION. 

Curiosity  the  bud  of  mind — Training  from  the  age  of  eight  to  twelve — Intellectual 
changes  of  puberty.  I.  The  vernacular  language  and  literature  the  root  of 
education — Present  degeneration  in  command  of  the  English  language  due  to : 
(a)  translation  English,  {d)  the  subordination  of  literature  and  content  to  lan- 
guage study,  (c)  too  early  substitution  of  reading  and  writing  for  hearing  and 
speaking,  (</)  restriction  of  language  work  to  sense  and  action — Children's 
favorite  words — Slang,  its  age  curve  and  its  moral  purposes — Development  of 
the  sentence-sense — Stories  by  children — The  pubescent  reading  craze  and  its 
forms — An  ideal  series  of  readers.  II.  Other  new  mental  aptitudes — Begin- 
ning of  the  historic  sense — Reason — Drawing — Art — Puzzles — Collections — 
Superstitions — Growth  of  the  power  to  define — Attention  and  seasons.  III. 
Me7tiory,  for  digits,  for  a  narrative — Changes  of  mental  quality — Loss  of  early 
and  permanence  of  memories  of  pubescence  and  their  kinds.  IV.  N^orvial 
Schools — Their  defects — Psychology — Place  of  history  of  education — Methods 
— Central  place  of  the  model  school — Needed  changes — Relation  to  universities 
and  pedagogic  chairs.  V.  High  Schools — Growth — Excess  of  girls — Curves  of 
diminution  up  the  grades  and  of  candidates  for  college — Fallacies  of  the  Com- 
mittee of  Ten  and  evils  of  college  dominance :  {a)  for  colleges  and  professors, 
{b^  for  high  schools  and  teachers,  {c)  for  pupils — The  next  step  needed.  VI. 
The  college.  VII.  College  philosophy:  its  history  and  central  function :  {a) 
the  aberrations  of  epistemology  and  its  causes,  {b)  the  six  necessary  postulates, 
(i)  space,  (2)  ether,  (3)  force,  (4)  law,  (5)  fulness  of  life,  and  (6)  good-will 
seen  in  the  survival  of  the  best,  (c)  the  proper  philosophy  (i)  of  nature,  and  (2) 
of  mind,  in  colleges.  VIII.  The  university :  its  methods  and  present  dangers 
from  the  standpoint  of  culminating  adolescence. 

Of  all  the  conventional  groups  of  psychic  activities,  the 
intellect,  next  to  the  senses,  has  been  most  studied,  but  its 
genesis  is  perhaps  even  less  known  than  that  of  the  feelings 
and  will.  The  latter  are  better  representatives  of  the  race, 
while  intellect  is  more  a  product  of  individual  experience  and 
culture  and  hence  varies  more  with  age,  education,  etc.  It  is, 
however,  a  more  partial  expression  of  the  soul  as  a  whole, 
many  and  perhaps  most  of  the  activities  of  which  do  not  in 
any  given  person  or  even  period  rise  to  consciousness.  On 
the  other  hand,  it  expresses  more  fully  those  that  do  emerge. 
Intellect  is  thus  related  to  the  more  unconscious  psychic  life 


08 


449 


45°  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

somewhat  as  accessory  are  related  to  fundamental  movements. 
So  far  as  thought  involves  playing  upon  muscular  tonicity, 
and  as  attention  means  tension  (as  we  saw  in  Chapter  III), 
this  is  more  than  an  analogy.  From  the  oldest  trophic  and 
vaso-motor  functions  and  organs  mediating  pleasure  and  pain 
and  perhaps  other  fundamental  feeling-instincts,  up  the  com- 
plex hierarchy  of  powers  when  the  projection  system  itself 
slowly  comes  under  some,  perhaps  tangential,  organ  of 
thought,  and  during  adolescence  when  a  suddenly  widened 
area  of  life  is  governed  and  perhaps  reconstructed  by  intelli- 
gence, this  viaticum  is  easily  and  rapidly  passed  in  normal 
psychogenesis,  but  for  the  full  understanding  of  it  the  entire 
animal  series  extinct  and  extant,  comparatively  and  exhaust- 
ively studied,  is  none  too  large  a  basis.  Conscious  thought, 
noetics,  intellect,  reason,  are  popular  and  provisional  terms  for 
the  last  or  neopsychic  stages  in  this  process,  and  all  their 
higher  forms  are  probably  rarer  and  developed  later  in  the 
average  human  being  than  is  usually  held. 

Their  bud  is  curiosity,  often  seen  in  the  animal  world,  and 
in  the  infant  its  first  dim  prelusion  is  the  reflex  victimization 
of  the  eye  by  any  patch  of  light.  Staring,  experimenting  with 
sensation,  surprise,  active  observation,  the  passion  to  touch, 
handle,  taste  everything,  often  apparent  cruelty  due  to  the  lust 
to  know,  the  question  mania  which  may  become  a  neurosis  at 
about  the  earliest  school  age,  anxiety  to  know  the  origin  of 
life  that  is  suppressed  to  stealthiness  at  about  the  same  age 
when  it  really  grows  more  intense,  baffling  theological  queries, 
interest  in  death  and  in  theological  questions,  in  the  hozu  of 
mechanical  processes  that  often  motivates  what  seems  destruc- 
tiveness,  desire  to  travel,  the  conquests  of  timidity  by  curiosity, 
its  function  in  prompting  to  take  the  first  drink,  as  Partridge 
has  shown,^  truancy  and  runaways,  according  to  Kline  ^  and 
Arnett ;  ^  all  these  expressions  of  a  pure  desire  for  knowledge 
are  phenomena  of  the  crepuscular  dawn  that  precedes  the  sun- 
rise of  reason  in  adolescence.^ 


1  Psychology  of  Alcohol.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  April,  1900,  vol.  xi,  p.  320. 
'Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  October,  1898,  vol.  x,  pp.  1-81. 
'  Ped.  Sem.,  September,  1902,  vol.  ix,  pp.  324-365. 

*  See  Curiosity  and  Interest,  by  T.  L.  Smith  and  myself.   Ped.  Sem.,  September,. 
1903.     Vol.  x,  pp.  315-358. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  45 1 

The  mental  operation  of  very  young  children  can  be  described  in 
the  terms  of  logic.  Gale '  finds  at  first  only  associations  in  time  and 
place,  and  that  this  very  slowly  passes  to  reasoning  by  associations  of 
similarity.  From  remote  analogy  to  the  inductive  method  of  agree- 
ment, and  then  even  to  the  method  of  difference  so  characteristic  of  sci- 
ence, he  finds  even  in  the  fifth  year  that  the  process  is  slow.  Children 
at  least  conform  to  Mill's  contention  that  we  really  reason  from  partic- 
ulars to  particulars  rather  than  through  a  major  premise.  This  of- 
server  even  found  the  methods  of  residues  and  concomitant  variations 
before  the  school  age.  Children  observe  keenly,  and  this  involves 
analysis  and  regrouping.  They  are  often  religious  skeptics  at  ten,  as 
Barnes  showed  (chap.  xiv).  They  ask  why,  what  for,  how,  in  ways 
that  reveal  the  causal  idea,  and  the  abstract  logician  easily  finds  every 
deductive  mood  and  figure  and  all  forms  of  syllogism  implicit  in  infant 
mentation.  But  on  the  other  hand,  children's  ideas  of  size,  perspective, 
and  of  time  and  space  are  so  narrow,  the  multitude  of  impressions  so 
overwhelming,''  their  superstitions  so  many,  their  credulity  so  great, 
they  are  so  victimized  by  sense,  so  bound  down  to  verbal  literalness, 
their  experience  is  so  small,  they  have  so  little  control  of  their  atten- 
tion, and  their  minds  are  so  permeated  with  error  and  ignorance,  that 
it  is  scarcely  too  much  to  say  that  almost  up  to  puberty  they  can  hardly 
think  at  all  in  any  proper  sense.  Practically,  Pestalozzi,  who  assumed 
that  they  were  susceptible  to  little  but  mechanical  drill,  was  nearer 
right  than  Alcott's  school,  where  their  minds  were  thought  surcharged 
with  Wordsworthian  intuitions  that  needed  only  to  be  explicited  to 
become  conscious  reason. 

Just  as  about  the  only  duty  of  young  children  (Chapter 
III)  is  implicit  obedience,  so  the  chief  mental  training  from 
about  eight  to  twelve  is  arbitrary  memorization,  drill,  habit- 
uation, with  only  limited  appeal  to  the  understanding.  After 
the  critical  transition  age  of  six  or  seven,  when  the  brain  has 
achieved  its  adult  size  and  weight  and  teething  has  reduced 
the  chewing  surface  to  its  least  extent,  begins  an  unique  stage 
of  life  marked  by  reduced  growth  and  increased  activity  and 
power  to  resist  both  disease  and  fatigue,  which,  as  was  set 
forth  in  Chapter  I,  suggests  what  was,  in  some  just  post-simian 
age  of  our  race,  its  period  of  maturity.  Here  belong  dis- 
cipline in  writing,  reading,  spelling,  verbal  memory,  manual 
training,  practise  of  instrumental  technique,  proper  names, 
drawing,  drill  in  arithmetic,  foreign  languages  by  oral  methods, 

^  Early  Reasoning  of  Children.      Jour,  of  AdoL,  July,   1902. 
*H.  W.  Brown:   Thoughts  and  Reasonings  of  Children.     Fed.  Sem.,  Decem- 
ber, 1893,  vol.  ii,  pp.  358-396. 


452  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

the  correct  pronunciation  of  which  is  far  harder  if  acquired 
later,  etc.  The  hand  is  never  so  near  the  brain.  Most  of  the 
content  of  the  mind  has  entered  it  through  the  senses,  and 
the  eye-  and  ear-gates  should  be  open  at  their  widest.  Au- 
thority should  now  take  precedence  of  reason.  Children  com- 
prehend much  and  very  rapidly  if  we  can  only  refrain  from 
explaining,  but  this  slows  down  intuition,  tends  to  make 
casuists  and  prigs  and  to  enfeeble  the  ultimate  vigor  of  reason. 
It  is  the  age  of  little  method  and  much  matter.  The  good 
teacher  is  now  a  pedotrieb,  or  boy-driver.  Boys  of  this  age 
are  now  not  very  affectionate.  They  take  pleasure  in  obliging 
and  imitating  those  they  like  and  perhaps  in  disobliging  those 
they  dislike.  They  have  much  selfishness  and  little  sentiment. 
As  this  period  draws  to  a  close  and  the  teens  begin  the  average 
normal  child  will  not  be  bookish  but  should  read  and  write 
well,  know  a  few  dozen  well-chosen  books,  play  several  dozen 
games,  be  well  started  in  one  or  more  ancient  and  modern 
languages,  if  these  must  be  studied  at  all,  should  know  some- 
thing of  several  industries  and  how  to  make  many  things  he 
is  interested  in,  belong  to  a  few  teams  and  societies,  know 
much  about  nature  in  his  environment,  be  able  to  sing  and 
draw,  should  have  memorized  much  more  than  he  now  does, 
and  be  acquainted  at  least  in  story  form  with  the  outlines  of 
many  of  the  best  works  in  literature  and  the  epochs  and  per- 
sons in  history.^  Morally  he  should  have  been  through  many 
if  not  most  forms  of  what  parents  and  teachers  commonly  call 
badness  and  Professor  Yoder  even  calls  meanness.  He  should 
have  fought,  whipped  and  been  whipped,  used  language  offen- 
sive to  the  prude  and  to  the  prim  precisian,  been  in  some 
scrapes,  had  something  to  do  with  bad,  if  more  with  good 
associates,  and  been  exposed  to  and  already  recovering  from 
as  many  forms  of  ethical  mumps  and  measles  as,  by  having 
in  mild  form  now  he  can  be  rendered  immune  to  later  when 
they  become  far  more  dangerous,  because  his  moral  and  re- 
ligious as  well  as  his  rational  nature  is  normally  rudimentary. 
He  is  not  depraved  but  only  in  a  savage  or  half-animal 
stage,   although  to  a  large-brained,   large-hearted  and   truly 

^See  my  Ideal  School  as  Based  on  Child  Study.     Proc.  of  the  N.  E.  A.,  1901, 
p.  475  et  seq. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  453 

parental  soul  that  does  not  call  what  causes  it  inconvenience 
by  opprobrious  names,  an  altogether  lovable  and  even  fascina- 
ting stage.  The  more  we  know  of  boyhood  the  more  narrow 
and  often  selfish  do  adult  ideals  of  it  appear.  Something 
is  amiss  with  the  lad  of  ten  who  is  very  good,  studious,  indus- 
trious, thoughtful,  altruistic,  quiet,  polite,  respectful,  obedient, 
gentlemanly,  orderly,  always  in  good  toilet,  docile  to  reason, 
who  turns  away  from  stories  that  reek  with  gore,  prefers  adult 
companionship  to  that  of  his  mates,  refuses  all  low  associates, 
speaks  standard  English,  or  is  pious  and  deeply  in  love  with 
religious  services  as  the  typical  maiden  teacher  or  the  a  la 
mode  parent  wishes.  Such  a  boy  is  either  under-vitalized  and 
anemic  and  precocious  by  nature,  a  repressed,  overtrained, 
conventionalized  manikin,  a  hypocrite,  as  some  can  become 
under  pressure  thus  early  in  life,  or  else,  a  genius  of  some  kind 
with  a  little  of  all  these. 

But  with  the  teens  all  this  begins  to  be  changed  and  many 
of  these  precepts  must  be  gradually  reversed.  There  is  an  out- 
burst of  growth  that  needs  a  large  part  of  the  total  kinetic 
energy  of  the  body.  There  is  a  new  interest  in  adults,  a 
passion  to  be  treated  like  one's  elders,  to  make  plans  for  the 
future,  a  new  sensitiveness  to  adult  praise  or  blame.  The 
large  muscles  have  their  innings  and  there  is  a  new  clumsiness 
of  body  and  mind.  The  blood-vessels  expand  and  blush- 
ing is  increased,  new  sensations  and  feelings  arise,  the  imagi- 
nation blossoms,  love  of  nature  is  born,  music  is  felt  in  a  new, 
more  inward  way,  fatigue  comes  easier  and  sooner,  and  if 
heredity  and  environment  enable  the  individual  to  cross  this 
pons  successfully  there  is  sometimes  almost  a  break  of  con- 
tinuity and  a  new  being  emerges.  The  drill  methods  of  the 
preceding  period  must  be  slowly  relaxed  and  new  appeals  made 
to  freedom  and  interest.  We  can  no  longer  coerce  a  break,  but 
must  lead  and  inspire  if  we  would  avoid  arrest.  Individuality 
must  have  a  longer  tether.  Never  is  the  power  to  appreciate 
so  far  ahead  of  the  power  to  express,  and  never  does  under- 
standing so  outstrip  ability  to  explain.  Overaccuracy  is 
atrophy.  Both  mental  and  moral  acquisition  sink  at  once  too 
deep  to  be  reproduced  by  examination  without  injury  both  to 
intellect  and  will.  There  is  nothing  in  the  environment  to 
which  the  adolescent  nature  does  not  keenly  respond.     With 


454  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

pedagogic  tact  we  can  teach  about  everything  we  know  that 
is  really  worth  knowing,  but  if  we  amplify  and  morselize  in- 
stead of  giving  great  wholes,  if  we  let  the  hammer  that  strikes 
the  bell  rest  too  long  against  it  and  deaden  the  sound,  and  if 
we  wait  before  each  methodic  step  till  the  pupil  has  reproduced 
all  the  last,  we  starve  and  retard  the  soul,  which  is  now  all 
insight  and  receptivity.  Plasticity  is  at  its  maximum,  utterance 
at  its  minimum.  The  inward  traffic  obstructs  the  outer  cur- 
rents. Boys  especially  are  often  dumb-bound,  monophrastic, 
inarticulate,  and  semi-aphasic  save  in  their  own  vigorous  and 
inelegant  way.  Nature  prompts  to  a  modest  reticence  for 
which  the  deflowerers  of  all  ephebic  naivete  should  have  some 
respect.  Deep  interests  arise  which  are  almost  as  sacred  as 
is  the  hour  of  visitation  of  the  Holy  Ghost  to  the  religious 
teacher.  The  mind  at  times  grows  in  leaps  and  bounds  in  a 
way  that  seems  to  defy  the  great  enemy,  fatigue,  and  yet  when 
the  teacher  grows  a  little  tiresome  the  pupil  is  tired  in  a  mo- 
ment. Thus  we  have  the  converse  danger  of  forcing  knowl- 
edge upon  unwilling  and  unripe  minds  that  have  no  love  for 
it,  which  is  in  many  ways  psychologically  akin  to  a  nameless 
crime  that  in  some  parts  of  the  country  meets  summary  venge- 
ance. 

(A)  The  heart  of  education  as  well  as  its  phyletic  root  is 
the  vernacular  literature  and  language.  These  are  the  chief 
instruments  of  the  social  as  well  as  of  the  ethnic  and  patriotic 
instinct.  The  prime  place  of  the  former  we  saw  in  the  last 
chapter,  and  now  pass  to  the  latter,  the  uniqueness  of  which 
should  first  be  considered. 

The  Century,  the  largest  complete  dictionary  of  English,  claims  to 
have  250,000  words,  as  against  55,000  in  the  old  Webster's  Unabridged. 
Worcester's  Unabridged  of  i860  has  105,000;  Murray's,  now  in  L,  it 
is  said,  will  contain  240,000  principal  and  140,000  compound  words, 
or  380,000  words  in  all.  The  dictionary  of  the  French  Academy  has 
33,000;  that  of  the  Royal  Spanish  Academy,  50,000;  the  Dutch  diction- 
ary of  Van  Dale,  86,000 ;  the  Italian  and  Portuguese,  each  about  50,000 
literary,  or  150,000  encyclopedic  words.  Of  course,  words  can  really 
be  counted  hardly  more  than  ideas  or  impressions,  and  compounds, 
dialects,  obsolete  terms,  localisms,  and  especially  technical  terms, 
swell  the  number  indefinitely.    A  competent  philologist '  says,  if  given 

'  Charles  P.  G.  Scott :  The  Number  of  Words  in  the  English  and  Other  Lan. 
guages.     Princeton  Univ.  Bull.,  May,  1902. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  455 

large  liberty,  he  "  will  undertake  to  supply  1,000,000  English  words 
for  1,000,000  American  dollars."  Chamberlain'  estimates  that  our 
language  contains  more  than  two  score  as  many  words  as  all  those 
left  us  from  the  Latin.  Many  savage  languages  contain  but  a  very 
few  thousand,  and  some  but  a  few  hundred,  words.  Our  tongue  is 
essentially  Saxon  in  its  vocabulary  and  its  spirit,  and  from  the  time 
when  it  was  despised  and  vulgar,  has  followed  an  expansion  policy 
swallowing  with  little  modification  terms  not  only  from  classical  an- 
tiquity, but  from  all  modern  languages — Indian,  African,  Chinese, 
Mongolian — according  to  its  needs,  its  adopted  children  far  outnum- 
bering those  of  its  own  blood.  It  absorbs  at  its  will  the  slang  of  the 
street  gamin,  the  cant  of  thieves  and  beggars;  is  actually  creative  in 
the  baby  talk  of  mothers  and  nurses;  drops,  forgets,  and  actually  in- 
vents new  words  with  no  pedigree  like  those  of  Lear,  Carrol,  and 
many  others.^ 

In  this  vast  field  the  mind  of  the  child  early  begins  to  take  flight. 
Here  his  soul  finds  its  native  breath  and  vital  air.  He  may  live  as  a 
peasant,  using,  as  Max  Miiller  says  many  do,  but  a  few  hundred  words 
during  his  lifetime,  or  he  may  need  8,000,  like  Milton,  15,000,  like  Shake- 
speare, 20,000  or  30,000,  like  Huxley,  who  commanded  both  literary 
and  technical  terms ;  while  in  understanding,  which  far  outstrips  use, 
a  philologist  may  master  perhaps  100,000  or  200,000  words.  The  con- 
tent of  a  tongue  may  contain  only  folk-lore  and  terms  for  immediate, 
practical  life,  or  this  content  may  be  indefinitely  elaborated  in  a  rich 
literature  and  science.  The  former  is  generally  well  on  in  its  develop- 
ment before  speech  itself  becomes  an  object  of  study.  Greek  literature 
was  fully  grown  when  the  Sophists,  and  finally  Aristotle,  developed 
the  rudiments  of  grammar,  the  parts  of  speech  being  at  first  closely 
related  with  his  ten  metaphysical  categories.  Our  modern  tongue  had 
the  fortune,  unknown  to  those  of  antiquity,  when  it  was  crude  and 
despised,  to  be  patronized  and  regulated  by  Latin  grammarians,  and 
has  had  a  long  experience,  both  for  good  and  evil,  with  their  con- 
serving and  uniformitizing  instincts.  It  has,  too,  a  long  history  of 
resistance  to  this  control.  Once  spelling  was  a  matter  of  fashion  or 
even  individual  taste,  and  as  the  constraint  grew  two  pedagogues  in 
the  thirteenth  century  fought  a  duel  for  the  right  spelling  of  the  word, 
and  that  maintained  by  the  survivor  prevailed.  Phonic  and  economic 
influences  are  now  again  making  some  headway  against  orthographic 
orthodoxy  here;  so  with  definitions.  In  the  days  of  Johnson's  diction- 
ary, individuality  still  had  wide  range  in  determining  meanings.  In 
pronounciation,  too,  we  may  now  pronounce  the  word  tomato  in  six 
ways,  all  sanctioned  by  dictionaries.  Of  our  tongue  in  particular  it  is 
true,  as  Tylor  says  in  general,  condensing  a  longer  passage,  "  take 
language  all  in  all,  it  is  the  product  of  a  rough-and-ready  ingenuity 

1  The  Teaching  of  English.     Pad.  Sem.,  June,  1902,  vol.  ix,  pp.  161-168. 
'See  my  Early  Sense  of  Self.     Am.  Jour,  of   Psy.,  April,    1898,  vol.  ix,  p. 
351-395- 


456  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

and  of  the  great  rule  of  thumb.  It  is  an  old  barbaric  engine,  which 
in  its  highest  development  is  altered,  patched,  and  tinkered  into  ca- 
pability. It  is  originally  and  naturally  a  product  of  low  culture, 
developed  by  ages  of  conscious  and  unconscious  improvement  to 
answer  more  or  less  perfectly  the  requirements  of  modern  civili- 
zation." 

It  is  plain,  therefore,  that  no  grammar,  and  least  of  all 
that  derived  from  the  prim,  meager  Latin  contingent  of  it,  is 
adequate  to  legislate  for  the  free  spirit  of  our  magnificent 
tongue.  Again,  if  this  is  ever  done  and  English  ever  has  a 
grammar  that  is  to  it  what  Latin  grammar  is  to  that  language, 
it  will  only  be  when  the  psychology  of  speech  represented,  e.  g.,. 
in  Wundt's  Psychologic  der  Sprache,  which  is  now  compiling 
and  organizing  the  best  elements  from  all  grammars,  is  com- 
plete. The  reason  why  English  speakers  find  such  difficulty  in 
learning  other  languages  is  because  ours  has  so  far  outgrown 
them  by  throwing  off  not  only  inflections  but  many  old  rules 
of  syntax  that  we  have  had  to  go  backward  to  an  earlier  and 
more  obsolescent  stage  of  human  development.  In  1414,  at 
the  Council  of  Constance,  when  Emperor  Sigismund  was 
rebuked  for  a  wrong  gender,  he  replied,  "  I  am  King  of  the 
Romans  and  above  grammar."  Thomas  Jefferson  later  wrote, 
"  Where  strictness  of  grammar  does  not  weaken  expression 
it  should  be  attended  to,  but  where  by  a  small  grammatical 
negligence  the  energy  of  an  idea  is  condensed  or  a  word  stands 
for  a  sentence,  I  hold  grammatical  rigor  in  contempt."  Brown- 
ing, Whitman,  and  Kipling  deliberately  violate  grammar  and 
secure  thereby  unique  effects  neither  asking  nor  needing 
excuse. 

By  general  consent  both  high  school  and  college  youth  in 
this  country  are  in  an  advanced  stage  of  degeneration  in  the 
command  of  this  the  world's  greatest  organ  of  the  intellect,  and 
that  despite  the  fact  that  the  study  of  English  often  continues 
from  primary  into  college  grades,  that  no  topic  counts  for 
more,  and  that  marked  deficiency  here  often  debars  from  all 
other  courses.  Every  careful  study  of  the  subject  for  nearly 
twenty  years  shows  deterioration,  and  Professor  Shurman,  of 
Nebraska,  thinks  it  now  worse  than  at  any  time  for  forty 
years.  We  are  in  the  case  of  many  Christians  described  by 
Dante  who  strove  by  prayers  to  get  nearer  to  God  when  in  fact 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  457 

with  every  petition  they  were  departing  farther  from  him. 
Such  a  comprehensive  fact  must  have  many  causes. 

I.  One  of  these  is  the  excessive  time  given  to  other  lan- 
guages just  at  the  psychological  period  of  greatest  linguistic 
plasticity  and  capacity  for  growth.  School  invention  and 
tradition  is  so  inveterate  that  it  is  hard  for  us  to  understand 
that  there  is  little  educational  value,  and  perhaps  it  is  deeduca- 
tional,  to  learn  to  tell  the  time  of  day  or  name  a  spade  in  several 
different  tongues  or  to  learn  to  say  the  Lord's  Prayer  in  many 
different  languages,  any  one  of  which  the  Lord  only  can  under- 
stand. The  polyglot  people  that  one  meets  on  great  inter- 
national highways  of  travel  are  linguists  only  in  the  sense 
that  the  moke  on  the  variety  stage  who  plays  a  dozen  instru- 
ments equally  badly  is  a  musician.  It  is  a  psychological  im- 
possibility to  pass  through  the  apprenticeship  stage  of  learning 
foreign  languages  at  the  age  when  the  vernacular  is  setting 
without  crippling  it.  The  extremes  are  the  youth  in  ancient 
Greece  studying  his  own  language  only  and  the  modern  high 
school  boy  and  girl  dabbling  in  three  or  perhaps  four  lan- 
guages. Latin,  which  in  the  eight  years  preceding  1898 
increased  one  hundred  and  seventy-four  per  cent  in  American 
high  schools,  while  the  proportion  entering  college  in  the 
country  and  even  in  Massachusetts  steadily  declined,  is  the 
chief  offender.  In  the  day  of  its  pedagogical  glory  Latin  was 
the  universal  tongue  of  the  learned.  Sturm's  idea  was  to  train 
boys  so  that  if  suddenly  transported  to  ancient  Rome  or  Greece 
they  would  be  at  home  there.  Language,  it  was  said,  was  the 
chief  instrument  of  culture;  Latin,  the  chief  language  and 
therefore  a  better  drill  in  the  vernacular  than  the  vernacular 
itself.  Its  rules  were  wholesome  swathing  bands  for  the 
modern  languages  when  in  their  infancy.  Boys  must  speak 
Latin  only  on  the  playground.  They  thought,  felt,  and  de- 
veloped an  intellectual  life  in  and  with  that  tongue.  But  how 
changed  all  this  is  now.  Statistical  studies  show  that  five 
hours  a  week  for  a  year  gives  command  of  but  a  few  hundred 
words,  that  two  years  does  not  double  this  number,  and  that 
command  of  the  language  and  its  resources  in  the  original  is 
almost  never  attained,  but  that  it  is  abandoned  not  only  by  the 
increasing  percentage  that  do  not  go  to  college  but  also  by  the 
increasing  percentage  who  drop  it  forever  at  the  college  door. 


458  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Its  enormous  numerical  increase  due  to  high  school  require- 
ments, the  increasing  percentage  of  girl  pupils  more  ready  to 
follow  the  teacher's  advice,  in  connection  with  the  deteriorating 
quality  of  the  girls  inevitable  with  their  increasing  numbers, 
the  sense  that  Latin  means  entering  upon  a  higher  education, 
the  special  reverence  for  it  by  Catholic  children,  the  over- 
crowded market  for  Latin  teachers  whom  a  recent  writer  says 
can  be  procured  by  the  score  at  less  rates  than  in  almost  any 
other  subject,  the  modern  methods  of  teaching  it  which  work 
well  with  less  knowledge  of  it  by  the  teacher  than  in  the  case 
of  other  school  topics,  have  been  attended  perhaps  inevitably  by 
steady  pedagogic  decline  despite  the  vaunted  new  methods ; 
until  now  the  baby  Latin  in  the  average  high  school  class  is  a 
kind  of  sanctified  relic,  a  ghost  of  a  ghost,  suggesting  Swift's 
Struldbrugs,  doomed  to  physical  mortality  but  shriveling  and 
with  increasing  horror  of  all  things  new.  In  1892  the  German 
emperor  declared  it  a  shame  for  a  boy  to  excel  in  Latin  com- 
position, and  in  the  high  schools  of  Sweden  and  Norway  it 
has  been  practically  abandoned.  In  the  present  stage  of  its 
educational  decadence  the  power  of  the  dead  hand  is  strongly 
illustrated  by  the  new  installation  of  the  old  Roman  pronun- 
ciation with  which  our  tongue  has  only  remote  analogies, 
which  makes  havoc  with  proper  names,  which  is  unknown  and 
unrecognized  in  the  schools  of  the  European  continent,  and 
which  makes  a  pedantic  affectation  out  of  mere  vocalism.  I 
do  not  know  nor  care  whether  the  old  Romans  pronounced 
thus  or  not,  but  if  historic  fidelity  in  this  sense  has  pedagogic 
justification,  why  still  teach  a  text  like  the  Veri  RomcB,  which 
is  not  a  classic  but  a  modern  pedagogue's  composition? 

I  believe  profoundly  in  the  Latin  both  as  a  university  specialty  and 
for  all  students  who  even  approach  mastery,  but  for  the  vast  numbers 
who  stop  in  the  early  stages  of  proficiency  it  is  disastrous  to  the  ver- 
nacular. Compare  the  evils  of  translation  English,  which  not  even 
the  most  competent  and  laborious  teaching  can  wholly  prevent  and 
which  careless  mechanical  instruction  directly  fosters,  with  the  vigor- 
ous fresh  productions  of  a  boy  or  girl  writing  or  speaking  of  something 
of  vital  present  interest.  The  psychology  of  translation  shows  that 
it  gives  the  novice  a  consciousness  of  etymologies  which  rather  im- 
pedes than  helps  the  free  movement  of  the  mind.  Jowett  said  in  sub- 
stance that  it  is  almost  impossible  to  render  either  of  the  great  dead 
languages  into  English  without  compromise,  and  this  tends  to  injure 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    459 

the  idiomatic  mastery  of  one's  own  tongue,  which  can  be  got  only  by 
much  hard  experience  in  uttering  our  own  thoughts  before  trying  to 
shape  the  dead  thoughts  of  others  into  our  language.  We  confound 
the  little  knowledge  of  word-histories  which  Latin  gives  with  the  far 
higher  and  subtler  sentence-sense  which  makes  the  soul  of  one  lan- 
guage so  different  from  that  of  another,  and  training  in  which  ought 
not  to  end  until  one  has  become  more  or  less  of  a  stylist  and  knows 
how  to  hew  out  modes  of  expressing  his  own  individuality  in  a  great 
language.  There  is  a  sense  in  which  Macaulay  was  not  an  English- 
man at  all,  but  a  Ciceronian  Latinist  who  foisted  an  alien  style  upon 
our  tongue;  and  even  Addison  is  a  foreigner  compared  to  the  virile 
Kipling.  The  nature  and  needs  of  the  adolescent  mind  demand  bread 
and  meat,  while  Latin  rudiments  are  husks.  In  his  autobiography, 
Booker  Washington  says  that  for  ten  years  after  their  emancipation, 
the  two  chief  ambitions  of  the  young  negro  of  the  South  were  to  hold 
office  and  to  study  Latin,  and  he  adds  that  the  chief  endeavor  of  his 
life  has  been  against  these  tendencies.  For  the  American  boy  and 
girl,  high  school  too  often  means  Latin.  This  gives  at  first  a  pleasing 
sense  of  exaltation  to  a  higher  stage  of  life,  but  after  from  one  to  three 
years  the  great  majority  who  enter  the  high  school  drop  out  limp  and 
discouraged  for  many  reasons,  largely,  however,  because  they  are  not 
fed.  Recent  studies  of  truancy  have  shown  a  strong  but  strangely  un- 
conscious association  between  runaways  and  a  bad  dietary  at  home. 
Defective  nutrition  of  the  mind  also  causes  a  restlessness,  which  en- 
hances all  the  influences  which  make  boys  and  girls  leave  school. 

11.  The  second  cause  of  this  degeneration  is  the  subordi- 
nation of  Hterature  and  content  to  language  study.  Grammar 
arises  in  the  old  age  of  language.  As  once  applied  to  our 
relatively  grammarless  tongue  it  always  was  more  or  less  of  a 
school-made  artifact  and  an  alien  yoke  and  has  become  in- 
creasingly so  as  English  has  grown  great  and  free.  Its  ghost, 
in  the  many  text-books  devoted  to  it,  lacks  just  the  quality  of 
logic  which  made  and  besouled  it.  Philology,  too,  with  all 
its  magnificence,  is  not  a  product  of  the  nascent  stages  of 
speech.  In  the  college,  which  is  its  stronghold,  it  has  so  in- 
spired professors  of  English  that  their  ideal  is  to  be  critical 
rather  than  creative  till  they  prefer  the  minute  reading  of  a 
few  masterpieces  to  a  wide  general  knowledge,  and  a  typical 
university  announces  that  "  in  every  case  the  examiners  will 
treat  mere  knowledge  of  books  as  less  important  than  the 
ability  to  write  good  English  "  that  will  parse  and  that  is 
spelled,  punctuated,  capitalized,  and  paragraphed  aright. 
Good  professors  of  English  literature  are  hard  to  find,  and 


460  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

upon  them  philologists  who  are  plentiful  look  with  a  certain 
condescension.  Many  academic  chairs  of  English  are  filled 
by  men  whose  acquaintance  of  our  literature  is  very  narrow, 
who  wish  to  be  linguistic  and  not  literary,  and  this  is  true  even 
in  ancient  tongues. 

At  a  brilliant  examination,  a  candidate  for  the  doctor's  degree  who 
had  answered  many  questions  concerning  the  forms  of  Lucretius,  when 
asked  whether  he  was  a  dramatist,  historian,  poet,  or  philosopher, 
did  not  know,  and  his  professor  deemed  the  question  improper.  I 
visited  the  eleventh  recitation  in  Othello  in  a  high  school  class  of 
nineteen  pupils,  not  one  of  whom  knew  how  the  story  ended,  so  intent 
had  they  been  kept  on  its  verbiage.  Hence,  too,  has  come  the  twelve 
feet  of  text-books  on  English  on  my  shelves  with  many  standard  works 
edited  for  schools  with  more  notes  than  text.  Fashion  that  works 
from  above  down  the  grades  and  college  entrance  requirements  are  in 
large  measure  responsible  for  this,  perhaps  now  the  worst  case  of  the 
prostitution  of  content  to  form. 

Long  exposure  to  this  method  of  linguistic  manicure  tends  to  make 
students  who  try  to  write  ultra-fastidious,  seeking  an  overrefined 
elaboration  of  petty  trifles,  as  if  the  less  the  content  the  greater  the 
triumph  of  form  alone  could  be.  These  petty  but  pretty  nothings  are 
like  German  confectionery,  that  appeals  to  the  eye  but  has  little  for 
taste  and  is  worse  than  nothing  for  the  digestion.  It  is  like  straining 
work  on  an  empty  stomach.  For  youth  this  embroidery  of  details  is 
the  precocious  senescence  that  Nordau  has  so  copiously  illustrated  as 
literary  decadence.  Language  is  vastly  larger  than  all  its  content, 
and  the  way  to  teach  it  is  to  focus  the  mind  upon  story,  history,  ora- 
tory, drama,  Bible,  for  their  esthetic,  mental,  and  above  all,  moral  con- 
tent, as  shown  in  the  last  chapter.  The  more  unconscious  processes 
that  reflect  imitatively  the  linguistic  environment  and  that  strike  out 
intuitively  oral  and  written  vents  for  interests  so  intense  that  they 
must  be  told  and  shared,  are  what  teach  us  how  to  command  the  re- 
sources of  our  mother  tongue.  These  prescriptions  and  corrections 
and  consciousness  of  the  manifold  ways  of  error  are  never  so  pecul- 
iarly liable  to  hinder  rather  than  to  help  as  in  early  adolescence,  when 
the  soul  has  a  new  content  and  a  new  sense  for  it,  and  so  abhors  and  is 
so  incapable  of  precision  and  propriety  of  diction.  To  hold  up  the 
flights  of  exuberant  youth  by  forever  being  on  the  hunt  for  errors  is, 
to  borrow  the  language  of  the  gridiron,  low  tackle,  and  I  would 
rather  be  convicted  of  many  errors  by  such  methods  than  to  use  them. 
Of  course  this  has  its  place,  but  it  must  always  be  subordinated  to  a 
larger  view,  as  in  one  of  the  newly  discovered  logia  ascribed  to  Jesus, 
who,  when  he  found  a  man  gathering  sticks  on  Sunday,  said  to  him, 
"  If  you  understand  what  you  are  doing,  it  is  well,  but  if  not,  thou  shalt 
be  damned."  The  great  teacher  who,  when  asked  how  he  obtained 
such  rare  results  in  expression,  answered,  "  By  carefully  neglecting  it 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    4^1 

and  seeking  utter  absorption  in  subject-matter,"  was  also  a  good  prac- 
tical psychologist.  This  is  the  inveterate  tendency  that  in  other  ages 
has  made  pedagogic  scribes,  Talmudists,  epigoni,  and  sophists,  who 
have  magnified  the  letter  and  lost  the  spirit.  But  there  are  yet  other 
seats  of  difficulty. 

III.  It  is  hard  and,  in  the  history  of  the  race,  a  late 
change  to  receive  language  through  the  eye  which  reads  instead 
of  through  the  ear  which  hears.  Not  only  is  perception  measur- 
ably about  three  times  slower,  but  book  language  is  related  to 
oral  speech  somewhat  as  an  herbarium  is  to  a  garden  or  a  mu- 
seum of  stuffed  specimens  to  a  menagerie.  The  invention  of 
letters  is  a  novelty  in  the  history  of  the  race  that  spoke  for 
countless  ages  before  it  wrote.  The  winged  word  of  mouth 
is  saturated  with  color,  perhaps  hot  with  feeling,  musical  with 
inflection,  is  the  utterance  of  a  living  present  personality,  the 
consummation  of  man's  gregarious  instincts.  The  book  is  dead 
and  more  or  less  impersonal,  best  apprehended  in  solitude,  its 
matter  more  intellectualized ;  it  deals  in  remoter  second-hand 
knowledge  so  that  Plato  reproached  Aristotle  as  being  a 
reader,  one  remove  from  the  first  spontaneous  source  of  origi- 
nal impressions  and  ideas,  and  the  doughty  medieval  knights 
scorned  reading  as  a  mere  clerk's  trick,  not  wishing  to  muddle 
their  wits  with  other  people's  ideas  when  their  own  were  good 
enough  for  them.  But  although  some  of  the  great  men  in 
history  could  not  read,  and  while  some  of  the  illiterate  were 
often  morally  and  intellectually  above  some  of  the  literate,  the 
argument  here  is  that  the  printed  page  must  not  be  too  sud- 
denly or  too  early  thrust  between  the  child  and  life.  The  plea 
is  for  more  oral  and  objective  work,  more  stories,  narra- 
tives, and  even  vivid  readings,  as  is  now  done  statedly  in  more 
than  a  dozen  of  the  public  libraries  of  the  country,  not  so  often 
by  teachers  as  by  librarians,  all  to  the  end  that  the  ear,  the 
chief  receptacle  of  language,  be  maintained  in  its  dominance, 
that  the  fine  sense  of  sound,  rhythm,  cadence,  pronunciation, 
and  speech-music  generally  be  not  atrophied,  that  the  eye 
which  normally  ranges  freely  from  far  to  near  be  not  injured 
by  the  confined  treadmill  and  zigzag  of  the  printed  page. 

Closely  connected  with  this,  and  perhaps  psychologically 
worse,  is  the  substitution  of  the  pen  and  the  scribbling  fingers 
for  the  mouth  and  tongue.     Speech  is  directly  to  and  from 


462  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

the  soul.  Writing,  the  deHberation  of  which  fits  age  better  than 
youth,  slows  down  its  impetuosity  many  fold,  and  is  in  every 
way  farther  removed  from  vocal  utterance  than  is  the  eye  from 
the  ear.  Never  have  there  been  so  many  pounds  of  paper,  so 
many  pencils,  and  such  excessive  scribbling  as  in  the  calamo- 
papyrus  pedagogy  of  to-day  and  in  this  country.  Not  only  has 
the  daily  theme  spread  as  an  infection,  but  the  daily  lesson  is 
now  extracted  through  the  point  of  a  pencil  instead  of  from 
the  mouth.  The  tongue  rests  and  the  curve  of  writer's  cramp 
takes  a  sharp  turn  upward,  as  if  we  were  making  scribes, 
reporters,  and  proof-readers.  In  some  schools  teachers  seem 
to  be  conducting  correspondence  classes  with  their  own  pupils. 
It  all  makes  excellent  busy  work,  keeps  the  pupils  quiet  and 
orderly,  and  allows  the  school  output  to  be  quantified,  and  some 
of  it  gives  time  for  more  care  in  the  choice  of  words.  But  is 
it  a  gain  to  substitute  a  letter  for  a  visit,  to  try  to  give  written 
precedence  over  spoken  forms?  Here  again  we  violate  the 
great  law  that  the  child  repeats  the  history  of  the  race,  and 
that,  from  the  larger  historic  standpoint,  writing  as  a  mode  of 
utterance  is  only  the  latest  fashion. 

Of  course  the  pupils  must  write,  and  write  well,  just  as  they  must 
read,  and  read  much ;  but  that  English  suffers  from  insisting  upon  this 
double  long  circuit  too  early  and  cultivates  it  in  excess,  devitalizes 
school  language  and  makes  it  a  litle  unreal,  like  other  affectations  of 
adult  ways,  so  that  on  escaping  from  its  thraldom  the  child  and  youth 
slump  back  to  the  language  of  the  street  as  never  before.  This  is  a 
false  application  of  the  principle  of  learning  to  do  by  doing.  The 
young  do  not  learn  to  write  by  writing,  but  by  reading  and  hearing. 
To  become  a  good  writer  one  must  read,  feel,  think,  experience,  until 
he  has  something  to  say  that  others  want  to  hear.  The  golden  age 
of  French  literature,  as  Gaston  Deschamps  and  Brunetiere  have  lately 
told  us,  was  that  of  the  salon,  when  conversation  dominated  letters, 
set  fashions,  and  made  the  charm  of  French  style.  Its  lowest  ebb  was 
when  bookishness  led  and  people  began  to  talk  as  they  wrote. 

IV.  The  fourth  cause  of  degeneration  of  school  English 
is  the  growing  preponderance  of  concrete  words  for  designat- 
ing things  of  sense  and  physical  acts,  over  the  higher  element 
of  language  that  names  and  deals  with  concepts,  ideas,  and 
non-material  things.  The  object-lesson  came  in  as  a  reaction 
against  the  danger  of  merely  verbal  and  definition  knowledge 
and  word  memory.     Now  it  has  gone  so  far  that  not  only 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  4'^3 

things  but  even  languages,  vernacular  and  foreign,  are  taught 
by  appeals  to  the  eye.  More  lately,  elementary  science  has 
introduced  another  area  of  pictures  and  things  while  industrial 
education  has  still  further  greatly  enlarged  the  material  sensori- 
motor element  of  training.  Geography  is  taught  with  arti- 
facts, globes,  maps,  sand  boxes,  drawing.  Miss  Margaret 
Smith  ^  counted  two  hundred  and  eighty  objects  that  must  be 
distributed  and  gathered  for  forty  pupils  in  a  single  art  lesson. 
Instruction,  moreover,  is  more  and  more  busied  upon  parts 
and  details  rather  than  wholes,  upon  analysis  rather  than 
synthesis.  Thus  in  modern  pedagogy  there  is  an  increased 
tyranny  of  things,  a  growing  neglect  or  exclusion  of  all  that 
is  unseen. 

The  first  result  of  this  is  that  the  modern  school  child  is 
more  and  more  mentally  helpless  without  objects  of  sense. 
Conversation  is  increasingly  concrete,  if  not  of  material  things 
and  persons  present  in  time  and  even  place.  Instead  of  deal- 
ing with  thoughts  and  ideas,  speech  and  writing  is  close  to 
sense  and  the  words  used  are  names  for  images  and  acts.  But 
there  is  another  higher  part  of  language  that  is  not  so  abjectly 
tied  down  to  perception,  but  that  lives,  moves,  and  has  its  being 
in  the  field  of  concepts  rather  than  percepts,  that,  to  use  Earle's 
distinction,  is  symbolic  and  not  presentative,  that  describes 
thinking  that  is  not  mere  contiguity  in  space  or  sequence  in 
time  but  that  is  best  in  the  far  higher  and  more  mental  asso- 
ciations of  likeness,  that  is  more  remote  from  activity,  that, 
to  use  logical  terminology,  is  connotative  and  not  merely 
denotative,  that  has  extension  as  well  as  intension,  that  re- 
quires abstraction  and  generalization.  Without  this  latter 
element  higher  mental  development  is  lacking  because  this 
means  more  than  word-painting  the  material  world. 

Our  school  youth  to-day  suffer  from  just  this  defect.  If 
their  psychic  operations  can  be  called  thought  it  is  of  that  ele- 
mentary and  half  animal  kind  that  consists  in  imagery.  Their 
talk  with  each  other  is  of  things  of  present  and  immediate 
interest.  They  lack  even  the  elements  of  imagination  which 
makes  new   combinations   and   is   creative  because   they   are 


'  Ped.  Sem.,  The  Psychological  and  Pedagogical  Aspect  of  Language,  Decem- 
ber, 1903,  vol.  X,  pp.  438-458. 


4^4  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

dominated  by  mental  pictures  of  the  sensory.  Large  views 
that  take  them  afield  away  from  the  persons  and  things  and 
acts  they  know  do  not  appeal  to  them.  Attempts  to  think 
rigorously  are  too  hard.  The  teacher  feels  that  all  the  content 
of  mind  must  come  in  through  the  senses,  and  that  if  these 
are  well  fed,  inferences  and  generalizations  will  come  of  them- 
selves later.  Many  pupils  have  never  in  their  lives  talked  five 
minutes  before  others  on  any  subject  whatever  that  can 
properly  be  called  intellectual.  It  irks  them  to  occupy  them- 
selves with  purely  mental  processes,  so  enslaved  are  they  by 
what  is  near  and  personal,  and  thus  they  are  impoverished  in 
the  best  elements  of  language.  It  is  as  if  what  are  sometimes 
called  the  associative  fibers,  both  ends  of  which  are  in  the  brain, 
were  dwarfed  in  comparison  with  the  afferent  and  efferent 
fibers  that  mediate  sense  and  motion. 

That  the  soul  of  language  as  an  instrument  of  thought 
consists  in  this  non-presentative  element,  so  often  lacking,  is 
conclusively  shown  in  the  facts  of  speech  diseases.  In  the 
slowly  progressive  aphasias,  of  late  so  carefully  studied,  the 
words  first  lost  are  those  of  things  and  acts  most  familiar  to 
the  patient,  while  the  words  that  persist  longest  in  the  wreck- 
age of  the  speech-centers  are  generally  words  that  do  not 
designate  the  things  of  sense.  A  tailor  loses  the  power  to 
name  his  chalk,  measure,  shears,  although  he  can  long  talk 
fluently  of  what  little  he  may  chance  to  know  of  God,  beauty, 
truth,  virtue,  happiness,  prosperity,  etc.  The  farmer  is  unable 
to  name  the  cattle  in  his  yard  or  his  own  occupations,  although 
he  can  reason  as  well  as  ever  about  politics,  can  not  discuss 
coin  or  bills,  but  can  talk  of  financial  policies  and  securities, 
or  about  health  and  wealth  generally.  The  reason  is  obvious. 
It  is  because  concrete  thinking  has  two  forms,  the  word  and 
the  image,  and  the  latter  so  tends  to  take  the  place  of  the 
former  that  it  can  be  lost  to  both  sense  and  articulation  without 
great  impairment,  whereas  conceptual  thinking  lacks  imagery 
and  depends  upon  words  alone,  and  hence  these  must  persist 
because  they  have  no  alternate  form  which  vicariates  for  them. 

In  its  lower  stages  speech  is  necessarily  closely  bound  up 
with  the  concrete  world,  but  its  real  glory  appears  in  its  later 
stages  and  its  higher  forms,  because  there  the  soul  takes  flight 
in  the  intellectual  world,  learns  to  live  amidst  its  more  spiritual 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    4^5 

realities,  to  put  names  to  thoughts,  which  is  far  higher  than 
to  put  names  to  things.  It  is  in  this  world  that  the  best  things 
in  the  best  books  Hve,  and  the  modern  school-bred  distaste 
for  them,  the  low-ranged  mentation  that  hovers  near  the  coast- 
line of  matter  and  can  not  launch  out  with  zest  into  the  open 
sea  of  thoughts,  holding  communion  with  the  great  dead  of 
the  past  or  the  great  living  of  the  distant  present,  seems  almost 
like  a  slow  progressive  abandonment  of  the  high  attribute  of 
speech  and  the  lapse  toward  infantile  or  animal  picture- 
thinking.  If  the  school  is  slowly  becoming  speechless  in  this 
sense,  if  it  is  lapsing  in  all  departments  toward  busy  work  and 
losing  silence,  repose,  the  power  of  logical  thought,  and  even 
that  of  meditation,  which  is  the  muse  of  originality,  this  is  per- 
haps the  gravest  of  all  these  types  of  decay.  If  the  child  has 
no  resources  in  solitude,  can  not  think  without  the  visual 
provocation,  is  losing  subjective  life,  enthusiasm  for  public, 
social,  ethical  questions,  is  crippled  for  intellectual  pursuits, 
cares  only  in  a  languid  way  for  literary  prose  and  poetry, 
responds  only  to  sensuous  stimuli  and  events  at  short  range, 
and  is  indifferent  to  all  wide  relations  and  moral  responsi- 
bility, cares  only  for  commercial  self-interest,  the  tactics  of 
field  sport,  laboratory  occupations  and  things  which  can  be 
illustrated  from  a  pedagogic  museum,  then  the  school  is  dwarf- 
ing, in  dawning  maturity,  the  higher  powers  that  belong  to 
this  stage  of  development  and  is  responsible  for  mental  arrest. 
In  this  deplorable  condition,  if  we  turn  to  the  child  study 
of  speech  for  help,  we  find  that,  although  it  has  been  chiefly 
occupied  with  infant  vocabularies,  there  are  already  a  very  few 
and  confessedly  crude  and  feeble  beginnings,  but  even  these 
shed  more  light  on  the  lost  pathway  than  all  other  sources 
combined.  The  child  once  set  in  their  midst  again  corrects  the 
wise  men.  We  will  first  briefly  recapitulate  these  and  then 
state  and  apply  their  lessons. 

Miss  Williams  ^  found  that  out  of  253  young  ladies  only  133  did  not 
have  favorite  sounds,  a  and  a  leading  among  the  vowels,  and  /,  r,  and 
m  among  the  consonants.  Eighty-five  had  favorite  words  often  lugged 
in,  329  being  good.     Two  hundred  and  twenty-one  as  children  had 

'  Children's   Interest   in   Words.     Ped.   Sem.,  September,   1902,  vol.  ix,  pp. 

274-295- 

69 


466  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

favorite  proper  names  in  geography,  and  also  for  boys,  but  especially 
for  girls.  The  order  of  a  few  of  the  latter  is  as  follows :  Helen,  36 ; 
Bessie,  25;  Violet  and  Lilly,  20;  Elsie  and  Beatrice,  18;  Dorothy  and 
Alice,  17;  Ethel,  15;  Myrtle,  14;  Mabel,  Marguerite,  Pearl,  and  Rose, 
13;  May,  12;  Margaret,  Daisy,  and  Grace,  11;  Ruth  and  Florence,  9; 
Gladys,  8 ;  Maud,  Nellie,  and  Gertrude,  7 ;  Blanche  and  Mary,  6 ;  Eve- 
line and  Pansy,  5 ;  Belle,  Beulah,  Constance,  Eleanor,  Elizabeth,  Eva, 
Laura,  Lulu,  Pauline,  Virginia,  and  Vivian,  4  each,  etc. 

Of  ten  words  found  interesting  to  adolescents,  murmur  was  the 
favorite,  most  enjoying  its  sound.  Lullaby,  supreme,  annannaman- 
nannaharoumlemay,  immemorial,  lillibulero,  burbled,  and  incarnadine 
were  liked  by  most,  while  zigzag  and  shigsback  were  not  liked.  This 
writer  says  that  adolescence  is  marked  by  some  increased  love  of 
words  for  motor  activity  and  in  interest  in  words  as  things  in  them- 
selves, but  shows  a  still  greater  rise  of  interest  in  new  words  and 
pronunciations ;  "  above  all,  there  is  a  tremendous  rise  in  interest  in 
words  as  instruments  of  thought."  The  flood  of  new  experiences, 
feelings,  and  views  finds  the  old  vocabulary  inadequate,  hence  "  the 
dumb  bound  feeling  of  which  most  adolescents  at  one  time  or  another 
complain,  and  also  I  suspect  from  this  study  in  the  case  of  girls,  we 
have  an  explanation  of  the  rise  of  interest  in  slang."  "  The  second 
idea  suggested  by  our  study  is  the  tremendous  importance  of  hearing 
in  the  affective  side  of  language." 

Conradi  ^  found  that  of  273  returns  concerning  children's  pleasure 
in  knowing  or  using  new  words,  ninety-two  per  cent  were  affirmative, 
eight  per  cent  negative,  and  fifty  per  cent  gave  words  especially 
"  liked."  Some  were  partial  to  big  words,  some  for  those  with  z 
in  them.  Some  found  most  pleasure  in  saying  them  to  themselves 
and  some  in  using  them  with  others.  In  all  there  were  nearly  three 
hundred  such  words,  very  few  of  which  were  artificial.  As  to  words 
pretty  or  queer  in  form  or  sound,  his  list  was  nearly  as  large,  but 
the  greater  part  of  the  words  were  different.  Sixty  per  cent  of  all 
had  had  periods  of  spontaneously  trying  to  select  their  vocabulary 
by  making  lists,  studying  the  dictionary,  etc.  The  age  of  those  who 
did  so  would  seem  to  average  not  far  from  early  puberty,  but  the 
data  are  too  meager  for  conclusion.  A  few  started  to  go  through 
the  dictionary,  some  wished  to  astonish  their  companions  or  used 
large  new  words  to  themselves  or  their  dolls.  Seventy  per  cent  had 
had  a  passion  for  affecting  foreign  words  when  English  would  do 
as  well.  Conradi  says  "  the  age  varies  from  twelve  to  eighteen,  most 
being  fourteen  to  sixteen."  Some  indulge  this  tendency  in  letters,  and 
would  like  to  do  so  in  conversation,  but  fear  ridicule.  Fifty-six  per 
cent  reported  cases  of  superfine  elegance  or  affected  primness  or  pre- 
cision in  the  use  of  words.  Some  had  spells  of  effort  in  this  direction, 
some  belabor  compositions  to  get  a  style  that  suits  them,  some  memo- 
rize fine  passages  to  this  end,  or  modulate  their  voice  to  aid  them, 

^  English.     Fed.  Sem.,  October,  1903,  vol.  x,  pp.  359-404. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    4^7 

affect  elegance  with  a  chosen  mate  by  agreement,  soliloquize  before  a 
glass  with  poses.  According  to  his  curve  this  tendency  culminates  at 
fourteen. 

Adjectivism,  adverbism,  and  nounism,  or  marked  disposition  to 
multiply  one  or  more  of  the  above  classes  of  words,  and  in  the  above 
order,  also  occur  near  the  early  teens.  Adjectives  are  often  used  as 
adverbial  prefixes  to  other  adjectives,  and  here  favorite  words  are 


40 
30 
30 
10 

y 

s. 

1 

/ 

s 

/ 

/ 

\ 

\ 

\ 

\ 

L 
If 

— 

/ 

\ 

1 

\ 

\ 

V 

/ 

ti 

4 

'♦.., 

\ 

\ 

\ 

.  \ 

\ 

A 

'/ 

/ 

;^N 

\, 

S 

■- 

\ 

Age  8   9   10  11   13   13   14   15  16   17  18  19   30   | 

,  Slang 
Reading  Ci-aze 

.  Precision 


marked.  Nearly  half  of  Conradi's  reports  show  it,  but  the  list  of 
words  so  used  is  small. 

Miss  Williams  presents  an  interesting  curve  of  slang  confessed  as 
being  both  attractive  and  used  by  226  out  of  251.  From  this  it  appears 
that  early  adolescence  is  the  curve  of  greatest  pleasure  in  its  use, 
fourteen  being  the  culminating  year.  There  is  very  little  until  eleven, 
when  the  curve  for  girls  rises  very  rapidly,  to  fall  nearly  as  rapidly 
from  fifteen  to  seventeen.  Ninety-three  out  of  104  who  used  it  did 
so  despite  criticism. 

Conradi,  who  collected  and  prints  a  long  list  of  current  slang  words 
and  phrases,  found  that  of  295  young  boys  and  girls  not  one  failed  to 
confess  their  use,  and  eighty-five  per  cent  of  all  gave  the  age  at  which 
they  thought  it  most  common.  On  this  basis  he  constructs  the  above 
curve,  comparing  with  this  the  curve  of  a  craze  for  reading  and 
for  precision  in  speech. 

The  reasons  given  are,  in  order  of  frequency,  that  slang  was  more 
emphatic,  more  exact,  more  concise,  convenient,  sounded  pretty,  re- 
lieved formality,  was  natural,  manly,  appropriate,  etc.  Only  a  very 
few  thought  it  was  vulgar,  limited  the  vocabulary,  led  to  or  was  a 
substitute  for  swearing,  destroyed  exactness,  etc.  This  writer  at- 
tempts a  provisional  classification  of  slang  expressions  under  the  sug- 


468  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

gestive  heads  of  rebukes  to  pride,  boasting  and  loquacity,  hypocrisy, 
quaint  and  emphatic  negatives,  exaggerati'ons,  exclamations,  mild 
oaths,  attending  to  one's  own  business  and  not  meddling  or  interfer- 
ing, names  for  money,  absurdity,  neurotic  effects  of  surprise  or  shock, 
honesty  and  lying,  getting  confused,  fine  appearance  and  dress,  words 
for  intoxication  which  Partridge  has  collected,^  for  anger  collated  by 
Chamberlain,'^  crudeness  or  innocent  naivete,  love  and  sentimentality, 
etc.  Slang  is  also  rich  in  describing  conflicts  of  all  kinds,  praising 
courage,  censuring  inquisitiveness  and  a  school  of  moral  discipline,  but 
he  finds,  however,  a  very  large  number  unclassified;  and  while  he  main- 
tains throughout  a  distinction  between  that  used  by  boys  and  by  girls, 
sex  differences  are  not  very  marked.  The  great  majority  of  terms  are 
mentioned  but  once,  and  a  few  under  nearly  all  of  the  above  heads 
have  great  numerical  precedence.  A  somewhat  striking  fact  is  the 
manifold  variations  of  a  pet  typical  form.  Twenty-three  shock  exple- 
tives, e.  g.,  are,   "  Wouldn't  that  you  ?  "  the  blank  being  filled 

by  jar,  choke,  cook,  rattle,  scorch,  get,  start,  etc.,  or  instead  of  you 
adjectives  are  devised.  Feeling  is  so  intense  and  massive  and  psychic 
processes  are  so  rapid,  forcible,  and  undeveloped  that  the  pithiness  of 
some  of  these  expressions  makes  them  brilliant  and  creative  works 
of  genius,  and  after  securing  an  apprenticeship  are  sure  of  adoption. 
Their  very  lawlessness  helps  to  keep  speech  from  rigidity  and  desicca- 
tion,'and  they  hit  off  nearly  every  essential  phrase  of  adolescent  life 
and  experience. 

Conventional  modes  of  speech  do  not  satisfy  the  adolescent,  so  that 
he  is  often  either  reticent  or  slangy.  Walt  Whitman  ^  says  slang  is 
"  an  attempt  of  common  humanity  to  escape  from  bald  literalism  and 
to  express  itself  inimitably,  which  in  the  highest  walks  produces  poets 
and  poems  " ;  and  again,  "  Daring  as  it  is  to  say  so,  in  the  growth  of 
language  it  is  certain  that  the  retrospect  of  slang  from  the  start  would 
be  the  recalling  from  their  nebulous  condition  of  all  that  is  poetical 
in  the  stores  of  human  utterance."  Lowell  *  says,  "  There  is  death  in 
the  dictionary,  and  where  language  is  too  strictly  limited  by  conven- 
tion, the  ground  for  expression  to  grow  in  is  limited  also,  and  we  get 
a  potted  literature,  Chinese  dwarfs  instead  of  healthy  trees."  Louns- 
bury  asserts  that  "  slang  is  an  effort  on  the  part  of  the  users  of  lan- 
guage to  say  something  more  vividly,  strongly,  concisely  than  the 
language  existing  permits  it  to  be  said.  It  is  the  source  from  which 
the  decaying  energies  of  speech  are  constantly  refreshed."  Conradi 
adds  in  substance  that  weak  or  vicious  slang  is  too  feeble  to  survive, 
and  what  is  vital  enough  to  live  fills  a  need.  The  final  authority  is  the 
people,  and  it  is  better  to  teach  youth  to  discriminate  between  good 
and  bad  slang  rather  than  to  forbid  it  entirely.     Emerson  calls  it  lan- 

'  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  April,  1900,  vol.  xi,  p.  345  et  seq. 

'Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  Jan.,  1895,  vol.  vi,  pp.  585-592.     See  also  vol.  x,  p.  517. 

*  N.  A.  Rev.,  vol.  cxli,  p.  431. 

*  Introduction  to  the  Biglow  Papers,  series  ii. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  4^9 

guage  in  the  making,  its  crude,  vital,  raw  material.  It  is  often  an 
effective  school  of  moral  description,  a  palliative  for  profanity,  and 
expresses  the  natural  craving  for  superlatives.  Faults  are  hit  off  and 
condemned  with  the  curtness  and  sententiousness  of  proverbs  devised 
by  youth  to  sanctify  itself  and  correct  its  own  faults.  The  pedagogue 
objects  that  it  violates  good  form  and  established  usage,  but  why 
should  the  habits  of  hundreds  of  years  ago  control  when  they  can  not 
satisfy  the  needs  of  youth,  which  requires  a  lingua  franca  of  its  own, 
often  called  "  slanguage  "'  ?  Most  high  school  and  college  youth  of  both 
sexes  have  two  distinct  styles,  that  of  the  classroom  that  is  as  unnat- 
ural as  the  etiquette  of  a  royal  drawing-room  reception  or  a  formal  call, 
and  the  other  that  of  their  own  breezy,  free,  natural  life.  Often  these 
two  have  no  relation  to  or  effect  upon  each  other,  and  often  the  latter 
is  at  times  put  by  with  good  resolves  to  speak  as  purely  and  therefore 
as  self-consciously  as  they  know,  with  petty  fines  for  every  slang 
expression.  But  very  few,  and  these  generally  husky  boys,  boldly  try 
to  assert  their  own  rude  but  vigorous  vernacular  in  the  field  of  school 
requirements. 

These  simple  studies  in  this  vast  field  demonstrate  little 
or  nothing,  but  they  suggest  very  much.  Slang  commonly 
expresses  a  moral  judgment  and  falls  into  ethical  categories. 
It  usually  concerns  ideas,  sentiment,  and  will,  has  a  psychic 
content,  and  is  never,  like  the  language  of  the  school,  a  mere 
picture  of  objects  of  sense  or  a  description  of  acts.  To  restate 
it  in  correct  English  would  be  a  course  in  ethics,  courtesy, 
taste,  logical  predication  and  opposition,  honesty,  self-posses- 
sion, modesty,  and  just  the  ideal  and  non-presentation  mental 
content  youth  most  needs,  and  that  the  sensuous  presentation 
methods  of  teaching  have  neglected.  Those  who  see  in  speech 
nothing  but  form  condemn  it  because  it  is  vulgar.  Youth  has 
been  left  to  meet  these  high  needs  alone,  and  the  prevalence  of 
these  crude  forms  is  an  indictment  of  the  delinquency  of  peda- 
gogues in  not  teaching  their  pupils  to  develop  and  use  their 
intellect  properly.  Their  pith  and  meatiness  are  a  standing 
illustration  of  the  need  of  condensation  for  intellectual  objects 
that  later  growth  analyzes.  These  expressions  also  illustrate 
the  law  that  the  higher  and  larger  the  spiritual  content,  the 
grosser  must  be  the  illustration  in  which  it  is  first  couched. 
Further  studies  now  in  progress  will,  I  believe,  make  this  still 
clearer. 

Again,  we  see  in  the  above,  outcrops  of  the  strong  pubescent 
instinct  to  enlarge  the  vocabulary  in  two  ways.  One  is  to 
affect  foreign  equivalents.    This  at  first  suggests  an  appetency 


47°  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

for  another  language  like  the  dog-Latin  gibberish  of  children. 
It  is  one  of  the  motives  that  prompts  many  to  study  Latin  or 
French,  but  it  has  little  depth,  for  it  turns  out,  on  closer  study, 
to  be  only  the  affectation  of  superiority  and  the  love  of  mys- 
tifying others.  The  other  is  a  very  different  impulse  to  widen 
the  vernacular.  To  pause  to  learn  several  foreign  equivalents 
of  things  of  sense  may  be  anti-educational  if  it  limits  the 
expansion  of  thought  in  our  own  tongue.  The  two  are,  in 
fact,  often  inversely  as  each  other.  In  giving  a  foreign 
synonym  when  the  mind  seeks  a  new  native  word,  the  peda- 
gogue does  not  deal  fairly.  In  this  irradiation  into  the  mother 
tongue,  sometimes  experience  with  the  sentiment  or  feeling, 
act,  fact,  or  object  precedes,  and  then  a  name  for  it  is 
demanded,  or  conversely  the  sound,  size,  oddness  or  jingle 
of  the  word  is  first  attractive  and  the  meaning  comes  later. 
The  latter  needs  the  recognition  and  utilization  which  the 
former  already  has.  Lists  of  favorite  words  should  be 
wrought  out  for  spelling  and  writing  and  their  meanings  illus- 
trated, for  these  have  often  the  charm  of  novelty  as  on  the 
frontier  of  knowledge  and  enlarge  the  mental  horizon  like 
new  discoveries.  We  must  not  starve  this  voracious  new 
appetite  "  for  w^ords  as  instruments  of  thought." 

The  sentence  is  affected  by  the  more  voluminous  mentation 
of  the  teens.  It  seems  always  to  grow  longer  and  more 
intricate  and  sometimes  to  become  for  a  time  inordinately 
involved  till  periodicity  is  almost  lost.  This  is  sometimes 
preceded  by  increased  simplification.  The  simpler  forms  of 
intrication  come  first.  Often  there  is  oscillation  between 
different  types  of  construction,  and  the  propensity  to  quote 
fine  extracts  and  to  ape  favored  adult  friends  and  authors  sug- 
gests a  subtle  plasticity  and  susceptibility  to  styles  for  which 
there  is  no  pedagogic  direction  except  exposure  to  good  pat- 
terns of  many  different  kinds  that  the  instinct  of  imitation 
may  have  a  free  field  and  a  long  rein.  The  few  and  meager 
data,  so  far  at  hand,  are  the  following : 

J.  A.  Hancock  '  examined  papers  written  for  the  purpose,  according 
to  a  special  plan,  of  542  boys  and  590  girls  from  ten  to  fifteen,  in  order 

^  Children's  Ability  to  Reason.  Ed.  Rev.,  New  York,  October,  1895.  See  also 
his  article  on  Children's  Use  of  Written  Language  Forms.  N.-W.  Monthly, 
June,  1898,  vol.  viii,  p.  646. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  47  ^ 

to  study  the  development  of  the  sentence  sense.  He  found  that  the 
use  of  simple  sentences  decreased  about  thirty  per  cent  from  ten  to 
fifteen;  that  the  years  of  greatest  change  were  from  thirteen  to  four- 
teen, especially  for  boys  who  developed  rapidly  in  this  respect.  Curi- 
ously enough,  there  was  here  a  year  of  arrest,  if  not  retrogression.  He 
found  that  "  the  increase  in  the  use  of  the  compound  sentence  is  rapid 
from  ten  to  eleven,  but  is  nearly  all  lost  during  the  next  year.  From 
twelve  to  fourteen  the  increase  is  again  rapid  for  the  boys,  while  a  yet 
greater  gain  is  made  by  the  girls  from  twelve  to  thirteen."  The  cul- 
mination of  the  curve  for  girls  precedes  that  of  the  boys  by  about  a 
year.  The  adverbial  subordinate  sentence  was  the  form  most  fre- 
quently used  by  children  of  all  ages,  it  being  most  common  at  twelve 
and  from  thirteen  to  fifteen  decreasing  for  boys.  From  eleven  to 
twelve  there  was  great  increase  in  the  proportion  of  the  substantive 
subordinate  sentence,  especially  in  boys.  There  was  a  marked  tendency 
to  increase  the  number  of  words  in  a  sentence  with  age,  which  seemed 
to  "  reflect  in  some  measure  mental  peculiarities  of  puberty  and  early 
adolescence."  The  long  sentences  at  this  age  are  often  highly  in- 
volved and  complex,  as  if  many  mental  items  were  struggling  for  sug- 
gestion but  tended  to  break  down  old  limits.  In  extreme  instances, 
sentences  of  very  great  length  are  used.  Sherman's  Analytics  of 
Literature  concludes  that  the  percentage  of  simple  sentences  in  good 
English  literature  has  increased  from  four  per  cent  to  thirty-three  and 
one-third  per  cent;  that  the  average  number  of  predicates  has  fallen 
from  five  and  a  fraction  to  two  and  a  fraction  per  cent;  that  the 
average  sentence  length  has  decreased  about  sixty-six  and  two 
thirds  per  cent,  as  written  now  tends  to  approach  the  characteris- 
tics of  oral  speech.  This  conclusion,  if  true,  has  immediate  practical 
bearings. 

Mr.  Sanford  Bell  writes,  "  My  experience  during  eleven  years  of 
teaching  and  supervising  convinces  me  that  the  language  curve  drops 
below  the  thought  curve  in  the  fifth  grade,  when  the  child  is  eleven 
or  twelve,  and  continues  .there  for  some  years."  He  expresses  the 
opinion  that  the  elaborate  analyses  of  grammatical  matter  and  of 
arithmetical  processes  seriously  interfere  with  the  progress  of  the 
child,  and  that  "  five  times  as  much  work  "  as  is  usually  prescribed 
can  be  done  in  arithmetic,  if  the  children  are  allowed  to  take  any 
short  cuts  they  please  to  solve  the  problems,  either  mentally  or  with 
the  pencil,  and  are  freed  from  the  obnoxious  formulas.  He  also  thinks 
that  the  requirements  of  grammatical  accuracy  seriously  interfere  not 
only  with  the  function  of  language  to  express  thought,  but  with 
thought  itself. 

Of  Conradi's  133  reports  on  the  long  sentence  habit,  more  than 
two-thirds  were  reminiscent  and  rather  more  than  half  were  before 
the  teens.  The  causes  were  imitation,  ignorance  of  sentence  structure, 
impetuosity,  etc.  Closely  connected  with  this  is  the  love  of  quoting 
pretty  phrases  and  album  poetry.  Conradi  gives  many  interesting 
specimens  and  quotes  many  of  these  under  the  captions :  Wise  sayings, 


472  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

despondency,  optimism,  altruism,  heroic  self-affirmation,  love,  with 
many  miscellanies. 

The  sentence-sense  is  often  weakened  along  with  the  power  of 
sequent  logical  thought  and  the  construction  is  often  changed. 
Thought  can  not  be  stated  in  concise  form  but  is  spun  out  with  copu- 
las and  no  periodicity,  and  jargon,  provincialism,  and  often  profane 
and  obscene  expressions  occur  that  owe  a  large  part  of  their  charm 
to  the  fact  that  they  are  tabooed  in  good  society;  diction  is  stilted 
or  poetic,  there  are  endless  iterations,  words  used  with  remotely 
suggested  meanings,  or  sheer  nullity  of  thought.  Verbigeration  alter- 
nates with  taciturnity  and  even  mutism,  fatuity  with  flashes  of  genius, 
animals'  noises,  cars,  machinery,  wind,  etc.,  are  imitated  often  with 
more  or  less  virtuosoship. 

Of  Conradi's  returns  twenty-eight  per  cent  had  aped  some  stylistic 
writer  either  consciously  or  unconsciously.  Some  were  charmed  by 
the  periods  of  Hugo,  Macaulay,  Dickens,  Addison,  Emerson,  Mark 
Twain,  Mrs.  Southworth,  Miss  Alcott,  or  many  others,  or  cultivated 
newspaperism  or  the  forms  of  polite  letter-writing,  etc. 

Just  fifty  per  cent  of  Conradi's  cases,  mostly  in  the  early  teens, 
had  tried  their  hand  at  spontaneous  original  poetry  generally  concern- 
ing either  living  persons,  nature,  or  religious  themes.  Many  of  the 
first  class  are  humorous,  of  all  of  which  this  writer  prints  suggestive 
samples. 

This  propensity  for  narration  has  been  very  strong  in  the  youth 
of  many  eminent  authors.  Goethe  spun  long  tales  for  the  delectation 
of  not  only  children  but  adults,  one  of  which  he  tells  at  length  in  his 
autobiography.  Beth  invented  incidents  and  personated  in  costume 
the  characters  of  her  plots.  George  Sand  and  the  anonymous  author 
of  the  Autobiography  of  a  Child,  and  many  others,  excelled  in  this, 
when  the  latter  became  interested  in  genealogy,  invented  a  family 
named  L'Estrange,  who  came  over  with  William  the  Conqueror,  and 
the  chief  of  which  as  a  certificate  of  chivalry  fought  at  the  Battle  of 
Hastings.  He  had  shining  armor  and  golden  hair  and  wondrous  eyes, 
and  they  married  him  to  an  imaginary  heroine.  To  stimulate  their 
imagination  a  cemetery  was  founded  with  wooden  tombstones  for  all 
the  L'Estranges  since,  where  every  one  after  his  history  had  been 
developed  as  far  down  as  the  Battle  of  Bosworth  Field,  was  buried. 
The  epitaphs  they  devised  showed  that  all  their  heroes  were  brave 
as  lions,  mild  as  lambs,  and  stainless  as  Galahads. 

Children  sometimes  float  off  in  complete  absorption  in  some  realm 
of  fancy.  One  girl,  as  she  stood  by  the  window,  was  a  captive  princess 
in  some  palace  waiting  for  a  fairy  prince  to  release  her,  and  at  the 
same  time  catching  flies.  Boys'  tales  are  of  hunting,  adventure,  vast 
wealth,  power,  cunning,  fights,  and  the  improbabilities  gradually  de- 
cline with  advancing  age.     Following  are  a  few  observations : 

In  a  very  interesting  study  of  the  continued  story,'  Miss  Learoyd 

^  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  October,  1S95,  vol.  vii,  pp.  86-90. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  473 

found  ninety-three  adults  who  had  formed  the  habit  of  carrying  on 
narratives  in  their  minds,  and  that  nearly  two-thirds  of  all  the  children 
did  so.  The  narratives  are  imaginative,  unwritten,  and  may  be  of  the 
type  of  the  fairy  tale  and  Marchen  common  in  childhood,  or  of  the 
romance  and  adventure  peculiar  to  adolescence ;  ideal  at  all  ages,  but 
more  practical  in  later  life.  In  childhood  the  habit  is  nearly  as  com- 
mon among  boys  as  among  girls,  but  in  maturity  nearly  three  times  as 
frequent  among  women.  Some  continue  one  story  for  weeks,  and  sixty- 
four  prolonged  them  for  years.  Others  have  hundreds  of  short  stories. 
Solitude  and  night  are  favorable.  The  starting-point  may  be  some- 
thing read  or  real  life.  The  habit  is  sometimes  thought  helpful,  but 
occasionally  is  deemed  adverse  to  sleep,  and  tends  to  absent-minded- 
ness. Some  develop  almost  illusionary  intensity;  the  characters  grow 
with  the  child;  often  there  is  hardly  any  plot  and  the  story  moves  on, 
weaving  itself,  the  weaver  often  being  the  hero  around  whom  every- 
thing centers,  and  visualizing  the  minutest  details  about  the  charac- 
ters. It  may  end  with  the  hero's  death,  and  then  often  another  is 
started. 

One  hundred  and  thiity-seven  children,  well  distributed  between 
the  ages  of  six  and  a  half  and  fifteen,  were  asked  to  write  a  story  on 
any  topic  of  their  own  choice.  The  younger  children  mostly  wrote  of 
personal  experiences  or  general  topics,  while  the  experiences  of  others 
came  into  prominence  near  the  dawn  of  adolescence.  At  that  time  the 
stories  showed  a  marked  increase  in  length,  complexity  of  plot  and 
climax.  The  aim  was  more  real  and  dominant,  and  occasionally  de- 
scriptions were  interspersed.  While  the  young  children  had  used 
mainly  verbs  and  especially  nouns,  mostly  names  of  persons  and 
familiar  objects,  personal  pronouns,  articles,  and  prepositions  increased 
with  age,  and  adjectives,  which  first  refer  chiefly  to  size  and  beauty, 
come  into  dominance,  as  do  conjunctions,  which  are  very  rare  with 
younger  children.^ 

One  girl  of  fifteen,  who  was  much  alone  in  the  country,  was  in  the 
habit  of  beginning  and  thinking  out  long  social  romances  involving 
a  dozen  or  twenty  people.  Each  of  these  had  his  own  name  and 
characteristics,  and  she  would  think  out  a  section  of  the  story  involv- 
ing incidents  chronologically  connected.  Everything  could  be  dropped 
any  time,  but  was  always  begun  on  the  next  occasion  exactly  where 
it  left  off.  Another  girl  at  the  same  age  told  her  stories  to  groups 
of  school  children,  who  came  at  stated  times  once  or  twice  a  week, 
and  whom  she  held  enchanted  sometimes  for  an  hour  or  two.  A  boy  of 
fourteen  developed  unusual  power  in  telling  tales  full  of  wonder  and 
stilted  heroism  to  his  mates.  These  he  was  able  to  begin  without 
premeditation  at  any  time  and  to  carry  the  plot  on  to  an  almost  indefi- 
nite length,  but  every  session  brought  forth  a  new  story.  Another,  at 
the  age  of  fourteen,  had  great  infatuation  for  stories  of  the  Sylvanus 

^Children's  Stories,  by  S.  W.  Eaton.  Fed.  Sem.,  October,  1895,  vol.  iii,  pp. 
334-335 


474  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Cobb  and  Mrs.  Southworth  order,  and  covered  nearly  half  a  ream  of 
paper  one  spring  and  summer  in  working  out  the  romance  of  Devil's 
Dare.  It  was  a  tale  of  incredible  prowess  and  adventure,  underground 
passages  and  hair-breadth  escapes,  and  written  in  red  ink  to  symbolize 
the  gore  which  flowed  so  freely  through  its  pages.  His  mother  found 
out  what  he  was  doing  and  undertook  to  read  it,  but  her  maternal  in- 
terest was  not  quite  equal  to  the  task  of  finishing  it.  This,  however, 
was  accomplished  by  a  somewhat  younger  girl  cousin,  who  professed  to 
await  with  eager  interest  every  new  section,  and  always  longed  for 
more. 

Interest  in  story-telling  rises  till  twelve  or  thirteen,  and 
thereafter  falls  off  perhaps  rather  suddenly,  partly  because 
youth  is  now  more  interested  in  receiving  than  in  giving.  As 
in  the  drawing  curve  we  saw  a  characteristic  age  when  the  child 
loses  pleasure  in  creating  as  its  power  of  appreciating  pictures 
rapidly  arises,  so  now  as  the  reading  curve  rises  auditory 
receptivity  makes  way  for  the  visual  method  shown  in  the  rise 
of  the  reading  curve  with  augmented  zest  for  book-method  of 
acquisition.  Darkness  or  twilight  enhances  the  story  interest 
in  children,  for  it  eliminates  the  distraction  of  sense  and  en- 
courages the  imagination  to  unfold  its  pinions,  but  the 
youthful  fancy  is  less  bat-like  and  can  take  its  boldest  flights 
in  broad  daylight.  A  camp-fire,  or  an  open  hearth  with  tales 
of  animals,  ghosts,  heroism,  and  adventure  can  teach  virtue, 
and  vocabulary,  style,  and  substance  in  their  native  unity. 

The  pubescent  reading  passion  is  partly  the  cause  and 
partly  an  effect  of  the  new  zest  in  and  docility  to  the  adult 
world  and  also  of  the  fact  that  the  receptive  are  now  and  here 
so  immeasurably  in  advance  of  the  creative  powers.  Now  the 
individual  transcends  his  own  experience  and  learns  to  profit 
by  that  of  others.  There  is  now  evolved  a  penumbral  region 
in  the  soul  more  or  less  beyond  the  reach  of  all  school  methods, 
a  world  of  glimpses  and  hints,  and  the  work  here  is  that  of 
the  prospector  and  not  of  the  careful  miner.  It  is  the  age  of 
skipping  and  sampling,  of  pressing  the  keys  lightly.  What  is 
acquired  is  not  examinable  but  only  suggestive.  Perhaps  noth- 
ing read  now  fails  to  leave  its  mark.  It  can  not  be  orally 
reproduced  at  call,  but  on  emergency  it  is  at  hand  for  use.  As 
Augustine  said  of  God,  so  the  child  might  say  of  most  of  his 
mental  content  in  these  psychic  areas,  "  If  you  ask  me,  I  do 
not  know ;  but  if  you  do  not  ask  me,  I  know  very  well  " — a 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  475 

case  analogous  to  the  typical  girl  who  exclaimed  to  her  teacher, 
"  I  can  do  and  understand  this  perfectly  if  you  only  won't  ex- 
plain it."  That  is  why  examinations  in  English,  if  not  im- 
possible, as  Goldwin  Smith  and  Oxford  hold,  are  very  liable 
to  be  harmful,  and  recitations  and  critical  notes  an  imperti- 
nence, and  always  in  danger  of  causing  arrest  of  this  exquisite 
romantic  function  in  which  literature  comes  in  the  closest 
rapport  to  life,  keeping  the  heart  warm,  reenforcing  all  its 
good  motives,  preforming  choices,  and  universalizing  its  sym- 
pathies. 

R.  W.  Bullock  ^  classified  and  tabulated  2,000  returns  from  school- 
children from  the  third  to  the  twelfth  grade,  both  inclusive,  concern- 
ing their  reading.  From  this  it  appeared  that  the  averag-e  boy  of  the 
third  grade  "  read  4.9  books  in  six  months ;  that  the  average  falls  to 
3.6  in  the  fourth  and  fifth  grades  and  rises  to  a  maximum  of  6.5  in 
the  seventh  grade,  then  drops  quite  regularly  to  3  in  the  tw^elfth  grade 
at  the  end  of  the  high  school  course."  The  independent  tabulation  of 
returns  from  other  cities  showed  little  variation.  "  Grade  for  grade, 
the  girls  re£,d  more  than  the  boys,  and  as  a  rule  they  reach  their  maxi- 
mum a  year  sooner,  and  from  a  general  maximum  of  5.9  books  there 
is  a  drop  tp  3.3  at  the  end  of  the  course."  The  age  of  maximum 
reading  may  be  postponed  or  accelerated  perhaps  nearly  a  year  by  the 
absence  or  presence  of  library  facilities.  Tabulating  the  short  stories 
read  per  week,  it  was  found  that  these  averaged  2.1  in  the  third  grade, 
rose  to  y.y  per  week  in  the  seventh  grade,  and  in  the  twelfth  had  fallen 
to  2.3,  showing  the  same  general  tendency. 

The  percentage  tables  for  boys'  preference  for  eight  classes  of 
stories  are  here  only  suggestive.  "  War  stories  seem  popular  with 
third  grade  boys,  and  that  liking  seems  well  marked  through  the  sixth, 
seventh,  and  eighth  grades.  Stories  of  adventure  are  popular  all 
through  the  heroic  period,  reaching  their  maximum  in  the  eighth 
and  ninth  grades.  The  liking  for  biography  and  travel  or  exploration 
grows  gradually  to  a  climax  in  the  ninth  grade,  and  remains  well  up 
through  the  course.  The  tender  sentiment  has  little  charm  for  the 
average  grade  boy,  and  only  in  the  high  school  course  does  he  ac- 
knowledge any  considerable  use  of  love  stories.  In  the  sixth  grade 
he  is  fond  of  detective  stories,  but  they  lose  their  charm  for  him  as 
he  grows  older."  For  girls,  "  stories  of  adventure  are  popular  in  the 
sixth  grade,  and  stories  of  travel  are  always  enjoyed.  The  girl  likes 
biography,  but  in  the  high  school,  true  to  her  sex,  she  prefers  stories 
of  great  women  rather  than  great  men,  but  because  she  can  not  get 
them  reads  those  of  men.     Pity  it  is  that  the  biographies  of  so  few 

^  Some  Observations  on  Children's  Reading.     Proc.  of  the  N.  E.  A.,  1897,  p. 
1015. 


476  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

of  the  world's  many  great  women  are  written.  The  taste  for  love 
stories  increases  steadily  to  the  end  of  the  high  school  course.  Beyond 
that  we  have  no  record."  Thus  "  the  maximum  amount  of  reading 
is  done  in  every  instance  between  the  sixth  and  eighth  grades,  the  aver- 
age being  in  the  seventh  grade  at  an  average  age  of  fourteen  and  one- 
tenth  years."  Seventy-five  per  cent  of  all  discuss  their  reading  with 
some  one,  and  the  writer  urges  that  "  when  ninety-five  per  cent  of  the 
boys  prefer  adventure  or  seventy-five  per  cent  of  the  girls  prefer  love 
stories,  that  is  what  they  are  going  to  read,"  and  the  duty  of  the  teach- 
er or  librarian  is  to  see  that  they  have  both  in  the  highest,  purest  form. 

Henderson  ^  found  that  of  2,989  children  from  nine  to  fifteen,  least 
books  were  read  at  the  age  of  nine  and  most  at  the  age  of  fifteen,  and 
that  there  was  "  a  gradual  rise  in  amount  throughout,  the  only  break 
being  in  the  case  of  girls  at  the  age  of  fourteen  and  the  boys  at  the 
age  of  twelve."  For  fiction  the  high-water  mark  was  reached  for  both 
sexes  at  eleven,  and  the  subsequent  fall  is  far  less  rapid  for  girls  than 
for  boys.  "  At  the  age  of  thirteen  the  record  for  travel  and  adven- 
ture stands  highest  in  the  case  of  the  boys,  phenomenally  so.  There 
is  a  gradual  rise  in  history  with  age,  and  a  corresponding  decline  in 
fiction." 

Kirkpatrick  ^  classified  returns  from  5,000  children  from  the  fourth 
to  the  ninth  grade  in  answer  to  questions  that  concerned  their  reading. 
He  found  a  sudden  increase  in  the  sixth  grade,  when  children  are 
about  twelve,  when  there  is  often  a  veritable  reading  craze.  Dolls 
are  abandoned  and  "  plays,  games,  and  companionship  of  others  are 
less  attractive,  and  the  reading  hunger  in  many  children  becomes  in- 
vSatiable  and  is  often  quite  indiscriminate."  It  seems  to  "  most  fre- 
quently begin  at  about  twelve  years  of  age  and  continue  at  least  three 
or  four  years,"  after  which  increased  home  duties,  social  responsibili- 
ties, and  school  requirements  reduce  it  and  make  it  more  discriminating 
in  quality.  "  The  fact  that  boys  read  about  twice  as  much  history  and 
travel  as  girls  and  only  about  two-thirds  as  much  poetry  and  stories 
shows  beyond  question  that  the  emotional  and  intellectual  wants  of 
boys  and  girls  are  essentially  different  before  sexual  maturity." 

Miss  Vostrovsky^  found  that  among  1,269  children  there  was  a 
great  increase  of  taste  for  reading  as  shown  by  the  number  of  books 
taken  from  the  library,  which  began  with  a  sharp  rise  at  eleven  and 
increased  steadily  to  nineteen,  when  her  survey  ended;  that  boys  read 
most  till  seventeen,  and  then  girls  took  the  precedence.  The  taste  for 
juvenile  stories  is  declining  and  that  for  fiction  and  general  literature 
is  rapidly  increased.    At  about  the  sixteenth  year  a  change  took  place 

'Report  on  Child  Reading.     New  York  Report  of  State  Supt.,  1897,  vol.  ii, 

P-  979- 

*  Children's  Reading.  North-Western  Mo.,  December,  1898,  vol.  ix,  p.  188, 
and  January,  1899,  vol.  ix,  p.  229. 

^  A  Study  of  Children's  Reading  Tastes.  Fed.  Sem.,  December,  1899,  vol.  vi, 
PP-  523-535- 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  477 

in  both  sexes,  "  showing  then  the  beginning  of  a  greater  interest  in 
works  of  a  more  general  character."  Girls  read  more  fiction  than  boys 
at  every  age,  but  the  interest  in  it  begins  to  be  very  decided  at  adoles- 
cence. With  girls  it  appears  to  come  a  little  earlier  and  with  greater 
suddenness,  while  the  juvenile  story  maintains  a  strong  hold  upon  boys 
even  after  the  fifteenth  year.  The  curve  of  decline  in  juvenile  stories  is 
much  more  pronounced  in  both  sexes  than  the  rise  of  fiction.  Through 
the  teens  there  is  a  great  increase  in  the  definiteness  of  answers  to 
the  questions  why  books  were  chosen.  Instead  of  being  read  because 
they  were  good  or  nice,  they  were  read  because  recommended,  and 
later  because  of  some  special  interest.  Girls  relied  on  recommenda- 
tions more  than  boys.  The  latter  were  more  guided  by  reason  and  the 
former  by  sentiment.  Nearly  three  times  as  many  boys  in  the  early 
teens  chose  books  because  they  were  exciting  or  venturesome.  Even 
the  stories  which  girls  called  exciting  were  tame  compared  with  those 
chosen  by  boys.  Girls  chose  books  more  than  four  times  as  often  be- 
cause of  children  in  them,  and  more  often  because  they  were  funny. 
Boys  care  very  little  for  style,  but  must  have  incidents  and  heroes. 
The  author  says  "  the  special  interest  that  girls  have  in  fiction  begins 
about  the  age  of  adolescence.  After  the  sixteenth  year  the  extreme 
delight  in  stories  fades,"  or  school  demands  become  more  imperative 
and  uniform.  Girls  prefer  domestic  stories  and  those  with  characters 
like  themselves  and  scenes  more  like  those  with  which  they  are  fa- 
miliar. "  No  boy  confesses  to  a  purely  girl's  story,  while  girls  frankly 
do  to  an  interesting  story  about  boys.  Women  writers  seem  to  appeal 
more  to  girls,  men  writers  to  boys.  Hence,  the  authors  named  by  each 
sex  are  almost  entirely  different.  In  fiction  more  standard  works  were 
drawn  by  boys  than  by  girls."  "  When  left  to  develop  according  to 
chance,  the  tendency  is  often  toward  a  selection  of  books  which  unfit 
one  for  every-day  living,  either  by  presenting,  on  the  one  hand,  too 
many  scenes  of  delicious  excitement  or,  on  the  other,  by  narrowing 
the  vision  to  the  wider  possibilities  of  life." 

Out  of  523  full  answers,  Lancaster  found  that  453  "  had  what  might 
be  called  a  craze  for  reading  at  some  time  in  the  adolescent  period," 
and  thinks  parents  little  realize  the  intensity  of  the  desire  to  read  or 
how  this  nascent  period  is  the  golden  age  to  cultivate  taste  and  inocu- 
late against  reading  what  is  bad.  The  curve  rises  rapidly  from  eleven 
to  fourteen,  culminates  at  fifteen,  after  which  it  falls  rapidly.  Some 
become  omnivorous  readers  of  everything  in  their  way;  others  are 
profoundly,  and  perhaps  for  life,  impressed  with  some  single  book ; 
others  have  now  crazes  for  history,  now  for  novels,  now  for  dramas 
or  for  poetry ;  some  devour  encyclopedias ;  some  imagine  themselves 
destined  to  be  great  novelists  and  compose  long  romances ;  some  can 
give  the  dates  with  accuracy  of  the  different  periods  of  the  develop- 
ment of  their  tastes  from  the  fairy  tales  of  early  childhood  to  the 
travels  and  adventures  of  boyhood  and  then  to  romance,  poetry,  his- 
tory, etc. ;  and  some  give  the  order  of  their  development  of  taste  for 
the  great  poets. 


47 8  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

The  careful  statistics  of  Dr.  Reyer  show  that  the  greatest  greed 
of  reading  is  from  the  age  of  fifteen  to  twenty-two,  and  is  on  the 
average  greatest  of  all  at  twenty.  He  finds  that  ten  per  cent  of  the 
young  people  of  this  age  do  forty  per  cent  of  all  the  reading.  Before 
twenty  the  curve  ascends  very  rapidly,  to  fall  afterward  yet  more 
rapidly  as  the  need  of  bread-winning  becomes  imperative.  After 
thirty-five  the  great  public  reads  but  little.  Every  youth  should  have 
his  or  her  own  library,  which,  however  small,  should  be  select.  To 
seal  some  knowledge  of  their  content  with  the  delightful  sense  of 
ownership  helps  to  preserve  the  apparatus  of  culture,  keeps  green  early 
memories,  or  makes  one  of  the  best  of  tangible  mementoes  of  parental 
care  and  love.  For  the  young  especially,  the  only  ark  of  safety  in  the 
dark  and  rapidly  rising  flood  of  printer's  ink  is  to  turn  resolutely 
away  from  the  ideal  of  quantity  to  that  of  quality.  While  literature 
rescues  youth  from  individual  limitations  and  enables  it  to  act  and 
think  more  as  spectators  of  all  time,  and  sharers  of  all  existence,  the 
passion  for  reading  may  be  excessive,  and  books  which  from  the  silent 
alcoves  of  our  nearly  5,500  American  libraries  rule  the  world  more 
now  than  ever  before,  may  cause  the  young  to  neglect  the  oracles 
within,  weaken  them  by  too  wide  reading,  make  conversation  bookish, 
and  overwhelm  spontaneity  and  originality  with  a  superfetation  of 
alien  ideas. 

The  reading  passion  may  rage  with  great  intensity  when 
the  soul  takes  its  first  long  flight  in  the  world  of  books,  and 
ninety  per  cent  of  all  Conradi's  cases  showed  it.  Of 
these,  thirty-two  per  cent  read  to  have  the  feelings  stirred  and 
the  desire  of  knowledge  was  a  far  less  frequent  motive. 
Some  read  to  pass  idle  time,  others  to  appear  learned  or 
to  acquire  a  style  or  a  vocabulary.  Romance  led.  Some 
specialized,  and  with  some  the  appetite  was  omnivorous. 
Some  preferred  books  about  or  addressed  to  children,  some 
fairy  tales,  and  some  sought  only  those  for  adults.  The  night 
is  often  invaded  and  some  become  "  perfectly  wild "  over 
exciting  adventures  or  the  dangers  and  hardships  of  true 
lovers,  laughing  and  crying  as  the  story  turns  from  grave 
to  gay,  and  a  few  read  several  books  a  week.  Some  were  for- 
bidden and  read  by  stealth  alone,  or  with  books  hidden  in  their 
desks  or  under  school  books.  Some  few  live  thus  for  years 
in  an  atmosphere  highly  charged  with  romance,  and  burn  out 
their  fires  wickedly  early  with  a  sudden  and  extreme  expan- 
siveness  that  makes  life  about  them  uninteresting  and  unreal, 
and  that  reacts  to  commonplace  later.  Conradi  prints  some 
two  to  three  hundred  favorite  books  and  authors  of  early  and 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  479 

of  later  adolescence.  The  natural  reading  of  early  youth  is 
not  classic  nor  blighted  by  compulsion  or  uniformity  for  all. 
This  age  seeks  to  express  originality  and  personality  in 
individual  choices  and  tastes. 

Suggestive  and  briefly  descriptive  lists  of  best  books  and 
authors  by  authorities  in  different  fields  on  which  some  time 
is  spent  in  making  selection,  talks  about  books,  pooling  knowl- 
edge of  them,  with  no  course  of  reading  even  advised  and 
much  less  prescribed,  is  the  best  guidance  for  developing  the 
habit  of  rapid  cursory  reading.  Others  before  Professor  De 
Long,  of  Colorado,  have  held  that  the  power  of  reading  a 
page  in  a  moment,  as  a  mathematician  sums  up  a  column  of 
figures,  and  as  the  artist  Dore  was  able  to  read  a  book  by  turn- 
ing the  leaves,  can  be  attained  by  training  and  practise. 
School  pressure  should  not  suppress  this  instinct  of  omniv- 
orous reading,  which  at  this  age  sometimes  prompts  the  re- 
solve to  read  encyclopedias,  and  even  libraries,  or  to  sample 
everything  to  be  found  in  books  at  home.  Along  with  but 
never  suppressing  it  there  should  be  some  stated  reading,  but 
this  should  lay  down  only  kinds  of  reading  like  the  four  em- 
phasized in  the  last  chapter  or  offer  a  goodly  number  of  large 
alternative  groups  of  books  and  authors  like  the  five  of  the 
Leland  Stanford  University  and  permit  wide  liberty  of  choice 
to  both  teacher  and  pupil.  Few  triumphs  of  the  uniformita- 
rians,  who  sacrifice  individual  needs  to  mechanical  convenience 
in  dealing  with  youth  in  masses,  have  been  so  sad  as  marking 
off  and  standardizing  a  definite  quantum  of  requirements  here. 
Instead  of  irrigating  a  wide  field,  the  well-springs  of  literary 
interest  are  forced  to  cut  a  deep  canyon  and  leave  wide  desert 
plains  of  ignorance  on  either  side.  Besides  imitation,  which 
reads  what  others  do,  is  the  desire  to  read  something  no  one 
else  does,  and  this  is  a  palladium  of  individuality.  Bad  as  is 
the  principle  the  selections  are  worse,  including  the  sac- 
charinity  ineffable  of  Tennyson's  Princess  (a  strange  expres- 
sion of  the  progressive  feminization  of  the  high  school  and  yet 
satirizing  the  scholastic  aspiration  of  girls)  which  the  virile 
boy  abhors,  books  about  books  which  are  two  removes  from 
life,  and  ponderous  Latinity  authors  which  for  the  Saxon  boy 
suggest  David  fighting  in  Saul's  armor,  and  which  warp  and 
pervert  the  nascent  sentence-sense  on  a  foreign  model.    Worst 


480  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

of  all,  the  prime  moral  purpose  of  youthful  reading  is  ignored 
in  choices  based  on  form  and  style,  and  a  growing  profusion 
of  notes  that  distract  from  content  to  language,  the  study  of 
which  belongs  in  the  college  if  not  in  the  university,  de- 
velops the  tendencies  of  criticism  before  the  higher  powers 
of  sympathetic  appreciation  have  done  their  work.^ 

(B)  Other  new  mental  powers  and  aptitudes  are  as  yet 
too  little  studied.  Very  slight  are  the  observations  so  far  made 
of  children's  historic,  w^hich  is  so  clearly  akin  to  literary,  in- 
terest and  capacity.  With  regard  to  this  and  several  other 
subjects  in  the  curriculum  we  are  in  the  state  of  Watts  when 
he  gazed  at  the  tea-kettle  and  began  to  dream  of  the  steam- 
engine  ;  we  are  just  recognizing  a  new  power  and  method 
destined  to  reconstruct  and  increase  the  efficiency  of  education, 
but  only  after  a  long  and  toilsome  period  of  limited  successes. 

Mrs.  Barnes  ^  told  a  story  without  date,  place,  name,  or  moral,  and 
compared  the  questions  which  1,250  children  would  like  to  have  an- 
swered about  it.  She  found  that  the  interest  of  girls  in  persons,  or  the 
number  who  asked  the  question  "  who,"  culminated  at  twelve,  when 
it  coincided  with  that  of  boys,  but  that  the  latter  continued  to  rise  to 
fifteen.  The  interest  to  know  "place  where"  events  occurred  culminated 
at  eleven  with  girls,  and  at  fifteen,  and  at  a  far  higher  point,  with  boys. 
The  questions  "  how  "  and  "  why,"  calling  for  the  method  and  reason, 
both  culminated  at  twelve  for  girls  and  fifteen  for  boys,  but  were 
more  infrequent  and  showed  less  age  differences  than  the  preceding 
question.    Interest  in  results  of  the  action  was  most  pronounced  of  all, 

1  Perhaps  the  best  and  most  notable  school  reader  is  Das  Deutsche  Lesebuch, 
begun  nearly  fifty  years  ago  by  Hopf  and  Paulsiek,  and  lately  supplemented  by  a 
corps  of  writers  headed  by  Dobeln,  all  in  ten  volumes  of  over  3,500  pages  and  con- 
taining nearly  six  times  as  much  matter  as  the  largest  American  series.  Many  men 
for  years  went  over  the  history  of  German  literature,  from  the  Eddas  and  Nibe- 
lungenlied  down,  including  a  few  living  writers,  carefully  selecting  saga,  legends, 
Mdrchen,  fables,  proverbs,  hymns,  a  few  prayers,  Bible  tales,  conundrums,  jests, 
and  humorous  tales,  with  many  digests,  epitomes  and  condensation  of  great  stand- 
ards, quotations,  epic,  lyric,  dramatic  poetry,  adventure,  e.xploration,  biography, 
with  sketches  of  the  life  of  each  writer  quoted,  with  a  large  final  volume  on  the 
history  of  German  literature.  All  this,  it  is  explained,  is  "  statarie"  or  required  to 
be  read  between  Okota-ua  and  Oberseainda.  It  is  no  aimless  anthology  or  chrestoma- 
thy  like  Chambers's  Encyclopedia,  but  it  is  perhaps  the  best  product  of  prolonged 
concerted  study  to  select  from  a  vast  field  the  best  to  feed  each  nascent  stage  of 
later  childhood  and  early  youth,  and  to  secure  the  maximum  of  pleasure  and  profit. 
The  ethical  end  is  dominant  throughout  this  pedagogic  canon. 

*  The  Historic  Sense  among  Children.  In  her  Studies  in  Historical  Method. 
Boston,  1896,  p.  57. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  4^1 

culminating  at  twelve  in  girls  and  fifteen  in  boys.  Details  and  time 
excited  far  less  interest,  the  former  jointly  culminating  for  both  sexes 
at  eleven.  Interest  in  the  truth  of  the  narrative  was  extremely  slight, 
although  it  became  manifest  at  fifteen,  and  was  growing  at  sixteen. 
The  number  of  inferences  drawn  steadily  increased  with  age,  although 
the  increase  was  very  slight  after  thirteen.  Both  legitimate  and  crit- 
ical inferences  increased  after  eleven,  while  imaginative  inferences  at 
that  age  had  nearly  reached  their  maximum.  Interest  in  names  was 
very  strong  throughout,  as  in  primitive  people.  Boys  were  more  curi- 
ous concerning  "who,"  "where,"  and  "how";  girls  as  to  "why." 
In  general,  the  historic  curiosity  of  boys  was  greater  than  that  of  girls, 
and  culminated  later.  The  inferences  drawn  from  an  imagined  finding 
of  a  log-house,  boat,  and  arrows  on  a  lonely  island  indicate  that  the 
power  of  inference,  both  legitimate  and  imaginative,  develops  strongly 
at  twelve  and  thirteen,  after  which  doubt  and  the  critical  faculties  are 
apparent ;  which  coincides  with  Mr.  M.  A.  Tucker's  conclusion,  that 
doubt  develops  at  thirteen  and  that  personal  inference  diminishes  about 
that  age. 

The  children  were  given  two  accounts  of  the  fall  of  Fort  Sumter, 
one  in  the  terms  of  a  school  history  and  the  other  a  despatch  of  equal 
length  from  Major  Anderson,  and  asked  which  was  best,  should  be 
kept,  and  why.  Choice  of  the  narrative  steadily  declined  after  eleven 
and  that  of  the  despatch  increased,  the  former  reaching  its  lowest,  the 
latter  its  highest,  point  at  fifteen,  indicating  a  preference  for  the  first- 
hand record.  The  number  of  those  whose  choice  was  affected  by 
style  showed  no  great  change  from  twelve  to  fifteen,  but  rose  very 
rapidly  for  the  next  two  years.  Those  who  chose  the  despatch  be- 
cause it  was  true,  signed,  etc.,  increased  rapidly  in  girls  and  boys 
throughout  the  teens,  and  the  preference  for  the  telegram  as  a  more 
direct  source  increased  very  rapidly  from  thirteen  to  seventeen. 

Other  studies  of  this  kind  led  Mrs.  Barnes  to  conclude  that  children 
remembered  items  by  groups;  that  whole  groups  were  often  omitted; 
that  those  containing  most  action  were  best  remembered;  that  what 
is  remembered  is  remembered  with  great  accuracy;  that  generalities 
are  often  made  more  specific ;  that  the  number  of  details  a  child  carries 
away  from  a  connected  narrative  is  not  much  above  fifty,  so  that  their 
numbers  should  be  limited ;  and  from  it  all  was  inferred  the  necessity 
of  accuracy,  of  massing  details  about  central  characters  or  incidents, 
letting  action  dominate,  omitting  all  that  is  aside  from  the  main  line 
of  the  story,  of  bringing  out  cause  and  effect,  and  dramatizing  where 
possible. 

Miss  Patterson '  collated  the  answers  of  2,237  children  to  the  ques- 
tion "  What  does  1895  mean?  "  The  blanks  "  Don't  know  "  decreased 
very  rapidly  from  six  to  eight,  and  thereafter  maintained  a  slight  but 
constant  percentage.    Those  who  expanded  the  phrase  a  little  without 

'  Special  Study  on  Children's  Sense  of  Historical  Time.     Mrs.  Barnes's  Studies 
in  Historical  Method,  p.  94. 
70 


482  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

intelligence  were  most  numerous  from  eight  to  ten,  while  the  propor- 
tion who  gave  a  correct  explanation  rose  quite  steadily  for  both  sexes 
and  culminated  at  fourteen  for  girls  and  fifteen  for  boys.  The  latter 
only  indicates  the  pupils  of  real  historic  knowledge.  The  writer  con- 
cludes that  "  the  sense  of  historical  time  is  altogether  lacking  with 
children  of  seven,  and  may  be  described  as  slight  up  to  the  age  of 
twelve."  History,  it  is  thought,  should  be  introduced  early  with  no 
difference  between  boys  and  girls,  but  "  up  to  the  age  of  twelve  or 
thirteen  it  should  be  presented  in  a  series  of  striking  biographies  and 
events,  appearing  if  possible  in  contemporary  ballads  and  chronicles, 
and  illustrated  by  maps,  chronologic  charts,  and  as  richly  as  possible 
by  pictures  of  contemporary  objects,  buildings,  and  people."  At  the 
age  of  fourteen  or  fifteen  another  sort  of  work  should  appear.  Orig- 
inal sources  should  still  be  used,  but  they  should  illustrate  not  "  the 
picture  of  human  society  moving  before  us  in  a  long  panorama,  but 
should  give  us  the  opportunity  to  study  the  organization,  thought, 
feeling,  of  a  time  as  seen  in  its  concrete  embodiments,  its  documents, 
monuments,  men,  and  books."  The  statesmen,  thinkers,  poets,  should 
now  exceed  explorers  and  fighters ;  reflection  and  interpretation,  dis- 
crimination of  the  true  from  the  false,  comparison,  etc.,  are  now  first 
in  order;  while  later  yet,  perhaps  in  college,  should  come  severer 
methods  and  special  monographic  study. 

Studies  of  mentality,  so  well  advanced  for  infants  and  so 
well  begun  for  lower  grades,  are  still  very  meager  for  adoles- 
cent stages  so  far  as  they  bear  on  growth  in  the  power  to 
deal  with  arithmetic,  drawing  and  pictures,  puzzles,  super- 
stitions, collections,  attention,  reason,  etc.  Enough  has  been 
done  to  show  that  with  authority  to  collect  data  on  plans 
and  by  methods  that  can  now  be  operated  and  with  aid  which 
should  now  be  appropriated  by  school  boards  and  teachers' 
associations,  incalculable  pedagogic  economy  could  be  secured 
and  the  scientific  and  professional  character  of  teaching  every 
topic  in  upper  grammar  and  high  school  and  even  in  the  early 
college  grades  be  greatly  enhanced.  To  enter  upon  this 
laborious  task  in  every  branch  of  study  is  perhaps  our  chief 
present  need  and  duty  to  our  youth  in  school,  although  in- 
dividual studies  like  that  of  Binet  belong  elsewhere.  Below 
is  a  description  of  the  few  tentatives  that  suggest  mental 
changes  of  puberty  relative  to  a  few  of  the  above  topics,  rea- 
soning power,  etc. 

J.  A.  Hancock  ^  undertook  a  statistical  study  of  children's  ability 
to  reason  by  giving  them  a  number  of  carefully  devised  sums  in  arith- 

>Ed.  Rev.,  October,  1896. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  4^3 

metic.  He  found  in  going  up  the  grades  the  greatest  oscillation  of  in- 
crease and  decrease  in  the  number  of  failures  and  apparently  in  the 
power  of  numerical  analysis.  But  his  figures  showed  that  the  rate  of 
decrease  in  error  is  most  rapid  at  thirteen  and  fifteen,  although  at  four- 
teen errors  are  nearly  as  numerous  as  at  twelve.  Girls  improved  till 
they  were  ten  and  then  lost,  but  after  a  year  improved  again.  From 
this  work  it  would  appear  that  children  can  not  reason  much  beyond 
their  experience  and  environment  until  about  the  age  of  puberty. 
These  conclusions  are  based  on  returns  studied  for  the  purpose  of  500 
or  more  children  of  each  age  from  seven  to  fifteen.  Queyrat  in  his 
Logique  chez  I'enfant,  Paris,  1902,  chap,  iii,  abundantly  illustrates  the 
lack  of  reasoning  power  in  children,  indisposed  as  he  is  to  await 
maturer  season. 

Voris '  found  that  the  seventh  school  year  was  more  accurate  in 
fundamental  operations  of  arithmetic,  and  that  the  subsequent  year 
shows  not  only  no  progress,  but  a  tendency  to  decline.  More  errors 
were  indicated  in  the  lower  work  of  the  high  school  than  in  the  eighth 
grammar  grade,  and  there  was  little  progress  from  the  fifth  to  the 
eighth,  indicating  a  stationary  period. 

Dr.  Hoffmann  developed  a  simple  story  as  a  result  of  careful  study 
of  children's  interests,  which  strongly  appealed  to  them.^  This  Barnes 
translated,  and  had  it  read  twice  to  children,  who  were  told  to  draw 
whatever  pictures  it  suggested.  He  collated  these  from  6,392  children, 
who  drew  15,218  scenes,  the  meeting  with  the  dog  and  rescue  after  a 
fall  into  the  river  predominating.  While  at  six  each  child  drew  an 
average  of  1.6  scenes,  the  latter  increased  in  number,  culminating  in 
girls  at  thirteen  and  boys  at  fourteen,  each  of  whom  averaged  more 
than  3  scenes  each.  This  number  declined  until  seventeen,  when  the 
census  ended  as  if  the  children  became  less  daring  in  expression. 
"  The  courage  to  express  ideas  through  drawing  increases  in  Califor- 
nia children  until  they  are  thirteen  or  fourteen  years  old,  and  then 
steadily  decreases."  Lukens '  and  others  have  confirmed  this  point. 
All  who  declined  to  draw  were  over  thirteen.  Other  studies  show  that 
at  this  age  there  is  a  change  of  ideals,  and  that  children  more  fully 
realize  that  they  can  not  execute  what  they  see.  Collating  12,740 
faces,  full  faces  decreased  and  profiles  increased  till  at  thirteen  there 
were  twice  as  many  of  the  latter  as  of  the  former,  the  equality  point 
being  between  nine  and  ten. 

Miss  Herrick*  classified  1.324  drawings  of  451  children  made  to 
illustrate  the  same  poem  and  on  the  same  conditions.  There  were  in 
all   1,313  faces  in  these  drawings,  tabulation  of  which  showed  that 

'  Unpublished  Dissertation.  Study  of  Children's  Errors  in  Examination  Papers. 
Indiana  University,  1900. 

^  See  his  Der  Struwwelpeter.     Hans  Guck-in-die-Luft. 

^A  .Study  of  Children's  Drawings  in  the  Early  Years.  Fed.  Sem.,  October, 
1896,  vol.  iv,  pp.  79-110. 

■•Children's  Drawings.     Ped.  Sem.,  October,  1895,  vol.  iii,  pp.  338,  339 


484  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

whereas  young  children  always  tend  to  draw  the  full  face,  profile 
seems  well  established  by  nine,  and  rather  tends  to  increase  up  to 
fourteen,  when  this  census  ends. 

Indian  children  ^  were  found  to  draw  the  maximal  number  of  fig- 
ures at  six  or  seven,  and  then  interest  in  drawing  somewhat  declined 
as  they  learned  to  write,  but  later  returned;  the  greatest  variety  of 
objects  drawn  was  found  in  girls  of  eleven  and  boys  of  twelve,  but 
this  later  declined  till  sixteen.  Animals,  birds,  and  man  were  often 
chosen  by  the  boys  in  the  earlier  years.  Flowers  were  most  frequent 
for  girls  from  twelve  to  fifteen,  and  conventional  figures  were  domi- 
nant for  both  sexes  at  fifteen. 

Miss  Maitland  ^  was  able  to  study  the  spontaneous  drawings  of  65 
Eskimo  children.  Up  to  ten,  thirty-three  per  cent  were  picture 
stories,  and  this  "  catalogued  frieze  "  work  predominated  over  repre- 
sentative work.  Up  to  ten  or  eleven,  drawing  is  a  language  and 
represents  their  own  environment.  There  are  very  many  human  fig- 
ures, and  both  men  and  animals  are  full  of  action. 

Lancaster's  returns '  indicate  that  fifty  to  seventy-five  per  cent  of 
young  people  are  profoundly  moved  by  art  at  this  stage  of  life,  al- 
though the  fervor  usually  lasts  but  a  few  months  or  at  most  a  year 
or  two.  It  was  not  a  sign  of  artistic  ability,  but  only  of  the  awakening 
emotional  nature.  The  change  in  pictures  was  generally  from  the 
bright-colored  pictures  of  action  to  quiet  scenes  of  sentiment.  Now, 
a  picture  may  be  interesting  without  animals  or  a  person  in  it.  Those 
pictures  that  show  deep  emotion  or  are  thought  to  reveal  the  heart 
are  preferred.  Some  now  become  very  conscious  of  inartistic  archi- 
tecture, wall  paper,  etc.,  and  make  new  demands  upon  their  home  or 
environment.  Classical  pictures,  which  have  sometimes  passed  unno- 
ticed or  even  been  hated,  now  begin  to  move  the  soul.  "  In  our  house 
hung  Angelo's  Madonna.  I  hated  it  and  would  make  terrible  faces  at 
it  as  a  child.  At  fifteen  it  suddenly  struck  me  with  a  beauty  that 
nothing  else  has  ever  made  me  feel.  The  Madonna  came  to  be  my 
ideal."     Many  speak  of  now  loving  landscapes  for  the  first  time. 

A  study  of  children's  passion  for  collecting  *  was  made  on  a  basis 
of  607  boys  and  the  same  number  of  girls,  as  measured  by  the  number 
of  things  collected,  which  reached  its  greatest  intensity  at  ten  and 
declined,  although  with  considerable  persistence,  through  the  teens. 
Two  hundred  and  fourteen  kinds  of  collection  for  each  sex  were 
studied  and  sexual  differences  stood  out  more  markedly  at  adolescence. 
At  eleven  or  twelve  there  was  more  interest  in  the  things  than  in 


'  Favorite  Drawings  of  Indian  Children,  by  Louisa  McDermott.     North-West- 
ern  Monthly,  September,   1897,  vol.  viii,  p.  134. 

*  Notes  on  Eskimo  Drawings.     North-Western  Mo.,  June,  1899,  vol.  ix,  p.  443. 

*  Psychology  and  Pedagogy  of  Adolescence  Fed.  Sem.  July  1897,  vol  .v,  p.  loi. 
*The  Collecting  Instinct,  by  Caroline   Frear  Burk.     Ped    Sem.,  July,   1900, 

vol.  vii,  pp.  179-207. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    4^5 

the  mere  collecting.  The  possession  idea  develops  into  love  of  quan- 
tity, so  that  the  largest  collections  come  now  and  imitation  is  potent. 
From  twelve  on  interest  begins  to  pass  from  the  things  themselves 
to  their  relations,  classifications,  and  explanations,  but  in  general  the 
impulse  "  continues  into  adolescence  as  a  vestige,  as  it  were,  a  remnant 
of  the  real  instinct.  It  dribbles  off  into  sentimental  lines  as  in  the 
collection  of  party  souvenirs,  theater  programs,  etc.,  and  into  social 
fads  as  in  the  collection  of  spoons,  hatpins,  etc."  The  spontaneous 
nature  interest  largely  dies  out  except  in  the  case  of  birds'  eggs,  where 
other  instincts,  as  roaming  and  hunting,  continue  to  supply  incentive. 
The  collecting  mania  is  perhaps  a  natural  beginning  in  any  subject, 
and  the  logical,  analytical,  literary,  and  esthetic  interests  come  later, 
but  are  often  initiated  by  collections  of  books  or  pictures  which  should 
by  induction  lay  the  base  for  true  appreciation  later.  To  encourage 
this  instinct  is  often,  therefore,  a  method  of  generating  interest.  Girls 
are  more  prone  to  receive,  and  boys  to  hunt  or  trade  for  their  objects, 
while  dickering  and  buying  are  predominant  in  adolescence  with  more 
faddism  and  larger  commercial,  scientific,  and  sentimental  interests, 
and  often  with  more  systematic  arrangement  of  collections. 

From  556  returns  to  a  questionnaire  upon  interest  in  puzzles, 
Lindley  ^  found  that  the  curve  of  greatest  interest  in  guess  games 
and  original  riddles  culminated  at  about  seven  years  of  age;  that  in 
the  standard  riddles  culminated  at  about  ten;  that  in  mechanical  puz- 
zles about  two  years  later,  and  that  in  geometrical  puzzles  a  trifle 
later  yet.  Language  puzzles,  exclusive  of  riddles,  seemed  to  reach 
their  maximum  interest  at  about  fifteen,  while  last  of  all  came  arith- 
metical puzzles,  which  indicates  with  a  high  degree  of  probability 
that  the  culmination  of  the  puzzle  aspect  of  the  mental  play  instinct 
falls  in  the  immediate  prepubertal  stage  of  growth.  It  marks  the  close 
of  the  period  just  preceding  adolescence.  Curiously  enough  the  cul- 
mination coincides  with  the  period  of  highest  specific  intensity  of  life. 
Perhaps  "  it  is  fair  to  assume  a  priori  that  the  system  of  cortical  asso- 
ciation fibres  now  begins  to  develop  more  rapidly,  and  indeed  Wer- 
nicke states  that  at  about  the  twelfth  year  there  is  a  marked  increase 
in  the  medullation  of  these  fiber  systems,  which  must  be  present  before 
there  is  a  great  activity  of  reason."  Being  a  boy  or  a  girl  had  "  be- 
come easy,  and  the  energies  are  not  all  taxed  to  maintain  the  equi- 
librium of  life.  Thus  there  is  a  mental  surplus,  which  expends  itself  in 
play.  May  not  this  prepubertal  intellectual  play  activity  bear  direct 
and  propaedeutical  relations  to  adolescence  ?  " 

From  692  papers  on  superstitions  of  children,  the  number  stated 
rose  rapidly  from  eleven  onward,  and  the  increase  "  does  not  seem  due 
merely  to  the  child's  ability  to  express  himself  more  easily  as  he  grows 

^  A  Study  of  Puzzles  with  Special  Reference  to  the  Psychology  of  Mental 
Adaptation.     Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  July,  1897,  vol.  viii,  pp.  431-493. 


486  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

older,  but  to  his  actually  acquiring  more  superstitions,"  girls  always 
leading/  Up  to  the  dawn  of  puberty  superstitions  are  very  simple  and 
vague,  but  at  this  period  ghost  fear  develops  rapidly,  and  later  come 
superstitions  of  love  and  marriage.  The  curve  of  disbelief  in,  e.  g., 
pin  luck,  rises  very  rapidly  from  eleven  onward  in  girls  and  from  thir- 
teen in  boys,  and  the  number  of  superstitions  called  untrue  rises  rapidly 
from  thirteen  in  boys  and  from  twelve  in  girls.  The  critical  spirit  at 
first  insists  on  only  a  single  test  or  coincidence,  and  evidence  to  the 
contrary  is  not  thereafter  ignored.  "  This  reliance  on  a  single  proof 
continues  through  the  seventeenth  year."  In  affairs  of  the  heart, 
adolescent  boys  do  not  rely  on  love  lore  as  girls  do.  The  latter  rarely 
express  contempt  for  superstitions  as  boys  do,  who  nevertheless  seem 
to  have  more  faith  in  the  supernatural. 

Barnes  ^  collated  returns  from  2,000  children  from  six  to  fifteen 
who  were  asked.  What  is  a  knife,  bread,  doll,  water  ?  etc. — thirty-three 
objects  in  all.  Young  children  defined  things  almost  entirely  by  their 
use;  at  eleven,  definition  by  a  larger,  more  generic  term  is  well  de- 
veloped, as  is  definition  by  stating  the  substance  of  which  a  thing  is 
made,  while  at  fifteen  most  of  the  definitions  for  both  sexes  were  by 
invoking  the  larger  term,  indicating  a  marked  adolescent  rise  in  the 
logical  mode  of  thought. 

Shaw '  spoke  and  immediately  wrote  upon  the  blackboard  names 
of  things,  requiring  the  pupil  to  write  at  once  as  rapidly  as  possible 
whatever  the  term  suggested  to  his  mind.  In  studying  these  returns, 
it  was  found  that  the  younger  child's  interest  was  self-centered  in 
individual  and  particular  acts,  while  older  children  recognized  general 
or  universal  use.  The  following  are  the  results  which  differ  most 
widely  from  those  of  Barnes.  Use  was  predominant  at  all  ages,  and 
definition  by  the  larger  term,  although  it  increased  with  years,  was 
rare.  While  action  led  at  all  ages,  quality  increased  with  age  and  was 
most  prominent  in  adolescent  children.  Substance  also  increased  with 
age,  and  mere  sentence-making  declined. 

Kratz  *  shows  that  children's  preferences  in  their  studies  up  to  and 
including  the  eighth  grade  by  no  means  followed  that  of  their  teacher, 
and  that  in  the  last  two  grades  this  divergence  became  more  marked. 
In  these  grades  the  motives  of  interest  and  utility  came  stronger  to 
the  front. 

Schuyten  °  and  Lobsien '  show  that  the  energy  of  attention  reaches 

'  A  Study  of  Children's  Superstitions,  by  Clara  Vostrovsky.  Barnes's  Studies 
in  Education,  pp.  123-143. 

'  A  Study  on  Children's  Interests.     Studies  in  Education,  p.  203. 

3  A  Comparative  Study  of  Children's  Interests.     Child  Study  Monthly,  1898. 

*  A  Study  of  Pupils'  Preferences.  North- Western  Monthly,  September,  1897, 
vol.  viii,  p.  143. 

°  Bull,  de  I'Acad.  Royale  de  Belgique,  vol.  xxxii,  1896. 

^Pad. -Psy.  Studien,  July  and  September,  1892. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  4^7 

its  low-water  mark  once  a  year  in  July.  Schuyten's  dynamometer 
tests  for  54,200  children,  mostly  between  twelve  and  sixteen  years  of 
age,  stimulated  by  rivalry,  showed  an  ascending  curve  from  October 
to  January,  a  sharper  rise  in  February,  and  a  fall  in  March.  Psychic 
and  physical  development  increase  from  October  to  January,  and  fall 
from  January  to  March.  The  curves  then  separate  and  take  opposite 
directions.  While  attention  diminishes  during  the  summer  months, 
muscular  power  increases  in  a  remarkable  way  to  June  or  July.  The 
atmospheric  temperature  of  summer  thus  seems  to  depress  attention 
and  stimulate  muscular  power.  This  is  very  suggestive  for  the  order 
of  work  through  the  school  year  and  for  vacations.  The  body  needs 
care  in  March  and  April  in  order  that  it  may  do  its  best  in  June  and 
July.  The  curve  of  psychic  activity  has  two  apexes,  the  higher  in  the 
spring  and  summer  and  the  lower  in  the  fall  and  winter.  Hence,  in 
March  should  come  a  shorter  and  before  October  a  longer  vacation. 
From  October  to  March  mental  work  can  increase,  but  should  then 
diminish  till  July,  the  best  time  for  work  being  from  December  to 
April. 

In  a  long-continued  study  of  the  mental  apparatus,  processes,  and 
content  of  two  girls,  aged  twelve  and  thirteen,  Binet  ^  sought  to  esti- 
mate variability  and  stability,  good  sense  and  caprice,  alternation  and 
imagination,  the  relations  of  internal  and  external  life,  etc.  He  care- 
fully noted  what  they  thought  of,  their  vocabulary  and  idealism,  how 
thought  developed,  its  relations  to  imagery,  and  the  character  of  the 
latter,  abstract,  spontaneous,  and  voluntary  mentation,  power  of  de- 
scription, of  voluntary  attention,  and  of  memory.  In  one  of  these 
psychic  portraits  he  saw  clearly  a  pronounced  bias  that  would  later 
become  scientific,  in  the  other  the  basis  of  a  literary  career,  that  logical 
thought  was  asserting  its  independence  of  and  dominance  over  images, 
that  the  work  of  thought  was  not  sufficiently  represented  by  the  mech- 
anism of  association  of  ideas,  that  it  may  interpret  and  may  even  be 
opposed  to  its  laws.  Individual  psychology,  which  would  penetrate 
the  secret  of  personality  more  than  statistical  methods  based  on  large 
numbers  can  do,  seems  here  to  find  in  intention  or  the  general  direction 
of  thought  its  chief  determinant.  Perhaps  this  comes  as  near  as  any  to 
Taine's  idea  of  a  master  faculty  from  which  the  entire  mental  organ- 
ization can  be  deduced.  The  prevailing  direction  of  attention,  which 
expresses  the  tendency  to  vary,  is  the  basis  of  the  explication  of  char- 
acter. Emotional  tone  is  another  determinant.  Unstable  tempera- 
ments pass  soon  from  pleasure  and  interest  to  indifference  or  revul- 
sion. Images  associated  by  ambiguity,  and  resemblance  and  contrast 
are  conservative  factors.  The  tendency  to  change  and  the  conserva- 
tive influence  of  association  and  emotional  tone  are  the  three  root 
explicants,  on  the  basis  of  which  our  mental  life  unfolds,  a  somewhat 

'  L'Etude  expdrimentale  de  I'intelligence.     Paris,  1903,  p.  309. 


488  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

restrictive  view  for  the  power  of  education  and  even  for  the  primacy 
of  consciousness. 

(C)  The  studies  of  memory  up  the  grades  show  character- 
istic adolescent  changes,  and  some  of  these  results  are  directly 
usable  in  school. 

Bolton '  tested  the  power  of  1,500  children  to  remember  and  write 
dictated  digits,  and  found,  of  course,  increasing  accuracy  with  the 
older  pupils.  He  also  found  that  the  memory  span  increased  with  age 
rather  than  with  the  growth  of  intelligence  as  determined  by  grade. 
The  pupils  depended  largely  upon  visualization,  and  this  and  concen- 
trated attention  suggested  that  growth  of  memory  did  not  necessarily 
accompany  intellectual  advancement.  Girls  generally  surpassed  boys, 
and  as  with  clicks  too  rapid  to  be  counted,  it  was  found  that  when 
the  pupils  reached  the  limits  of  their  span,  the  number  of  digits  was 
overestimated.  The  power  of  concentrated  and  prolonged  attention 
was  tested.  The  probability  of  error  for  the  larger  number  of  digits, 
7  and  8,  decreased  in  a  marked  way  with  the  development  of  pubes- 
cence, at  least  up  to  fourteen  years,  with  the  suggestion  of  a  slight 
rise  again  at  fifteen. 

In  comprehensive  tests  of  the  ability  of  Chicago  children  to  re- 
member figures  seen,  heard,  or  repeated  by  them,  it  was  found  that, 
from  seven  to  nine,  auditory  were  slightly  better  remembered  than 
visual  impressions.  From  that  age  the  latter  steadily  increased  over 
the  former.  After  thirteen,  auditory  memory  increased  but  little,  and 
was  already  about  ten  per  cent  behind  visual,  which  continued  to  in- 
crease at  least  till  seventeen.  Audio-visual  memory  was  better  than 
either  alone,  and  the  span  of  even  this  was  improved  when  articula- 
tory  memory  was  added.  When  the  tests  were  made  upon  pupils  of 
the  same  age  in  different  grades  it  was  found  in  Chicago  that  memory 
power,  whether  tested  by  sight,  hearing,  or  articulation,  was  best  in 
those  pupils  whose  school  standing  was  highest,  and  least  where 
standing  was  lowest. 

When  a  series  of  digits  was  immediately  repeated  orally  and  a 
record  made,  it  was  found  ^  that  while  from  the  age  of  eight  to  twelve 
the  memory  span  increased  only  eight  points,  from  fourteen  to 
eighteen  it  increased  thirteen  points.  The  number  of  correct  repro- 
ductions of  numbers  of  seven  places  increased  during  the  teens,  al- 
though this  class  of  children  remain  about  one  digit  behind  normal 
children  of  corresponding  age.  In  general,  though  not  without  excep- 
tions, it  was  found  that  intelligence  grew  with  memory  span,  although 
the  former  is  far  more  inferior  to  that  of  the  normal  child  than  the 

»The  Growth  of  Memory  in  School  Children.  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.,  April,  1892, 
vol.  iv,  pp.  362-380. 

2  Contribution  to  the  Psychology  and  Pedagogy  of  Feeble-minded  Children,  by 
G.  E.  Johnson.     Ped.  Sem.,  October,  1895,  vol.  iii,  p.  270. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  4^9 

latter,  and  also  that  weakness  of  this  kind  of  memory  is  not  an  espe- 
cially prominent  factor  of  weak-mindedness. 

Shaw '  tested  memory  in  700  school  children  by  dividing  a  story  of 
324  words  into  152  phrases,  having  it  read  and  immediately  repro- 
duced by  them,  and  selecting  alternate  grades  from  the  third  grammar 
to  the  end  of  the  high  school,  with  a  few  college  students.  The  maxi- 
mum power  of  this  kind  of  memory  was  attained  by  boys  in  the  high 
school  period.  Girls  remembered  forty-three  per  cent  in  the  seventh 
grade,  and  in  the  high  school  forty-seven  per  cent.  The  increase  by 
two-year  periods  was  most  rapid  between  the  third  and  fifth  grades. 
Four  terms  were  remembered  on  the  average  by  at  least  ninety  per 
cent  of  the  pupils,  41  by  fifty  per  cent,  and  130  by  ten  per  cent.  The 
story  written  out  in  the  terms  remembered  by  each  percentage  from  ten 
to  ninety  affords  a  most  interesting  picture  of  the  growth  of  memory, 
and  even  its  errors  of  omission,  insertion,  substitution,  and  displace- 
ment. "  The  growth  of  memory  is  more  rapid  in  the  case  of  girls  than 
boys,  and  the  figures  suggest  a  coincidence  with  the  general  law,  that 
the  rapid  development  incident  to  puberty  occurs  earlier  in  girls  than 
in  boys." 

In  a  careful  study  of  children's  memory,  Kemsies  ^  concludes  that 
the  quality  of  memory  improves  with  age  more  rapidly  than  the 
quantity. 

W.  G.  Monroe  tested  275  boys  and  293  girls,  well  distributed,  from 
seven  to  seventeen  years  of  age,  and  found  a  marked  rise  for  both 
visual  and  auditory  memory  at  fifteen  for  both  sexes.  For  both  sexes, 
also,  auditory  memory  was  best  at  sixteen  and  visual  at  fifteen. 

When  accuracy  in  remembering  the  length  of  tone  was  used  as  a 
test,  it  was  found  there  was  loss  from  six  to  seven  and  gain  from 
seven  to  eight  for  both  sexes.  From  eight  to  nine  girls  lost  rapidly 
for  one  and  gained  rapidly  for  the  following  year,  while  boys  were 
nearly  stationary  till  ten,  after  which  both  sexes  gained  to  their  maxi- 
mum at  fourteen  years  of  age  and  declined  for  the  two  subsequent 
years,  both  gaining  power  from  sixteen  to  seventeen,  but  neither 
attaining  the  accuracy  they  had  at  fourteen.^ 

Netschajeff  *  subjected  637  school  children,  well  distributed  be- 
tween the  ages  of  nine  and  eighteen,  to  the  following  tests.  Twelve 
very  distinct  objects  were  shown  them,  each  for  two  seconds,  which 
must  then  be  immediately  written  down.  Twelve  very  distinct  noises 
were  made  out  of  sight ;  numbers  of  two  figures  each  were  read ; 
three-syllable  words,  which  were  names  of  familiar  objects,  objects 

^  A  Test  of  Memory  in  School  Children.  Ped.  Sem.,  October,  1896,  vol.  iv, 
pp.  61-78. 

'  Zeits.  f.  Pad.  Psychologic  und  Pathologic.      Heft  i,  1900. 

'  See  Scripture  :  Scientific  Child  Study.  Handbook  of  the  111.  Soc.  for  Child 
Study,  May,  1895,  p.  32. 

*  Experimentelle  Untersuchungen  iiber  die  Gedachtnissentwickelung  bei  Schul* 
kindern.     Zeits.  f.    Psychologic,  1900,  vol.  xxiv,  p.  32. 


490 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


11 

10 
i     9 

1  * 
1  ' 

&     6 

o 

1  = 

4 
3 

/ 

— »-« 

_,. 

-■*— 

1 

r-X- 

/ 

— 

'•'' 

y 



f 

M 

'>, 

^ 

i>< 

r 

^»-J 

f    , 

12 

,/■ 

•< 

^ 

J^ 

\ 

/ 

> 

>< 

v>* 

/ 

..-=. 

y 

Age        9      10      11      13     13     14     15     10      17 

GIBLS 


that  suggested  noises,  words  designating  touch,  temperature,  and 
muscle  sensations,  words  describing  states  of  feeUng,  and  names  of 
abstract  ideas  were  also  given  them.  The  above  eight  series  of 
twelve  each  were  all  reproduced  in  writing,  and  showed  that  each 
kind  of  memory  here  tested  increased  with  age,  with  some  slight  ten- 
dency to  decline  at  or  just  before  puberty,  then  to  rise  and  to  slight- 
ly decline  after  the  six- 
teenth or  seventeenth  year. 
Memory  for  objects  showed 
the  greatest  amount  of  in- 
crease during  the  year 
studied,  and  words  for  feel- 
ing next,  although  at  all 
ages  the  latter  was  consid- 
erably below  the  former. 
Boys  showed  stronger 
memory  for  real  impres- 
sions, and  girls  excelled 
for  numbers  and  words. 
The  difference  of  these  two 
kinds  of  memory  was  less 
with  girls  than  with  boys. 
The  greatest  difference  be- 
tween the  sexes  lay  be- 
tween eleven  and  fourteen 
years.  This  seems  at  eight- 
een or  nineteen  to  be  slight- 
ly increased.  "  This  is 
especially  great  at  the  age 
of  puberty."  Children  from 
nine  to  eleven  have  but 
slight  power  of  reproduc- 
ing emotions,  but  this  in- 
creases in  the  next  few 
years  very  rapidly,  as  does 
that  of  the  abstract  words. 
Girls  from  nine  to  eleven 
deal  better  with  words  than 
with  objects  ;  boys  slightly 
excel  with  objects.  Illu- 
sions in  reproducing  words 
which  mistake  sense,  sound, 
and  rhythm,  which  is  not 
infrequent  with  younger  children,  decline  with  age  especially  at 
puberty.  Up  to  this  period  girls  are  most  subject  to  these  illusions, 
and  afterward  boys.  The  following  tables,  in  which  the  ordinates 
represent  the  number  of  correct  reproductions  and  the  abscissas  the 
age,  are  interesting. 


_x Objects 

Sounds 


—,  Kuinbers 

—Visualized  Words 


Sound  Concepts 

h4■  +  •^Touch 
._<_  Feeling 
luuuui  Abstract  Ideas 


11 

10 
§     9 

1     ^ 

^     6 

a      5 

4 

3 

r- 

-»— «• 

y^ 

'--.. 

■>.,^ 

y 

'^- 

^ 

^    .. 

/ 

/ 

^ 

"7=^ 

rt^ 

^^^ 

..-• 

— . 

.TZ-y 

^: 

••  * 

/!? 

S 

-— ^ 

\. 

J* 

A* 

J 

**^\ 

•" 

V 

\ 

u 

'J^ 

d 

-o-»' 

/ 

Age         9       10     11      13     13     14      15     16      17      | 

BOYS 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    49  ^ 

Lobsien'  made  tests  similar  to  those  of  Netschajeff,  with  modifi- 
cations for  greater  accuracy,  upon  238  boys  and  224  girls  from  nine 
to  fourteen  and  a  half  years  of  age.  The  following  tables  show  the 
development  of  the  various  kinds  of  memory  for  boys  and  girls : 


Boys. 


Age.        Objects. 

Noises. 

Number. 

Visual 
Concepts. 

Acoustic 
Concepts. 

Touch 
Concepts. 

Feeling 
Concepts. 

Sounds. 

13-I4K 
12-13 
II-I2 
lO-II 
9-10 

92-56 
76.45 
89.78 
87-12 
64.00 

71.89 

57-33 
57-19 
55-33 
53-33 

80.67 

72.33 
70.22 

49-33 
49.09 

73.00 
69.67 
59-67 

55-11 
46-56 

74.78 
64.89 
63.00 
48.44 
43-78 

75-33 
73.67 
73-33 
57-11 
43-67 

75-44 
58.67 
55-33 
38.33 
27.22 

40.56 

37-67 

19.99 

12.44 

7.22 

Normal ) 
value.  ( 

82.2 

S9.02 

64.8 

60.6 

59-4 

64.2 

31.2 

24.0 

I3-H>^ 

12-13 

11-12 

lO-II 

9-10 

99-56 
92.89 
94.00 
7578 
8933 

82.67  ' 

75-56 

56.00 

46.22 

46.22 

87.22 
7489 
73-56 
62.44 

50-44 

Girls. 

96.67 
77.22 
72.78 
56.22 
54.22 

71.44 
63.11 
72.11 

54.78 
38.22 

60.2 

82.00 

74-67 
70.89 

58-78 
51. II 

67.2 

70.22 
67.33 
73-33 
43-22 
32.89 

59-4 

41-33 
3489 
23.22 
10.44 
6.89 

91.4 

62.2 

71.8 

71.0 

23.8 

The  table  for  boys  shows  in  the  fourteenth  year  a  marked  increase 
of  memory  for  objects,  noises,  and  feelings,  especially  as  compared 
with  the  marked  relative  decline  the  preceding  year,  when  there  was  a 
decided  increase  in  visual  concepts  and  senseless  sounds.  The  twelfth 
year  shows  the  greatest  increase  in  number  memory,  acoustic  impres- 
sions, touch,  and  feeling.  The  tenth  and  eleventh  years  show  marked 
increase  of  memory  for  objects  and  their  names.  Thus  the  increase 
in  the  strength  of  memory  is  by  no  means  the  same  year  by  year,  but 
progress  focuses  on  some  forms  and  others  are  neglected.  Hence 
each  type  of  memory  shows  an  almost  regular  increase  and  decrease 
in  relative  strength. 

The  table  for  girls  shows  a  marked  increase  of  all  memory  forms 
about  the  twelfth  year.  This  relative  increase  is  exceeded  only  in  the 
fourteenth  year  for  visual  concepts.  The  thirteenth  year  shows  the 
greatest  increase  for  sounds  and  a  remarkable  regression  for  objects 
in  passing  from  the  lowest  to  the  next  grade  above. 

In  the  accuracy  of  reproducing  the  order  of  impressions,  girls 
much  exceeded  boys  at  all  ages.  For  seen  objects  their  accuracy  was 
twice  that  of  boys,  the  boys  excelling  in  order  only  in  number.  In 
general,  ability  to  reproduce  a  series  of  impressions  increases  and 
decreases  with  the  power  to  reproduce  in  any  order,  but  by  no  means 

^  Exp.  Untersuch.  ii.  d.  Gedachtnissentwickelung  bei  Schulkindern.  Zeits.  f. 
Psychologic,  Bd.  27,  Heft  1-2,  1901. 


492 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 


in  direct  proportion  to  it.  The  effect  of  the  last  member  in  a  series 
by  a  purely  mechanical  reproduction  is  best  in  boys.  The  range  and 
energy  of  reproduction  is  far  higher  than  ordered  sequence.  In  gen- 
eral girls  slightly  exceed  boys  in  recalling  numbers,  touch  concepts, 
and  sounds,  and  largely  exceed  in  recalling  feeling  concepts,  real 
things  and  visual  concepts. 

Colegrove  ^  tabulated  returns  from  the  early  memories  of  1,658 
correspondents  with  6,069  niemories,  from  which  he  reached  the  con- 
clusions, represented  in  the  following  curves,  for  the  earhest  three 
memories  of  white  males  and  females. 

In  the  cuts  below,  the  heavy  line  represents  the  first  memory,  the 
broken  the  second,  and  the  dotted  line  the  third  memory.  Age  at  the 
time  of  reporting  is  represented  in  distance  to  the  right,  and  the  age 

BOYS 


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of  the  person  at  the  time  of  the  occurrence  remembered  is  represented 
by  the  distance  upward.  "  There  is  a  rise  in  all  the  curves  at  adoles- 
cence. This  shows  that  from  the  age  of  twelve  to  fifteen  boys  do  not 
recall  so  early  memories  as  they  do  both  before  and  after  this  period." 
This  Colegrove  ascribes  to  the  fact  that  the  present  seems  so  large 
and  rich.  At  any  rate,  "  the  earliest  memories  of  boys  at  the  age  of 
fourteen  average  almost  four  years."  His  curves  for  girls  show  that 
the  age  of  all  the  first  three  memories  which  they  are  able  to  recall 
is  higher  at  fourteen  than  at  any  period  before  or  after;  that  at  seven 
and  eight  the  average  age  of  the  first  things  recalled  is  nearly  a  year 
earlier  than  it  is  at  fourteen.    This  means  that  at  puberty  there  is  a 


*  Memory :  An  Inductive  Study,  by  F.  W.  Colegrove. 
New  York,  1900,  p.  229.  See  also  Individual  Memories, 
vol.  X,  p.  228  et  seq. 


Henry  Holt  &  Co., 
Am.  Jour,  of  Psy., 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  493 

marked  and  characteristic  obliteration  of  infantile  memories  which 
lapse  to  oblivion  with  augmented  absorption  in  the  present. 

It  was  found  that  males  have  the  greatest  number  of  memories  for 
protracted  or  repeated  occurrences,  for  people,  and  clothing,  topo- 
graphical and  logical  matters ;  that  females  have  better  memories  for 
novel  occurrences  or  single  impressions.  Already  at  ten  and  eleven 
motor  memories  begin  to  decrease  for  females  and  increase  for  males. 
At  fourteen  and  fifteen  motor  memories  nearly  culminate  for  males, 
but  still  further  decline  for  females.  The  former  show  a  marked  de- 
crease in  memory  for  relatives  and  playmates  and  an  increase  for 
other  persons.  Sickness  and  accidents  to  self  are  remembered  less  by 
males  and  better  by  females,  as  are  memories  of  fears.  At  eighteen 
and  nineteen  there  is  a  marked  and  continued  increase  in  the  visual 
memories  of  each  sex  and  the  auditory  memory  of  females.  Memory 
for  the  activity  of  others  increases  for  both,  but  far  more  strongly  for 
males.  Colegrove  concludes  from  his  data  that  "  the  period  of  adoles- 
cence is  one  of  great  psychical  awakening.  A  wide  range  of  memories 
is  found  at  this  time.  From  the  fourteenth  year  with  girls  and  the 
fifteenth  with  boys  the  auditory  memories  are  strongly  developed.  At 
the  dawn  of  adolescence  the  motor  memory  of  boys  nearly  culminates, 
and  they  have  fewer  memories  of  sickness  and  accidents  to  self. 
During  this  time  the  memory  of  other  persons  and  the  activity  of 
others  is  emphasized  in  case  of  both  boys  and  girls.  In  general,  at 
this  period  the  special  sensory  memories  are  numerous,  and  it  is  the 
golden  age  for  motor  memories.  Now,  too,  the  memories  of  high 
ideals,  self-sacrifice,  and  self-forgetfulness  are  cherished.  Wider  in- 
terests than  self  and  immediate  friends  bcome  the  objects  of  reflec- 
tion and  recollection." 

After  twenty  there  is  a  marked  change  in  the  memory  content. 
The  male  acquires  more  and  the  female  less  visual  and  auditory 
memories.  The  memories  of  the  female  are  more  logical,  and  topo- 
graphical features  increase.  Memories  of  sickness  and  accidents  to  self 
decrease  with  the  males  and  increase  with  the  females,  while  in  the 
case  of  both  there  is  relative  decline  in  the  memories  of  sickness  and 
accident  to  others.  From  all  this  it  would  appear  that  different  mem- 
ories culminate  at  different  periods,  and  bear  immediate  relation  to  the 
whole  mental  life  of  the  period.  While  perhaps  some  of  the  finer 
analyses  of  Colegrove  may  invite  further  confirmation,  his  main  results 
given  above  are  not  only  suggestive,  but  rendered  very  plausible  by 
his  evidence. 

Statistics  based  upon  replies  to  the  question,  as  to  whether  pleasant 
or  unpleasant  experiences  were  best  remembered,  show  that  the  former 
increase  at  eleven,  rise  rapidly  at  fourteen,  and  culminate  at  eighteen 
for  males,  and  that  the  curve  of  painful  memories  follows  the  same 
course,  although  for  both  there  is  a  drop  at  fifteen.  For  females,  the 
pleasant  memories  increase  rapidly  from  eleven  to  thirteen,  decline  a 
little  at  fourteen,  rise  again  at  sixteen,  and  culminate  at  seventeen, 
and  the  painful  memories  follow  nearly  the  same  course,  only  with  a 


494  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

slight  drop  at  fifteen.  Thus,  up  to  twenty-two  for  males,  there  is  a 
marked  preponderance  of  pleasant  over  painful  memories,  although 
the  two  rise  and  fall  together.  After  thirty,  unpleasant  memories  are 
but  little  recalled.  For  the  Indians  and  negroes  in  this  census,  un- 
pleasant memories  play  a  far  more  and  often  preponderating  role 
suggesting  persecution  and  sad  experiences.  Different  elements  of 
the  total  content  of  memory  come  to  prominence  at  different  ages. 
He  also  found  that  the  best  remembered  years  of  life  are  sixteen  to 
seventeen  for  males  and  fifteen  for  females,  and  that  in  general  the 
adolescent  period  has  more  to  do  than  any  other  in  forming  and  fur- 
nishing the  memory  plexus,  while  the  seventh  and  eighth  years  are 
most  poorly  remembered. 

It  is  also  known  that  many  false  memories  insert  themselves  into 
the  texture  of  remembered  experiences.  One  dreams  a  friend  is  dead 
and  thinks  she  is  till  she  is  met  one  day  in  the  street ;  or  dreams  of  a 
fire  and  inquires  about  it  in  the  morning;  dreams  of  a  present  and 
searches  the  house  for  it  next  day ;  delays  breakfast  for  a  friend,  who 
arrived  the  night  before  in  a  dream,  to  come  down  to  breakfast;  a  child 
hunts  for  a  bushel  of  pennies  dreamed  of,  etc.  These  phantoms  falsify 
our  memory  most  often,  according  to  Dr.  Colegrove,  between  sixteen 
and  nineteen. 

Mnemonic  devices  prompt  children  to  change  rings  to  keep  ap- 
pointments, tie  knots  in  the  handkerchief,  put  shoes  on  the  dressing- 
table,  hide  garments,  associate  faces  with  hoods,  names  with  acts, 
things,  or  qualities  they  suggest;  visualize,  connect  figures,  letters 
with  colors,  etc.  From  a  scrutiny  of  the  original  material,  which  I  was 
kindly  allowed  to  make,  this  appears  to  rise  rapidly  at  puberty. 

Perhaps  nothing  in  the  history  of  the  world  has  ever  been 
supported  by  a  consensus  of  behef  more  universal  than  that 
which  sustains  education  to-day  and  which  has  almost  attained 
the  semper  ubiqtie,  et  ah  omnibus  which  the  early  Church  strove 
for  in  vain.  The  world  goes  to  school.  This  has  become  the 
method  of  colonization  and  completes  the  work  of  conquest  by 
armies.  When  Germany  won  a  part  of  Poland,  and  then 
Schleswig-Holstein,  and  Alsace-Lorraine,  she  founded  or  re- 
created at  lavish  expense  the  universities  at  Breslau,  Kiel,  and 
Strassburg  respectively  to  show  her  new  subjects  what  she 
meant  by  education.  France  thus  strives  to  civilize  Algiers, 
and  England  her  possessions  everywhere,  Professor  Fitch  de- 
claring the  schools  of  Madagascar  now  probably  the  best  or- 
ganized in  the  world.  I  have  seen  good  schools  in  the  east 
and  south  of  Russia  and  in  Finland,  that  all  must  commend. 
France  soon  after  the  war  of  1870  increased  her  educational 
budget   over    seven    hundred    per    cent.      In  China  education 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  495 

has  long  been  the  basis  of  the  civil  service,  old  men  striving, 
in  the  thousands  of  individual  booths  erected  for  the  pur- 
pose, to  attain  the  degree  of  Han  Sin,  and  all  with  a  fervor 
that  suggests  that,  if  modern  culture  should  ever  be  the  grist 
ground  in  these  mills,  Europe  must  look  out  for  her  laurels. 
The  success  of  republics  is  especially  dependent  on  the  edu- 
cation of  their  citizens,  and  refusal  to  send  to  or  attend  school 
is  civic  recreancy  akin  to  refusal  to  pay  taxes  or  fight  when 
the  Fatherland  is  in  danger.  Schools  are  often  the  best  things 
and  housed  in  the  best  buildings  in  town,  although  but  lately 
many  doubted  whether  high  schools  should  be  supported  at 
public  cost.  We  have  Just  passed  a  period  of  renaissance 
in  secondary  education,  and  the  recent  multiplication  of  col- 
leges and  the  increase  of  students  is  startling.  It  is  almost 
a  heresy  to  urge  that  there  are  some  who  should  not  go 
to  school  at  all,  or  that  many  who  are  there  would  be  better 
off  elsewhere.  Most  permanent  results,  however,  are  staked 
on  whether  this  material  installation,  numerical  expansion, 
and  mechanical  organization  are  to  be  regarded  as  finalities 
or  recognized  as  only  promising  first  steps,  as  we  gird  our- 
selves to  the  yet  greater  and  longer  task  of  internal  develop- 
ment and  progressive  reconstruction  till  a  qualitative  that  is 
proportionate  to  the  quantitative  development  is  attained. 
This  is  the  most  vital  and  burning  question,  and  may  well  give 
pause  to  all  those  who  hold  a  brief  for  youth  and  work  in  their 
cause  and  name,  A  hasty  glance  at  one  or  more  aspects  of 
each  of  the  three  stages  of  education  that  spans  the  interval 
from  thirteen  to  twenty-one  must  here  suffice, 

(D)  Normal  Schools.  The  professional  training  of  teach- 
ers seventy  years  ago  marked  an  epoch ;  this  work  has  enlisted 
the  services  of  some  of  the  best  men  and  women,  and  some 
of  these  private  and  public  institutions  could  hardly  be  im- 
proved, while  others  are  not  only  wooden  but  petrified.  Most 
entirely  lack  efficient  inspection.  On  the  Continent  the  state 
always  follows  up  all  its  growth  by  tests,  but  here  many  of 
these  public  institutions  are  essentially  private,  Male  teachers 
are  diminishing  and  male  pupils  are  in  many  if  not  most  of 
them  a  negligible  quantity.  A  large  but  never  ascertained 
proportion  of  teachers  are  not  graduates  of  colleges  but  only 
of  normal  schools,  perhaps  the  very  one  in  which  they  teach, 


49^  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

and  colleges  are  perhaps  nowhere  held  in  such  doubtful  esteem. 
The  philosophy  of  education  taught  under  various  names  is 
sometimes  as  obsolete  as  if  in  schools  of  theology  only 
patristics  was  studied.  There  are  definitions  that  triangulate 
vast  vacant  spaces  in  the  teachers'  minds,  conspectuses  of 
human  faculties,  metaphysical  theories  of  mind  inherited  from 
the  pedagogic  fathers.  The  departments  of  human  knowledge 
are  classified,  correlated,  coordinated,  and  educational  value 
is  discussed  in  an  abstract  way,  with  an  aloofness  for  detailed 
externality  that  is  an  anachronism  in  a  concrete  age,  while  the 
cult  of  Herbart  and  Froebel  flourishes  as  a  finality  instead  of 
a  prologue  to  a  great  drama  now  well  on  in  its  first  act. 

The  most  fatal  infection  to  which  normal  schools  are  liable 
is  that  of  teaching  to  dissect  large  living  wholes,  which  pubes- 
cents  crave,  into  elements,  which  they  abhor.  This  involves 
logic  chopping,  formal  steps,  analysis  of  processes  that  should 
never  be  analyzed,  and  overexplanation.  The  soul  naturally 
storms  its  way  to  the  center  of  things  with  a  rapid  impetuosity, 
but  the  methodaster  and  macerator  blunts  the  intuitions,  the 
best  thing  in  youth,  drags  down  thoughts  that  fly  and  makes 
them  crawl  at  a  slow,  senescent  pace.  More  yet,  it  tends  to 
pedantry  that  shields  ignorance  from  exposure,  teaches  the 
art  of  seeming  wise  with  empty  minds,  brings  complacency 
that  tends  to  arrest  in  the  teacher,  and  whips  up  a  modicum 
of  knowledge  to  deceptive  proportions,  as  the  barber's  appren- 
tice was  dubbed  master  when  he  could  make  two  ounces  of 
soap  into  two  barrels  of  lather.  Scholarship  tends  to  be  in- 
versely as  mechanical  methods.  By  demanding  a  prede- 
termined way  the  pupil  is  exhausted,  and,  in  Plato's  phrase, 
there  is  no  true  parturition  but  only  a  wind-birth.  The  arid 
wastes  of  short  steps  and  sequences  and  weary  morselization 
of  rudiments  better  represent  the  second  childhood  of  senility 
than  the  golden  dawn  of  divination  with  which  childhood  is 
endowed,  but  which  is  so  easily  blighted. 

Psychology  is  rightly  called  the  teacher's  Blackstone,  but 
as  the  whole  of  biology,  chemistry,  or  physics  is  too  large  for 
the  farmer,  electrician,  photographer,  or  dyer  to  know,  al- 
though their  calling  is  permeated  by  the  principles  of  these 
sciences,  so  the  teacher  needs  to  know  chiefly  specific  things, 
memory,   attention,   association,    something  of   feelings   and 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    497 

will,  a  little  about  reason,  but  more  of  hygiene,  nutrition, 
enough  to  be  a  defender  of  health,  very  little  about  the  brain, 
enough  of  logic  to  name  its  tools,  simple  tests  of  eye,  ear,  and 
motor  ability,  juvenile  abnormalities,  and  moral  perversions 
enough  to  detect  defects,  and  something  of  Froebel,  but  with- 
out being  a  symbolist,  either  in  a  state  of  clairvoyance  or 
muddle,  or  seeking  to  hatch  out  beautiful  souls  when  the  body 
most  needs  attention  and  the  mind  least.  The  teacher  should, 
therefore,  know  something  of  nursing,  the  schools  of  which 
now  require  higher  conditions  of  entrance,  and  longer  and 
richer  courses  than  kindergarten  schools,  should  know  some- 
thing of  muscles  as  organs  of  the  will,  and  of  the  psychology 
of  play,  habit,  imitation,  imagination,  the  organ  of  all  that  is 
absent  in  time  and  place,  and  some  outlines  of  heredity  and  evo- 
lution, especially  that  of  mind  in  animals  and  children.  These 
are  perhaps  more  easily  taught  to  young  women  than  to  young 
men,  for  the  former  are  less  specialized  and  more  generic, 
richer  in  intuition,  and  psychically  nearer  the  child.  Much 
of  this  lies  so  near  the  soul  of  normal  youth  that,  once  taught 
by  the  easy  way  of  hints,  it  sinks  deep  and  is  never  forgotten. 
It  is  akin  to  tact  and  taste,  and  should  make  these  training 
classes  the  best  of  all  schools  for  all  the  parental  instincts.  The 
good  teacher  learns  far  more  from  the  children  than  he  can 
ever  teach  them.  We  should  remember,  too,  that  we  are  not 
teaching  the  psychology  of  the  adult  mind,  which  at  its  best 
works  logically,  but  the  genetic  philosophy  of  the  young  and 
growing  mind  where  perception,  intuition,  and  spontaneity  are 
at  their  very  best  and  the  powers  of  introspection  are  weakest. 
This  inculcates  due  respect  for  the  child  to  whom,  as  the  old 
proverb  has  it,  the  maximum  of  reverence  is  due.  It  teaches 
us  to  discriminate  between  the  wide  range  of  individual  differ- 
ences and  capacities  from  subnormal  and  defective  to  budding 
talent,  and  thus  will  tend  to  make  the  school,  as  it  always  should 
be,  a  life  and  career-saving  station.^ 

Next  to  this,  the  heart  of  professional  teacher  training, 
should  be  the  history  of  education  to  give  a  repertory  of  mo- 
tives and  modes  of  approach.  Rightly  taught,  this  should  in- 
spire high  ideals  for  this  most  philosophic  vocation  of  man. 

'A    C.  Ellis  :   The  Normal  School  Course  in  Psychology.     Proc.   Ed.  Ass'n, 
December,  1901. 
71 


498  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

It  also  has  a  very  high  culture  value  in  itself.  There  is  a  sense 
in  which  the  history  of  the  world  is  the  history  of  its  great 
teachers,  religious  as  well  as  secular.  From  Plato  down  some 
of  these  great  heroes,  whose  names  are  landmarks,  are  often 
the  very  best  expression  of  the  aspirations  of  their  age.  These 
things  enter  and  live  again  in  the  soul  of  the  young  teacher. 
I  have  heard  several  normal  principals  in  Germany  teach  this 
subject,  there  often  central.  I  will  try  to  illustrate  their  spirit 
and  matter  in  introducing  a  class  to  Pestalozzi  and  to  Fichte 
in  this  course,  as  follows : 

More  than  a  century  ago  a  remarkable  story  appeared  in  Europe. 
It  was  prolix  after  the  fashion  of  that  day  and  is  now  rarely  read. 
Yet  its  characters  and  action  were  as  real  and  as  new  in  fiction  as 
Kipling's  best,  while  the  author's  passion  for  moral  and  social  reforms 
was  as  all-controlling  as  Tolstoi's.  It  was  a  tale  of  homely  life  in  a 
Swiss  village,  of  peasants  who  beat  their  wives,  and  of  dirty  children 
who  stole  potatoes,  and  only  on  gala  days  had  the  cream  left  on  their 
milk.  The  good  preacher  was  growing  duller,  the  doctor  more  quack- 
ish,  the  schoolmaster  more  mechanical.  The  squire,  who  also  kept 
the  beer  house,  was  getting  every  one  in  his  debt  and  extracting  and 
using  for  his  own  wretched  ends  all  domestic  secrets.  There  was  the 
gossip,  the  hypocrite,  the  liar,  the  fool,  the  sot,  and  everywhere  in- 
creasing superstition,  scandal,  intrigue,  and  vice. 

But  there  was  one  good  woman  in  this  dismal  hamlet,  Gertrude, 
the  mason's  wife,  who  taught  her  children  cleanliness,  courtesy,  max- 
ims, hymns,  prayers,  and  simple  industries  with  such  devotion  and 
success  that  the  neighbors  begged  that  their  children  might  come  too, 
and  soon  began  to  come  to  see  for  themselves.  An  old  nobleman 
visited  her  home-school  and  found  a  real  vocation  in  starting  a  school 
himself.  The  pastor  grew  interested,  and  realized  that  his  sermons 
had  been  dry,  and  began  to  preach  in  earnest.  The  spirit  of  home  life 
and  mutual  improvement  appeared.  The  beer  house  ceased  to  be  the 
center  of  the  village  life.  A  few  citizens  met  weekly  to  discuss  the 
larger  educational  questions  of  public  and  private  weal.  At  length  a 
Royal  Commission  was  sent  to  study  Bonal,  which  had  become  the 
thriftiest  village  in  the  realm,  and  reported  that  they  had  discovered 
here  the  true  principle  of  reform,  prosperity,  and  universal  govern- 
ment in  education,  with  Gertrude's  school  at  the  root  of  all. 

For  Bonal  is  the  world.  All  its  degradations  are  but  the  natural 
offspring  of  ignorance,  and  Gertrude  is  the  good  teacher  by  whom 
alone  society,  state,  and  church  can  be  regenerated.  This  tale  of 
Pestalozzi's '  shows  us  what  a  simple  and  unlearned  man  can  do  if  he 
is  in  earnest,  and  if  his  cause  is  great.  It  was  read  everywhere;  it 
was  wept  over;  royal  personages  came  to  see  the  author,  and  gave 

^  How  Gertrude  teaches  her  children. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  499 

him  presents  and  decorations,  and  many  greater  men  than  he  have 
since  lit  their  torches  at  the  fire  he  kindled. 

Sixteen  years  later,  in  1806,  the  power  of  Prussia  was  shattered 
at  a  blow  by  the  battle  of  Jena.  Its  army  was  swept  away ;  its  allies, 
industries,  and  trade  gone.  The  country  was  impoverished  and  ex- 
hausted and  its  capital  garrisoned  by  French  soldiers.  Its  soil  had 
never  been  fertile  nor  its  spirit  practical.  Its  military  situation,  with 
strong  nations  on  all  sides,  was  the  worst  in  history  and  its  record 
had  shown  more  discord  than  unity.  The  race  had  never  felt  such 
humiliation  and  the  future  had  never  seemed  so  dark.  But  the  German 
stock  was  still  vigorous  and  on  every  hand  the  cause  of  this  unexpect- 
ed collapse  was  explained.  Scharnhorst  began  to  plan  a  comprehensive 
reorganization  of  the  military  system  on  its  present  basis.  Stein  set 
about  reconstructing  the  land  laws  and  the  status  of  the  peasants. 
Jahn  founded  everywhere  his  patriotic  Turner  societies  and  preached 
again  the  gospel  of  ancient  Greece,  that  only  strong  muscles  can  make 
men  great  and  nations  free.  But  the  key-word  which  guided  and  uni- 
fied all  was  spoken  by  Fichte  in  his  so-called  "  addresses  to  the  Ger- 
man nation,"  which  were  given  in  Berlin  every  Sunday  evening  for 
an  entire  winter  to  large  audiences  of  the  best  classes,  with  Napoleon's 
sentries  at  the  door,  and  his  spies  scattered  through  the  hall.  He  said 
in  substance  this : 

We  have  yet  left  us  German  bodies,  large,  strong,  and  healthy  to 
the  core,  a  marvellous  language  all  our  own  and  not  agglomerate  of 
many  tongues  like  English,  and  a  pure  blood  never  mixed  with  other 
races.  We  have  wrought  out  the  Reformation,  the  greatest  task  the 
human  spirit  has  yet  achieved,  and  our  ancestors  call  to  us  not  to  let 
the  work  they  died  in  doing  be  in  vain.  We  carry  the  light  and  the 
hope  of  the  world.  If  we  sink,  freedom  and  humanity  sink  with  us. 
There  is  one  plain  and  only  one  way  for  patriotic  recreation.  It  is  not 
primarily  by  armies  or  legislation,  but  we  must  rise  like  Bonal  by  the 
slow  and  sure  processes  of  national  education.  We  must  live  for  our 
own  children,  training  their  bodies  and  minds  as  was  never  done  in 
the  world  before.  Schools  have  been  the  one  product  in  which  the 
German  spirit  has  already  excelled.  We  have  set  the  human  spirit 
free,  have  preached,  taught,  lived,  and  believed  in  ideas  and  ideals. 
We  must  make  education  our  supreme  task,  our  duty  of  duties.  We 
must  realize  the  platonic  republic  where  the  wisest  ruled  and  educa- 
tion was  the  chief  problem  of  statesmanship.  This  policy  must  be  our 
destiny.  Our  leaders  must  be  priests  of  Truth  and  in  her  pay.  They 
must  think  fearlessly  in  all  directions;  must  investigate  and  discuss, 
do  and  suffer  all  in  the  world's  great  holy  cause  of  science  and  learn- 
ing. To  this  end  he  invoked  all  ranks  and  classes.  For  thus  not  only 
the  united  Fatherland,  long  hoped  for,  long  delayed,  could  become  real, 
but  men  of  a  higher  type  and  order  of  existence  than  had  yet  appeared 
would  be  developed.' 

'  Addresses  to  the  German  nation. 


500  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Thus  Fichte,  idealist  and  enthusiast,  spoke  and  was  heard  as  no 
man  had  spoken  or  been  heard  since  Luther.  For  him  education  was 
the  one  divine  cause  in  the  world;  a  new  dispensation  of  religion 
itself.  In  accordance  with  his  conceptions,  but  by  far  more  practical 
men  than  he,  the  University  of  Berlin  was  founded  and  a  national 
policy  was  defined  making  education  the  test  of  all.  Along  these  lines 
the  Fatherland  has  become  the  most  effectively  governed  state,  and  its 
army  the  strongest  since  ancient  Rome.  Just  as  the  Reformation 
slowly  pervaded  other  lands,  so  Germany  has  set  the  educational  fash- 
ions for  most  nations  of  continental  Europe,  not  to  speak  of  Japan 
and  South  America.  Her  methods  and  ideas  have  been  especially 
transforming  since  the  war  of  1870  made  manifest  the  strength  this 
policy  had  developed  in  half  a  century.  Her  conquests  are  now 
spreading  to  the  world  of  industry  and  trade,  and  France  has  shown 
her  true  greatness  by  wise  imitation  of  her  conqueror. 

Upon  this  introduction  followed  discussions,  details,  refer- 
ences, reproductions,  and  so  through  the  year,  five  hours  a  week. 
These  young  teachers  went  out  full  of  their  mission.  They 
were  potentialized  to  do  their  best  and  worthiest,  feeling  that 
their  cause  indeed  was  the  chief  one  in  the  world. 

A  model  school,  the  very  idea  of  which  is  essentially  op- 
posed to  a  practise  school,  or  an  experiment  station  or  peda- 
gogic laboratory,  where  tyros  learn  their  trade,  should  be  the 
core  of  every  kind  of  pedagogium.  It  should  be  first  in  time, 
and  seek  to  be  ideal,  a  Mecca  where  the  best  processes  can 
be  demonstrated  object-lesson-wise  to  visitors,  and  developed 
slowly  upward  from  the  lowest  grades  with  teachers  enough 
so  that  each  can  take  time  to  demonstrate  and  answer  questions 
to  strangers,  and  from  these  shorter  and  then  longer  courses 
should  be  the  germ  of  the  normal  school,  which  should  grow 
out  of  it,  and  not  vice  versa.  Every  teacher  here  should  be 
more  or  less  specialized.  In  this  respect  I  would  try  to  imitate 
the  German  gymnasia,  which  permit  only  university  graduates 
to  teach  boys  from  eight  to  nine  on,  and  most  topics  should 
be  taught  intensively  and  with  but  little  reference  to  teaching 
it  to  children,  but  that  precious  little  should  be  by  the  special 
expert  with  the  equivalent  of  a  Ph.D.  degree.  About  this,  as 
the  cloister  and  cathedral  schools  grew  up  about  the  medieval 
churches,  as  some  of  the  best  modern  churches  are  now  de- 
veloping about  social  settlements,  and  as  the  best  equipped 
trade  schools  are  under  the  wing  of  the  great  industries,  so 
my  teacher  college  should  develop  about  these  grades  of  an 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  S^I 

Utopian  school,  and  the  training  of  apprentices  should  be 
developed  very  gradually  and  at  first  be  by  the  grade  teach- 
ers of  the  school  in  superfluous  hours  which  the  corps  should 
be  numerous  enough  to  have.  But  here  I  would  stop,  and  not 
train  for  high  school  grades.  The  aspirations  of  independent 
and  isolated  normal  schools  to  do  this  should  be  generally 
checked.  That  some  of  these  institutions  aspire  to  do  such 
work  seems  to  me  rather  an  abandonment  of  their  chief  func- 
tion, when  we  reflect  that  the  younger  the  age  of  the  pupils 
the  more  attention  needs  to  be  paid  to  adapting  knowledge 
to  them ;  hence  the  most  truly  normal  work  must  always  serve 
the  lower  grades.  The  experience  of  other  countries,  notably 
of  the  College  of  Preceptors  in  London  and  the  Pddagogium 
in  Vienna,  shows  that  training  for  secondary  education  es- 
pecially needs  an  academic  atmosphere.  Several  of  the  larger 
normal  schools  in  this  country  are,  no  doubt,  in  these  days  of 
educational  federation  and  combination,  soon  to  join  universi- 
ties, just  as  everywhere  within  the  last  few  years  special 
schools  of  medicine,  law,  theology,  and  technology  are  being 
organized  or  affiliated,  and  sometimes  moved  to  universities. 
The  other  schools  of  town  and  night  schools  should  serve  as 
practise  schools,  where  these  normal  pupils  should  serve  their 
apprenticeship,  including  if  possible  a  little  work  in  hospitals 
and  with  defectives. 

Every  normal  school  should  have  a  small  and  a  few  central 
museums,  or  perhaps  the  state  should  have  a  large  pedagogical 
one.  Russia  has  a  vast  central  one  now  in  its  forty-first 
year,  where  conferences,  lectures,  and  expositions  of  toys  and 
games  are  held,  demonstrations  of  all  kinds  of  hygienic  and 
illustrative  apparatus  are  given,  and  which  publishes  memoirs 
and  makes  special  researches.  France  has  a  museum  with 
a  room  each  set  apart  for  geography,  natural  history,  physics, 
chemistry,  model  school  laboratories,  desks  in  all  thirty  rooms, 
a  library  of  50,000  titles,  building  plans,  ideal  tables  for 
science;  its  publications  make  it  a  center  of  information;  its 
collections  comprise  foods,  flora  and  fauna,  and  maps ;  and  it 
has  many  thousand  lantern  slides  in  circulation  on  all  kinds 
of  topics,  with  many  branches  in  the  provinces.  Some  schools 
in  Europe  make  a  point  of  collecting  exhaustively  plants,  birds, 
animals,  rocks,  soils,  trees,  etc.,  of  the  locality  as  a  basis  of 


502  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

instruction,  and  some  have  curious  and  suggestive  alcoves  or 
rooms  set  apart  for  things  that  children  have  made  spontane- 
ously. Perhaps,  if  most  were  likely  to  serve  in  country  regions, 
I  would  try  to  develop  an  ungraded  model  school.  Some  stu- 
dent pupils  might  teach  in  night  schools,  but  with  not  too  much 
consciousness  of  the  presence  of  the  critic  teacher.  I  would 
have  them  practise  every  year  and  every  week,  and  rise,  either 
up  the  grades,  beginning  with  the  lowest,  or  grow  in  inde- 
pendence from  helpers  to  control  of  a  room,  or  possibly  in  some 
places  up  the  social  classes,  according  to  their  teaching  ability, 
scholarship,  etc.  But  in  place  of  much  criticism  I  would  en- 
large the  time  of  observation  in  all  the  grades  of  the  model 
school,  for  women  are  more  intuitive  as  well  as  more  imitative 
than  men,  and  more  in  danger  of  being  either  spoiled  or  intro- 
verted by  too  much  self-consciousness  about  their  work.  The 
summer  vacation  should  be  far  shorter  than  now,  both  for  the 
sake  of  the  children,  that  relapse  in  three  idle  months,  and  for 
the  convenience  of  visitors  whom  a  summer  session  for  their 
benefit  should  aid  in  attracting.  All  should  be  done  in  the 
light  of  a  wide  comparative  study  of  other,  even  foreign  in- 
stitutions, and  under  the  wing  of  a  university  with  a  strong 
pedagogic  department. 

This  latter  is  also  prone  to  its  own  peculiar  forms  of  decay 
and  perversion.^  The  academic  professor  of  pedagogy  should 
not  be  chiefly  a  traveling  drummer  of  recruits  for  the  freshman 
class  or  an  inspector  of  preparatory  schools,  nor  an  agent  for 
placing  the  graduates  of  the  institution  he  represents.  He 
should  not  limit  his  interest  to  feeders  or  even  to  secondary 
grades  of  education,  but  should  fit  for  expert  work  in  super- 
intendence, college  pedagogy,  normal  chairs,  and  should  offer 
courses  that  all  intending  high  school  teachers  would  wish  to 
attend,  should  extend  his  interest  to  the  lowest  grades,  to  insti- 
tutions for  defectives  and  criminals,  and  represent  the  largest 
view  of  education.  The  president  should  allow  him  the  widest 
academic  freedom  and  not  discourage  him  for  discussing  the 
highest  university  problems,  even  though  his  own  methods  and 
policy  be  criticized.     He  should  not,  like  most  German  pro- 


^  See  A.  J.   Kinnaman  :    Pedagogy  in    our    Colleges   and  Universities.     Ped. 
Sem. ,  September,  1902,  vol.  ix,  pp.  366-373. 


INTELLECTUAL   DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION     503 

fessors  of  education,  be  a  proselyte,  for  his  own  department 
for  a  special  type  of  philosophy,  or  for  either  the  sciences 
or  humanities  as  against  the  other.  He  should  engage  in  orig- 
inal educational  research  and  always  have  one  or  more  prob- 
lems under  investigation.  He  should  have  a  model  high  school, 
and  here  all  professional  training  for  teachers  in  these  institu- 
tions, as  well  as  in  normal  schools,  should  be  given.  He  should 
know  philosophy,  but  be  a  doctrinaire  in  no  school  of  it. 
That  this  subject  receives  such  scanty  attention  in  colleges  for 
women,  a  majority  of  whom  teach  for  a  time,  is  in  striking 
contrast  to  the  views  of  the  late  President  Francis  A.  Walker, 
who  urged  in  an  able  paper  that  the  study  of  education  should 
be  central  and  that  the  subjects  immediately  connected  with 
it  should  be  the  only  higher  education  of  women,  even  for 
those  not  destined  to  teach,  both  for  its  supreme  culture  value 
in  itseif  and  for  its  practical  worth  for  life. 

(E)  High  Schools.  The  first  public  high  school  was  estab- 
lished in  Boston  in  182 1.  In  i860  there  were  forty  in  the 
United  States;  in  1880  less  than  800,  and  in  1900,  6,005,  with 
519,251  pupils,  their  number  having  increased  about  one  hun- 
dred and  fifty  per  cent,  that  of  schools  over  one  hundred  and 
thirty  per  cent,  and  that  of  teachers  more  than  one  hundred 
per  cent  since  1890.  The  increase  in  the  number  of  studies 
has  probably  kept  pace  with  the  above  increment,  as  has  that 
of  the  proportion  of  those  who  take  Latin  and  algebra.  In 
secondary  schools  of  all  kinds  there  were,  in  1900,  719,241 
adolescents,  or  six  and  one-half  times  as  many  as  in  all  State 
and  private  colleges,  universities,  and  technological  schools 
combined.  In  1889-90  less  than  three-fifths  of  one  per  cent 
of  our  population  was  enrolled  in  secondary  schools;  in  1899- 
1900,  nineteen-twentieths  of  one  per  cent  was  so  enrolled,  and 
in  eighteen  States  this  proportion  was  more  than  one  per  cent. 
"  If  the  figures  at  hand  are  correct,  this  is  not  only  by  far  the 
largest  number,  but  by  far  the  largest  proportion  of  any  nation 
to  be  found  pursuing  studies  of  this  grade,  Prussia  showing  a 
little  less  than  one-half  of  one  per  cent  and  France  a  trifle  less 
than  Prussia."  ^     While  the  percentage  of  the  population  in 

^  palmer  K.    Brown :  The  Making  of  our  Middle  Schools.     Longmans,  Green 
&  Co.,  New  York,  1903,  p.  465. 


504  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

private  schools  increased  in  the  decade  from  0.23  to  0.25,  the 
percentage  in  the  pubHc  high  schools  increased  in  the  same 
period  from  0.36  to  0.70.  As  Professor  Brown  well  says,  "  For 
the  past  ten  or  twelve  years  we  have  seen  middle  school  prob- 
lems occupying  a  central  place  in  the  thought  of  the  great  cul- 
ture nations.  We  have  had  a  decade  or  more  of  middle  school 
reforms.  The  great  mile-stones  in  the  progress  of  these  re- 
forms have  been  the  December  Conference  at  Berlin  in  1890, 
and  the  revision  of  the  Prussian  curriculums  which  followed; 
the  report  of  our  own  Committee  of  Ten  in  1893;  the  report 
of  the  English  Parliamentary  Commission  on  Secondary  Edu- 
cation in  1895,  and  the  establishment  of  the  English  Board  of 
Education  to  give  effect  to  recommendations  which  this  com- 
mission presented ;  the  report  of  the  Committee  on  College 
Entrance  Requirements  of  our  National  Educational  Asso- 
ciation in  1899;  the  report,  in  1899  and  1900,  of  the  commis- 
sion appointed  by  the  French  Chamber  of  Deputies;  the 
Brunswick  Declaration  and  the  Kiel  decree,  of  1900;  the 
establishment  of  the  College  Entrance  Examination  Board 
and  the  Commission  on  Accredited  Schools  in  the  year  just 
past  (1902).  It  is  a  most  remarkable  record,  and  warrants 
the  belief  that  we  have  juct  been  passing  through  one  of  the 
greatest  formative  epochs  in  the  history  of  secondary  schools. 
In  America  it  has  been  not  a  time  of  crisis,  as  in  the  nations 
of  Europe,  but  rather  a  time  of  unparalleled  progress." 

The  cry  against  taxation  for  those  who  do  not  send  to 
school  is  as  old  as  the  district  school,  was  raised,  too,  by  the 
parochial  school,  and  was  a  few  years  ago  greatly  in  vogue 
against  the  extension  of  the  high  school  movement  as  well  as 
against  State  universities.  But  now  no  one  doubts  their  con- 
stitutionality, both  voter  and  taxpayer  have  adopted  them,  and 
they  seem  destined  to  become  free  local  colleges  for  the  people. 
Statistics  show  that  in  the  West,  while  many  of  them  are  no 
more  local  in  their  attendance  than  some  colleges,  they  appeal 
more  strongly  to  local  pride.  The  age  of  high  school  pupils 
has  also  increased.  With  three  years  for  law  and  three  or 
four  for  medicine  and  theology,  now  pretty  well  established, 
all  agree  that  the  average  young  man  is  too  late  in  entering 
upon  his  work.  Yet  few  or  none  find  the  lost  two  years,  that 
have  been  sought  or  found  in  every  earlier  and  later  stage,  to 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  5^5 

be  here,  but  nearly  all  advocate  an  expansion  policy  for  high 
schools.  President  Harper  would  shorten  the  elementary 
school  from  eight  to  six  years  and  extend  the  high  school 
downward.  It  is  possible  for  most  children  in  this  country  to 
leave  the  school  forever  at  fourteen,  common  law  require- 
ments being  thirteen  or  fourteen,  and  parents  often  represent 
children  of  twelve  as  having  fulfilled  these  requirements.  Most 
do  leave  at  this  age  never  to  return,  and  many  of  them  are 
never  again  interested  in  educational  pursuits.^  Some  would 
add  the  freshman  and  perhaps  sophomore  years  from  the  col- 
lege, thinking  the  high  school  could  do  the  work  as  well  and 
that  this  would  increase  their  dignity.  In  a  recent  census  of 
principals  made  by  Professor  Bolton,  of  Iowa,  seventy-five  per 
cent  favored  adding  two  years  at  the  top,  the  chief  reason  be- 
ing that  more  would  be  benefited  because  many  would  stop 
whenever  the  high  school  ended.  Some  thought  the  course 
was  not  long  enough  for  those  who  do  not  go  to  college.  Some 
claimed  that  the  State  ought  to  educate  till  a  legal  majority  of 
twenty-one,  and  a  few  of  these  institutions  already  confer  the 
A.  B.  degree. 

In  the  high  schools  of  this  country  the  girls  conspicuously 
outnumber  the  boys.  This  disparity  is  increasing,  and  it  is 
rare  indeed  to  find  a  class  in  which  the  sexes  are  equal.  From 
1890  to  1897  the  number  of  boys  in  the  public  schools  of 
this  country  averaged  about  forty-one  per  cent;  this  pro- 
portion has  changed  but  little,  and  does  not  vary  very  greatly 
in  different  parts  of  the  country  as  a  whole.  The  proportion 
of  boys  decreases  very  rapidly  during  the  course.^  Girls  pre- 
ponderate especially  in  English,  Latin,  algebra,  and  French 
classes,  so  much  so  that  in  a  few  places  boy  sentiment  decrees 
it  good  form  to  avoid  some  of  these  as  "  sissy  "  courses. 

In  244  high  schools  of  Massachusetts,  McDonald  estimated 
that  in  1897  there  were  33,369  pupils,  of  whom  13,082  were 
in  the  first  year,  9,151  in  the  second,  6,343  in  the  third,  and 
4,820  in  the  fourth  and  higher  classes,  the  percentages  being 
respectively  38,  27,  19,  and  15.     In  Missouri  this  percentage 


'  Age  at  which  Children  Leave  School,  by  F.  H.  Law.  Ed.  Rev.,  January, 
1898,  p.  40. 

'^  Where  are  the  High  School  Boys  ?  by  F.  E.  DeYoe  and  C.  H.  Thurber 
School  Rev.,  April,  1900,  p.  234. 


5o6 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


shrunk  from  41.4  per  cent  in  the  first  to  9.7  per  cent  in  the 
fourth  year;  in  Kansas  City  from  40  per  cent  in  the  first  to 
14  per  cent  in  the  fourth,  and  these  figures  are  typical.^ 
Greenwood  found  that  the  older  pupils  who  enter  the  high 
schools  of  this  country  are  more  liable  to  fail  or  leave  during 
the  first  year  than  those  who  enter  younger. 

The  causes  of  leaving  most  often  specified  by  girls  are 
sickness,  while  most  boys  leave  to  go  to  work.  Poverty  seems 
to  weaken  children's  interest  in  education  and  their  apprecia- 
tion of  its  value,  for  ideal  elements  are  lacking  and  short- 
sighted material  considerations  come  into  power;  G.  E. 
Gay  found  thirty-four  per  cent  left  from  loss  of  interest  in 
the  work.  Next  for  both  sexes  together  comes  inability  to 
do  the  work.  Of  those  who  leave  from  this  latter  cause  most 
fail  in  mathematics,  next  most  in  English,  third  in  ancient  and 
modern  languages,  fourth  in  the  natural  sciences,  and  fifth  in 
history,  etc.  Some  depreciate  stopping  places  and  would  have 
as  few  as  possible,  like  the  gymnasia.  Real  school,  and  lycee, 
which  are  continuous  from  the  age  of  eight  or  nine  for  ten 
years  and  so  grade  uninterruptedly  from  the  primary  through 
the  university,  while  others  praise  the  American  system  on 
account  of  the  break  which  they  would  place  at  the  dawn  of 
puberty  when  the  young  crave  change.  The  School  Report 
of  St.  Louis,  in  1901,  presents  a  valuable  table  and  curves  of 
attendance  up  the  grades  in  three  representative  cities  where 
the  dawn  of  puberty  is  marked  by  the  greatest  steepness  of  the 
curve  of  leaving,  as  follows : 


Grammar  Grades. 

High  Schools. 

S 

n; 

> 

> 

> 

> 

> 

> 

St.  Louis, 

years  1879-1881.. 

100 

67 

63 

44 

20 

9 

8 

'     5 

3 

2 

2 

" 

"      1887-1890.. 

100 

67 

55 

28 

20 

12 

10 

5 

3 

2 

2 

" 

"      1898-1900.. 

100 

93 

83 

50 

29 

21 

14 

7 

4 

3 

2 

Chicago, 

"        "         "     .. 

ICO 

91 

78 

71 

52 

37 

2b 

12 

7 

5 

3 

Boston, 

"        "         "     . . 

100 

97 

93 

»5 

74  ,  59 

44 

25 

IS 

10      4 

The  proportion  who  enter  college  seems  also  declining.    Of 
22,575  m^ile  graduates  of  American  high  schools  in  1900,  8,592 

'  Report  on  High  School  Statistics,  by  J.  M.  Greenwood.     Proc.  of  the  N.  E. 
A.,  1900,  p.  340. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  5^7 

only  were  in  college  preparatory  courses.  Of  the  total  number 
of  male  students  13.44  per  cent  were  in  preparatory  courses. 
From  1890  to  1899  the  percentage  of  pupils  even  in  private 
high  schools  who  were  preparing  for  college  fell  from  61.37 
per  cent  to  46.52  per  cent,  or  nearly  fifteen  per  cent.  In  the 
public  high  schools  the  total  number  preparing  for  college 
fell  between  1890  and  1900  from  14.44  to  10.82  per  cent. 
The  percentage  of  those  who  graduated  fell  from   12.60  to 


Grammar  Grades                            High  School  Years 

II     III       IV       V        VI      VII     VIII      I         II       III     IV 

90 
80 
70 

260 

d 

i 

S  50 
40 

^^ 

■**• 

, 

\ 

\ 

X 

' 

\ 

\ 

v., 

\ 

\ 
\ 

\ 
\ 

\ 
\ 

\  \  ] 

\ 

1 

^ 

\ 

\ 

\ 

\ 
\ 
\ 

\ 

\ 

*J 

\  \ 

\ 

\ 

\\ 

\2 

\ 

30 
80 
10 

\ 

\   \ 

\ 

\ 

k 

\ 

\ 

\ 

\ 
\ 

\ 

N 

\ 
■^ 

^--^"^ 

si; 

I,  Boston,  1901  ;   2,  Chicago,  1901  ;   3,  St.  Louis,  1901  ;   4,  St.  Louis,  1891 ; 
5,  St.  Louis.  i88i. 


11.89  per  cent.  The  total  number  in  public  and  private 
high  schools  preparing  for  college  fell  in  the  same  decade 
from  18.66  to  11.53,  or  more  than  seven  per  cent.  Accord- 
ing to  the  late  report  of  Secretary  Hill  upon  the  subject, 
in  the  year  1899  there  were  13,563  persons  who  entered 
the  244  high  schools  of  Massachusetts,  of  whom  only  4,655, 
or  about  one-third,  entered  the  last  year.  How  many  of  this 
latter  number  fell  out  and  how  many  graduated,  statistics  do 
not  state.     In  the  same  report  it  is  stated  that,  in  1899,  818 


508  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

entered  college  from  Massachusetts  high  schools.  In  1901, 
the  secretary  says,  "  I  am  led  to  infer  that  the  proportion  of 
high  school  graduates  who  do  not  go  to  college  is  gaining 
slowly  upon  the  proportion  that  do  go,"  and  he  adds  that  while 
the  ratio  of  girls  who  enter  college  from  Massachusetts  high 
schools  showed  an  increase  for  some  years,  it  has  now  "  sub- 
stantially ceased." 

The  last  decade  has  witnessed  a  remarkable  new  move- 
ment on  the  part  of  colleges  to  influence  high  schools,  which 
began  with  the  Report  of  the  Committee  of  Ten,  printed  in 
1893.  W^  have  also  had  Reports  of  the  Committee  of  Seven, 
Nine,  Twelve,  Fourteen,  Fifteen,  besides  that  of  the  National 
Education  Association  in  1890  on  entrance  requirements 
which  invoked  the  aid  of  the  American  Historical  and  Philo- 
logical Associations.  In  general  these  influences  have  worked 
from  above  downward,  the  dominating  influence  and  the  initia- 
tive in  most  cases  coming  from  colleges  or  universities.  That 
this  movement  did  good  for  a  time  no  one  can  deny.  It  has 
made  many  junctures  between  secondary  and  higher  educa- 
tion ;  greatly  increased  the  interest  of  faculties  in  high  schools ; 
given  the  former  fruitful  pedagogic  themes  for  their  own  dis- 
cussions; brought  about  a  more  friendly  feeling  and  better 
mutual  acquaintance;  given  slow  colleges  a  wholesome  stimu- 
lus; made  school  courses  richer,  given  them  better  logical 
sequence;  detected  many  weak  points;  closed  many  gaps; 
defined  standards  of  what  education  means;  brought  great 
advantages  from  uniformity  and  cooperation,  and  no  doubt, 
on  the  whole,  has  improved  the  conditions  of  college  entrance 
examinations  and  aided  in  continuity. 

One  interesting  result  is  the  standardizing  of  high  school 
knowledge,  as  hardware  and  even  agricultural  products,  food- 
stuffs and  machines  are  standardized  by  sizes,  weight,  and 
other  measures — six  weeks,  twelve  chapters,  four  or  six  hun- 
dred pages,  forty  weeks,  eighteen  courses,  seventy  experi- 
ments, four  hours  a  week,  three  and  four  years  of  preparatory 
study,  with  3,200  periods,  fifteen  credits,  age  eighteen,  average 
mark  seventy,  so  many  Latin  and  Greek  words  to  learn  a 
month,  so  many  minutes  of  recitation,  home  work,  courses, 
text-books  and  examination  tests  all  reduced  to  arithmetical 
or  quantified  dimensions.     Knowledge  is  no  longer   bullion 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  509 

from  the  mine,  but  is  minted  with  a  hall-mark  of  at  least  some 
numerical  committee.  Everything  must  count  and  so  much, 
for  herein  lies  its  educational  value.  There  is  no  more  wild, 
free,  vigorous  growth  of  the  forest,  but  everything  is  in  pots 
or  rows  like  a  rococo  garden.  Intellectual  pabulum  has  lost  all 
gamey  flavor  and  is  stall-fed  or  canned.  These  bales  or  blocks 
of  condensed  and  enriched  knowledge,  which  are  used  to  cali- 
brate the  youthful  mind  or  test  its  lifting  or  carrying  power, 
seem  to  it  stale ;  the  stints  become  monotonous,  mechanical, 
factory  work  to  the  pupil,  but  to  the  teacher  they  acquire  an 
excessive  value,  as  if  the  world  of  knowledge  had  been  canon- 
ized and  certain  things  set  apart  as  more  sacred  than  other 
fields  of  knowledge.  Some  institutions  allow  more  options 
between  the  blocks  and  assert  greater  freedom  because  they 
offer  more  patterns  and  more  sizes  of  essentially  the  same 
material.  Such  scientific  goods  as  can  be  metered,  inspected, 
and  examined  by  mass  methods,  tabulated  and  schematized, 
always  soon  seem  shopworn  to  youth  who  want  somewhere 
room  for  individuality,  if  not  for  distinction,  and  resist  cur- 
ricularization  and,  as  the  French  call  it,  the  canalization  of 
knowledge.  The  pupil  is  in  the  age  of  spontaneous  variation 
which  at  no  period  of  life  is  so  great.  He  does  not  want  a 
standardized,  overpeptonized  mental  diet.  It  palls  on  his 
appetite.  He  suffers  from  mental  ennui  and  dyspepsia,  and 
this  is  why  so  many  and  an  increasing  number  refuse  some 
of  the  best  prepared  courses,  like  the  ducks  in  James  Russell 
Lowell's  story,  for  which  a  chemist  had  demonstrated  by  long 
study  that  celery  was  the  most  nutritious  of  all  possible  foods, 
but  when  his  farm  was  well  stocked  it  was  found  to  be  about 
the  only  thing  "  the  derned  things  wouldn't  touch,"  and  they 
pined  and  died  when  it  was  injected  with  a  syringe.  As  we 
saw  above,  truancy  is  often  due  to  a  restlessness  which,  all  un- 
conscious of  the  cause,  is  really  where  the  home  dietary  lacks 
nutritiousness.  To  enforce  a  curriculum  without  interest  sug- 
gests the  dream  of  a  great  Leipzig  psychologist  who  predicted 
that  sometime  foods  could  be  prepared  so  like  chyme  as  to  be 
inserted  into  the  veins  through  a  stop-cock,  dispensing  with 
the  digestive  function  of  the  alimentary  canal,  and  thus  the 
time  of  eating  would  be  saved  and  energy  set  free  for  a  new 
upward  march  of  culture  greater  even  than  that  caused  by 


510  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

cooking  and  the  control  of  fire  which  the  legend  of  Prometheus 
marks.  It  is  now  often  painful  to  set  limits  to  science,  and 
results  as  surprising  as  all  these  may  emerge  in  the  future,  but 
they  will  be  different  and  by  yet  undiscovered  methods.  Once 
beneficent,  college  entrance  requirements,  as  now  enforced  in 
some  parts  of  our  country  and  in  some  respects,  are  almost  an 
unmitigated  curse  to  high  schools,  exploiting  them  against 
their  normal  interests  and  the  purpose  of  the  people  w^ho  sup- 
port them,  and  thus  perverting  their  natural  development,  en- 
forcing artifacts  of  both  method  and  matter,  and  sacrificing 
the  interests  of  the  vast  majority  who  will  never  go  to  college. 

This  invasion  and  subjection  has  been  rendered  plausible  even  to 
its  victims  by  three  extraordinary  fallacies,  (a)  The  Committee  of 
Ten  "  unanimously  declare  that  every  subject  which  is  taught  at  all 
in  a  secondary  school  should  be  taught  in  the  same  way  and  to  the 
same  extent  to  every  pupil  so  long  as  he  pursues  it,  no  matter  what 
the  probable  destination  of  the  pupil  may  be  or  at  what  point  his 
education  is  to  cease."  This  is  a  masterpiece  of  college  policy.  But 
in  the  first  place  this  principle  does  not  apply  to  the  great  army  of 
incapables,  shading  down  to  those  who  should  be  in  schools  for  dul- 
lards or  subnormal  children,  for  whose  mental  development  heredity 
decrees  a  slow  pace  and  early  arrest,  and  for  whom  by  general  consent 
both  studies  and  methods  must  be  dififerent.  To  refuse  this  concession 
to  the  wide  range  of  individual  differences  is  a  specious  delusion, 
which  in  a  democracy  may  be  perfectly  honest.  Difficulties  must  be 
omitted,  the  interest  of  the  hour  more  appealed  to,  illustrations  multi- 
plied, and  different  beginnings,  means,  and  goals  early  sought.  Nor 
does  this  principle,  of  course,  apply  to  geniuses.  The  school  is  not 
constructed  for  such.  They  go  by  leaps  and  find  their  own  way. 
We  must  consider,  then,  only  pupils  that  lie  between  these  extremes. 
Again,  this  is  unknown  in  other  lands,  where  it  would  bring  the  direst 
confusion.  European  systems  seem  constructed  on  the  converse  prin- 
ciple that  subjects  should  be  approached  in  as  many  different  ways 
as  there  are  ultimate  goals,  while  choices  between  academic  and  other 
careers  are  made  before  the  teens,  and  methods  and  matter  in  the 
same  topics  diverge  increasingly  up  the  grades.  The  courses  in  Eng- 
lish public  secondary  schools  differ  as  much  in  method  from  those  of 
the  great  endowed  fitting  schools  as  they  do  in  matter.  So  the  gym- 
nasia and  Real  schools  differ  from  each  other,  and  both  still  more  from 
the  Volk  schools,  and  as  do  the  lycee  and  polytechnic  schools  in  France, 
while  text-books  on  the  same  subject  are  radically  different.  Besides 
the  distinction  between  those  destined  for  technical  and  professional 
careers  and  those  who  study  for  culture  purposes,  there  are  many 
species  and  varieties  of  difference.  Again,  in  the  vast  number  of 
monotechnic,  polytechnic,  commercial,  and  other  courses,  some  of  the 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  5^^ 

departments  of  physics  and  chemistry,  which  are  of  immediate  appli- 
cation, are  emphasized.  The  horological  school  course  emphasizes 
vibrations;  the  great  Hthograph  school  of  Vienna  lays  stress  upon 
light,  and  that  in  certain  aspects ;  the  schools  of  telegraphy,  upon  elec- 
tricity; those  of  wine  culture,  upon  the  chemistry  of  fermentation; 
those  of  agriculture,  upon  the  practical  problems  of  chemistry  involved 
in  fertilization;  secondary  schools  for  art,  upon  the  geometry  con- 
nected with  perspective ;  those  for  the  lower  order  of  engineering, 
upon  mechanics ;  and  so  on  indefinitely,  all  selecting  those  parts  and 
principles,  and  even  sub-aspects  and  methods,  from  the  fields  of  these 
great  sciences  that  lie  nearest  to  and  shed  most  light  upon  practise, 
and  with  comparatively  little  matter  in  common  with  some  sciences. 
With  all  this  precious  development  the  principle  of  the  Committee  of 
Ten  would  make  havoc,  lacking  as  it  does  all  proper  conception  of  the 
magnitude  of  each  science  and  its  vast  variety  of  approaches.  In 
topics  like  astronomy  and  physics,  even  the  question  where  to  begin 
the  mathematical  side,  how  much  stress  to  lay  upon  it,  or  whether  to 
omit  it  entirely,  like  Tyndall,  is  largely  a  problem  of  destination. 

Even  in  teaching  modern  languages  there  are  recognized  differ- 
ences of  both  method  and  matter,  whether  the  pupil  needs  to  be  taught 
chiefly  and  first  to  speak  and  hear  the  language  or  to  read  and  command 
its  literary  resources.  Geography  might  almost  be  called  in  its  best 
modern  development  the  introduction  to  various  sciences,  and  I  think 
there  is  now  general  agreement  that  much  more  stress  should  be  laid 
upon  it  for  those  who  finish  their  education  early  than  for  those 
who  continue.  So  in  English,  children  who  leave  school  early  have, 
as  we  saw  above,  an  inalienable  right  to  some  knowledge,  slight  though 
it  be,  of  the  general  moral  lessons  of  the  great  masterpieces  which 
those  who  go  on  have  other  means  of  attaining.  Who  would  say  that 
if  a  child  has  six  months  or  one  year  to  learn  what  the  Latin  or  Greek 
world  really  means,  he  should  begin  as  the  pupil  would  who  is  to 
specialize  in  these  topics  later?  Not  only  thus  does  this  principle  fail 
to  recognize  how  vast  as  the  mind  itself  the  great  departments  ot 
knowledge  are,  but  how  the  pedagogic  instinct  almost  inclines  to  the 
belief  that  there  are  perhaps  almost  as  many  ways  of  approach  to  them 
as  there  are  minds,  and  that  it  would  not  be  an  insanely  wild  thesis 
for  those  not  ignorant  of  the  anthropology  of  youth  to  maintain  that 
every  individual  mind  has  ideally  its  own  best  personal  way  of  ap- 
proach to  every  science,  because  each  mind  not  only  has,  but  is,  its 
own  method.  There  is  especially  the  great  fundamental  distinction 
between  those  approaches  that  begin  with  practise,  art,  skill,  and  in- 
dustry or  for  those  who  are  motor-minded,  into  whom  the  great  func- 
tion of  the  teacher  is  to  instil  as  much  scientific  knowledge  and  as  many 
principles  as  can  be  made  of  practicable  service,  and  the  professional 
and  the  other  culture  groups  who  can  follow  a  logical  order.  In  looking 
over  the  text-books  for  these  two  kinds  of  minds  or  "  destinations," 
one  is  struck  with  the  very  limited  amount  of  subject-matter  which 
is  common,  and  also  with  the  fact  that  these  differences  rest  on  funda- 


512  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

mental  differences  of  constitution,  and  that  to  force  them  into  one 
mold  would  be  wasteful,  undemocratic,  and  pedagogically  immoral. 
This  principle  ignores  the  fact  that  the  average  youth  of  high  school 
age,  and  especially  in  the  early  teens,  has  not  so  far  reached  the  age 
of  reason  that  logical  methods  can  be  made  supreme,  but  that  genetic 
methods  which  cross-section  it  must  also  be  largely  relied  on.  Some 
need  far  more  popular  science  or  can  not  depart  from  utilities.  But 
minds  destined  to  high  development  grasp  and  follow  the  order  and 
logic  of  science  far  earlier  than  others.  In  general  the  more  vigorous 
and  capable  of  high  development  is  an  adolescent  mind,  the  less  appeal 
is  needed  to  this  kind  of  interest — i.  e.,  the  smaller  the  mental  area 
necessary  to  cultivate,  to  generate  interest  in  the  great  spring  of 
mind.  The  female  intellect,  in  general,  is  far  more  in  need  of  this, 
and  develops  specialized  and  abstract  interest  later  than  that  of  the 
average  boy. 

(b)  Closely  associated  with  this  is  the  principle  that  "all  subjects 
are  of  equal  educational  value  if  taught  equally  well."  This,  too,  has 
been  reiterated  until  with  some  it  has  almost  become  a  dogma.  It 
is  especially  startling  to  those  who  have  accepted  the  Herbartian  view 
of  grades  of  culture  values,  for  it  means  that  in  themselves  and  when 
rightly  taught,  shorthand,  Greek,  agriculture,  mathematics,  sewing 
and  surveying,  elocution  and  drawing,  the  humanities  and  science, 
pure  and  applied  knowledge,  and  all  the  newest  as  well  as  the  oldest 
branches,  if  taught  alike  well,  have  equal  educational  worth.  Here, 
too,  the  counter  assertion  that  no  two  topics  have  or  can  ever  be  given 
equal  culture  value  is  probably  somewhat  nearer  the  truth.  Were 
the  above  precept  sound,  the  supreme  desideratum  in  the  world  would 
be  good  pedagogic  methods,  for  they  would  be  all  that  is  necessary 
to  transform  the  meanest  bread-winning  to  the  best  culture  topic.  A 
great  teacher-scholar  has  sometimes  made  the  world  seem  to  pivot 
on  a  new  species  or  a  Greek  particle,  but  this  art  can  never  make  these 
themes  rank  with,  e.  g.,  evolution,  the  renaissance,  religion,  or  mathe- 
matics, even  if  poorly  taught.  The  history  of  education  is  rich  in 
warnings,  but  I  can  recall  no  fallacy  that  so  completely  evicts  content 
and  enthrones  form.  If  true,  the  greatest  educational  battles  from 
the  Greeks  to  the  present  time  have  been  fought  for  naught,  and  seas 
of  pedagogic  ink  will  have  been  spilled  in  vain. 

(c)  Another  related  surd  that  has  acquired  wide  vogue  and 
wrought  only  mischief  is  that  fitting  for  college  is  essentially  the  same 
as  fitting  for  life.  Indeed,  life,  it  is  said,  is  preparing  for  an  examina- 
tion. The  lawyer  crams  for  his  cases ;  the  doctor  for  his  critical 
trials;  the  business  man  for  crises.  Life  itself  is  an  examination. 
Therefore,  that  state  of  man  where  he  is  fitting  for  college  is  really 
the  best  school  for  life.  This  involves  the  colossal  assumption  that 
the  college  has  so  adjusted  itself  to  the  demands  of  the  world  as  it  now 
is,  that  the  old  maxim — non  vitce  sed  scholcv  discimus — presents  an 
antithesis  which  no  longer  exists,  and  the  schools  and  teachers  that 
complain  that  they  must  fit  for  college  rather  than  fit  for  life  are  non- 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  5^3 

suited.  This  would  be  true  if,  e.  g.,  the  high  school  best  fitted  the  vast 
majority  who  now  leave  to  do  so  with  least  loss  and  with  the  greatest 
advantage  at  any  point  during  or  at  the  end  of  the  course,  for  this 
would,  in  present  conditions,  be  the  greatest  good  for  the  greatest 
number.  But  this  would  involve  the  radical  revolution  of  beginning 
every  topic  with  its  practical,  industrial,  or  applied  side,  and  reserving 
pure  science  of  every  kind  till  the  last.  If  this  be  the  ideal  and  ulti- 
mate system,  colleges  are  farthest  from  and  will  be  the  last  to  accept 
it.  Here  the  counter  assertion  is  that  to  fit  for  present  entrance  ex- 
aminations involves  an  at  least  temporary  unfitting  for  life.  It  is  too 
sedentary,  clerical,  bookish,  and  noetic,  and  above  all,  arbitrary  and 
by  an  alien  master  who  offers  at  best  only  a  limited  range  of  choices, 
all  of  which  may  fail  to  appeal  to  the  best  powers  of  youth.  Life  is 
not  coaching  nor  cramming,  and  very  few  of  its  tests  consist  in  get- 
ting up  subjects  and  writing  them,  while  too  many  examinations  stunt 
and  clog,  and  if  too  prolonged,  make  real  life  seem  tenuous  and  afar 
because  it  lacks  the  vital  element  of  decision  and  application. 

Again,  in  one  of  the  most  important  of  recent  educational  books, 
Demolins'  urges  that  an  education  which  fits  for  life  in  existing  insti- 
tutions is  bad  and  must  fail  because  it  makes  men  tuft-hunters,  place- 
seekers,  searchers  for  soft  snaps,  takes  out  the  blood  and  iron  of  their 
nature,  and  he  demands  an  education  that  fits  for  nothing,  for  only 
that  is  truly  liberal,  in  a  way  that  suggests  Lowell's  definition  of  a 
university  as  a  place  where  nothing  useful  is  taught.  For  him  it 
should  exhaust  all  the  possibilities  of  the  present  and  overflow  natu- 
rally into  the  future.  It  is  filled  with  an  ideal  of  what  Mr.  Kidd  calls 
projected  efficiency.  Its  sentiments  preform  history.  Those  who  es- 
cape bondage  to  past  and  present  alike  and  who  are  best  fitted  for 
life  want,  no  matter  with  what  degree  or  at  what  stage  their  appren- 
ticeship ends — every  man  Jack  of  them — to  go  out  into  the  world  and 
make  careers  for  themselves.  They  go  West,  to  the  colonies,  the 
slums;  devise  new  enterprises,  sometimes  almost  want  to  peasantize 
themselves  and  fall  in  love  with  wheel-grease  and  the  smell  of  the 
barnyard ;  want  to  sweep  the  office  and  run  on  errands ;  their  instinct 
to  be  fundamental  impels  them  to  start  so  low  that  they  can  sink  no 
lower,  so  that  every  change  must  be  a  rise.  Academic  enervation 
and  anemia  is  seen  when  youth  desire  simply  to  fit  for  ready-made 
positions  instead  of  striking  out  new  ones.  Napoleon  organized  the 
schools  of  France  to  give  him  civil  servants,  and  the  incubus  of  the 
French  educational  system,  which  all  the  best  teachers  of  that  land 
now  deplore,  is  that  the  young  baccalaureate  and  his  parents  have 
from  the  first  only  a  snug  little  berth  in  view,  and  those  who  fail  of  this 
low  kind  of  success  eat  their  hearts  out.  Their  parents,  instead  of 
wanting  to  see  them  safely  housed  and  married  to  a  dot,  should  cut 
the  navel-string  and  toss  them  out  into  the  current,  to  sink  or  swim 
according  to  their  merit.    One  college  graduate  of  this  mettle  wagered 

^  Anglo-Saxon  Superiority.      London,  1898. 


514  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

that  he  would  start  naked  in  a  hotel  bathroom  and,  unaided,  pay  his 
way  around  the  world  and  return  in  one  year  with  $5,000,  and  won 
his  wager.  With  academic  wealth  comes  taste  for  luxury,  enervation, 
distaste  for  strenuosity,  taste  for  pemmican  courses,  the  habit  of 
dawdling,  and  in  the  end  the  realizing  sense  that  one  has  been  born 
just  too  late  and  has  spent  his  life  in  trying  to  make  up  the  lost  quarter 
of  an  hour.'  Education  should  cease  to  fit  for  the  past  that  its  gradu- 
ates should,  in  Sturm's  ideal,  be  at  home  if  transported  to  ancient 
Greece  or  Rome.  Nor  should  it  be  content  to  fit  for  the  present,  which 
will  all  too  soon  be  an  emeritus  deity.  This  enthusiasm  for  a  larger 
future  alone  banishes  ennui  and  disenchantment.  This  is  fitting  for 
life,  but  it  is  not  fitting  for  college  or  even  for  present  times. 

These  three  so-called  principles  thus  turn  out  to  be  only 
clever  recruiting  precepts,  special  pleas  of  able  advocates  hold- 
ing briefs  for  the  college  rather  than  the  judicial  decisions  of 
educational  statesmanship.  The  strategists  of  this  policy  urge 
that  social  classes  are  favored  by  European  schools,  and  that 
it  is  an  American  idea  of  unique  value  that  every  boy  should 
as  long  as  possible  feel  that  he  is  on  the  high  road  to  the  bache- 
lor's degree  and  will  reach  it,  if  he  does  not  stop,  just  as  we 
teach  that  he  may  become  president,  but  they  ignore  the  fact 
that  there  are  as  great  differences  in  natural  ability  as  those 
artificially  created  in  any  aristocracy,  and  that  the  very  life 
of  a  republic  depends  on  bringing  these  out,  in  learning  how 
to  detect  betimes,  and  give  the  very  best  training  to,  those 
fittest  for  leadership.  If  all  topics  have  equal  culture  value 
and  fit  equally  well  for  life  and  college,  every  youth  would 
naturally  select  whatever  topics  the  college  suggests,  and 
every  teacher  would  adopt  any  methods  it  prescribes,  for  all 
other  differences  are  obliterated.  The  growing  preponderance 
of  scholastic  topics,  the  increase  of  high  school  classes  in 
the  first  year,  and  the  augmented  subserviency  of  secondary 
teachers,  who  here  find  the  uniformity  so  dear  to  the  inert 
mind — because  its  ready-made  scheme,  supported  by  the  most 
respectable  pedagogic  authority,  relieves  them  from  the  vaster 
problems  of  local  and  all  other  adjustments — show  the  tri- 
umphs, and  the  growing  percentages  of  those  who  drop  out 
from  loss  of  zest  show  the  havoc  wrought  by  these  master- 
strokes of  college  politics.  The  voters,  who  have  lately  so 
multiplied  high  schools,  were  at  first  pleased  with  the  dignity 

'  See  Vol.  I,  p.  173. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION     5^5 

of  the  fitting  function  that  seemed  to  make  academic  life  so 
accessible,  but  the  people  are  slower  and  their  interests  less 
enlightened  and  less  sharply  defined.  Their  real  voice  has  not 
yet  been  clearly  heard,  and  their  unformulated  purpose  has 
not  yet  been  accomplished.  It  is  an  infinitely  greater  prob- 
lem to  fit  for  life  than  to  fit  for  college,  and  requires  far  more 
thought  and  a  larger  accumulation  of  experiences.  It  was 
natural,  therefore,  that  college  interests,  which  are  so  simple 
and  easy,  should  be  the  first  on  the  ground  and  should  come 
to  power.  The  evils  of  this  dominance  are  now  so  great  and 
manifest  that  they  must  be  transient. 

(a)  Effects  on  Colleges  and  Professors. — While  the  pres- 
sure of  work  in  the  high  school  has  been  greatly  increased, 
this  very  fact  has  been  to  some  extent  the  cause  of  decreased 
pressure  of  work  inside  the  college.  Professor  Byerly  ^  says, 
"  It  is  commonly  and,  I  believe,  correctly  asserted  that  a  stu- 
dent of  fair  ability  entering  college  from  a  good  preparatory 
school,  choosing  his  courses  with  discretion,  using  borrowed 
or  purchased  lecture  notes,  and  attending  one  or  two  coaching 
'  seminars  '  for  a  couple  of  evenings  before  the  mid-year  and 
final  examinations,  can  win  our  A.  B.  degree  without  spending 
more  than  half  an  hour  a  day  in  serious  study  outside  of  the 
lecture  and  examination  rooms."  "  Why,"  he  adds,  with  all 
the  distractions,  "  should  a  young  man  without  strong  intel- 
lectual interests  '  live  laborious  days  '  when  he  sees  his  com- 
rades gaining  their  degrees  on  such  easy  terms  ?  He  naturally 
becomes  a  butterfly,  and  by  his  attractive  example  makes  it 
harder  for  his  fellow  ants  to  pursue  the  diligent  tenor  of  their 
way."  In  a  large  college  on  the  elective  plan,  with  many  be- 
ginners and  advanced  courses,  "  discretion  "  in  selection  can 
no  doubt  do  a  great  deal,  and  does,  at  least  in  extreme  cases. 
Not  only  are  many  too  well  prepared,  but  they  have  brushed 
the  bloom  off  many  subjects  and  become  a  little  blase  thereby, 
and  sit  down  at  the  college  table  with  appetites  slightly  dulled. 
Could  the  above  statement  be  made  in  any  preparatory  course  ? 
and  if  not,  by  what  right  do  the  colleges  bind  heavy  burdens 
upon  the  high  school  and  refuse  to  bear  them  themselves  ?  All 
up  the  grades  the  question  has  long  been,  Where  are  the  two 


^  Harvard  Graduates'  Magazine,  December,  1902. 


5i6  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

or  more  lost  years  that  have  been  sought  Hke  the  lost  tribes? 
Can  any  grade  put  forth  a  stronger  claim  for  them  than  the 
college,  if  this  statement  be  true?  The  high  school,  as  we  saw, 
weeds  out  more  than  three-fourths  of  those  who  enter,  before 
the  completion  of  its  course.  How  many  leave  the  college, 
which  now  has  the  enormous  motive  of  tuition  fees  to  retain 
all  it  can?  Again,  colleges  have  of  late  an  unwholesome  af- 
fectation of  rating  themselves  by  the  raw  material  which  they 
receive  from  the  high  school,  when  their  own  merits  should  be 
tested  by  the  finished  products  they  turn  out  at  the  end,  iinis 
coronal  opus.  The  entrance  question  ought  to  be.  What  is  the 
boy  fitted  to  receive?  quite  as  much,  if  not  more  than.  What 
does  he  possess?  whereas  it  is  when  he  leaves,  if  at  any  time, 
that  the  test  should  be  what  he  has  attained.  The  exclusiveness 
of  mere  high  standards  of  entrance  is  a  false  basis  of  supe- 
riority, for  it  by  no  means  of  itself  implies  superior  work 
within.  That  standards  are  maintained  too  ostentatiously  high 
for  the  interests  of  the  college  itself,  there  is  much  reason  to 
believe.  Again,  the  colleges  which  have  been  most  exacting 
here  are  just  those  which  have  also  led  in  the  cutting  off  at  the 
top,  in  the  form  of  concessions  to  students  attending  profes- 
sional courses,  provided  they  take  them  at  the  same  institution. 
Thus  the  fourth  year  is  often  sacrificed  a  little  too  much  as  if 
it  were  a  bribe  to  the  student  to  take  his  law,  medicine,  or 
theology  at  the  same  institution,  because  in  that  only  his 
fourth  year  can  count  credits  in  both  at  the  same  time.  Thus, 
what  President  Tucker  and  many  others  so  strenuously  insist 
upon  as  the  integrity  of  the  college  unity,  is  to-day  most  im- 
periled, while  we  discuss,  as  Professor  Penniman  says,  whether 
to  serve  its  mental  pabulum  in  the  table  d'hote  of  the  old- 
fashioned  fixed  college  course,  in  the  European  plan  a  la  carte 
of  the  three  years'  elective  system,  or  the  quick  lunch  of  the 
proposed  two  years'  course.  The  same  colleges  that  turn  over 
what  was  once  freshman's  study  to  the  high  schools  are  also 
readiest  to  turn  over  severer  work  to  the  professional  schools. 
Again,  high  school  problems  have  become  an  important 
topic  for  college  faculty  discussion,  and  in  every  large  institu- 
tion a  number  of  professors  now  specialize  upon  high  school 
work  as  guardians  of  collegiate  interest.  In  the  West  many 
institutions  employ  an  expert  in  pedagogy  who  divides  his  time 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  51? 

between  instructing  students  within  the  walls  who  are  likely 
to  become  high  school  teachers  and  in  traveling  about  the 
State  inspecting  schools,  advising,  incidentally  paving  the  way 
from  the  high  schools  to  the  college  he  represents,  and  placing 
its  graduates  in  vacancies,  or  conducting  a  teachers'  bureau. 
I  have  been  greatly  interested  in  the  kind  of  pedagogy  taught 
in  these  chairs.  It  almost  all  centers  or  bears  upon  the  rela- 
tions of  high  school  and  college.  Problems  of  the  lower 
grades,  the  larger  educational  questions  of  the  day,  and  funda- 
mental principles,  and  those  of  higher  education  generally  are 
either  untouched  or  interpreted  in  severe  accordance  with  the 
interests  of  their  institution.  The  last  two  years  have  seen 
striking  developments  in  this  respect  which  can  not  fail  to 
bring  department  education  into  the  respect  it  deserves. 

Again,  most  of  the  recent  text-books  for  high  schools  have 
been  written  by  college  professors,  occasionally  with  the  co- 
operation of  a  high  school  man.  In  the  remarkable  develop- 
ment of  the  last  decade  this  has  been  both  a  useful  and  a 
lucrative  field,  but  I  believe  we  see  two  baleful  effects :  first, 
these  authors  have  a  strong  interest  which  can  not  be  quite  im- 
partial, scientific,  or  educational,  and  in  all  texts  and  methods 
are  special  pleaders  whose  minds  are  no  longer  open,  who  are 
advocates  rather  than  judges,  and  bring  the  authority  and  pres- 
tige of  their  position  to  bear  in  ways  that  are  not  entirely 
wholesome.  One  who  has  merely  expressed  an  educational 
opinion  can  change  more  easily,  if  he  sees  reason,  than  one 
who  has  given  that  opinion  elaborate  embodiment  in  a  set  of 
methods  by  writing  a  text-book.  More  or  less  of  the  book- 
agent  element  has  sometimes  seemed  to  be  almost  inexpug- 
nable from  public  discussions.  But  this,  I  hasten  to  say,  is  of 
course  not  true  of  the  best,  and  not  consciously  true  perhaps 
of  the  most,  who  would  scorn  themselves  if  they  detected  such 
a  bias,  but  even  this  too  often  impairs  the  opinion  of  their 
candor  which  their  hearers  entertain. 

Next,  a  college  author  of  a  high  school  text-book  in  his 
department  can  hardly  refrain  from  giving  at  least  some  hints 
of  the  best  thoughts  in  his  mind.  He  has  sought  to  ele- 
mentarize  his  specialty,  to  interest  beginners,  and  this  I  believe 
in  the  judgment  of  most  of  the  best  men  of  science  is  not 
favorable  to  the  best  teaching  in  college.    If  professors  should 


5i8  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

devote  themselves  to  v^riting  high  school  texts,  why  should 
they  also  admit  and  teach  beginners  in  their  own  courses? 
Pupils  who  have  gone  through  their  professor's  book  in  high 
school  can  often  afford  to  dawdle  when  they  take  his  course  in 
college.  It  is  sometimes  said  that  only  true  greatness  can  ele- 
mentarize.  Certainly  it  is  a  difficult  thing  and  habituates  the 
mental  vision  to  another  focus.  I  believe  it  is  one  of  the  great- 
est services  and  perhaps  ought  to  be  made  a  duty,  or  even  a 
point  of  honor,  by  successful  college  teachers,  before  they  close 
their  career,  to  put  down  the  best  of  their  teachings,  enriched 
by  their  own  experience,  in  a  text-book,  which  is  in  a  sense 
their  life-book,  as  Le  Conte  did  in  geology,  Ganot  in  physics, 
Schwegler  in  philosophy,  Dana  in  mineralogy,  and  many 
others ;  and  I  hold  it  a  bad  habit  for  professors  in  their  prime 
to  emit  a  long  graded  series  of  text-books,  from  the  various 
rudiments  up  to  the  greatest  height  to  which  they  can  tiptoe, 
because  in  fact  the  best  teachers  must  by  long  experience  ad- 
dress themselves  to  but  one,  or  at  most  a  few,  grades  of  work 
to  do  their  best.  The  fact,  too,  that  young  men  in  high  schools 
intending  to  enter  a  certain  college  prefer  the  text-book  of  their 
coming  professor  does  not  seem  to  me  an  entirely  wholesome 
fact,  although  this  evil  is  not  great.  High  school  youth  com- 
monly need  to  approach  great  departments  by  genetic  rather 
than  by  logical  methods,  and  of  this  great  fact,  as  well  as  how 
to  meet  it,  the  profession  is  usually  ignorant.  From  one  to  three 
years  later,  however,  the  latter  method,  which  would  fail  be- 
fore, can  accomplish  such  results  that  not  a  few  of  the  ablest 
academic  teachers  prefer  virgin  minds  in  their  pupils  with  noth- 
ing to  unlearn.  Thus,  again,  it  is  often  only  an  affectation  that 
goes  with  limited  knowledge,  ignorance  of  youth,  mechanic 
methods,  and  low  pedagogic  ability  that  demands  a  prolonged 
novitiate  as  a  condition  precedent  to  admission  to  one's  courses. 
The  present  absorption  in  the  work  of  prescription  for 
lower  grades  is  bad  for  every  truly  academic  aspiration  of  the 
college,  and  still  more  of  the  university,  that  in  its  present  par- 
turient stage  needs  all  the  care  of  all  the  best  faculties  and  for 
lack  of  which  it  is  now  in  great  danger  and  pain,  to  say  nothing 
here  of  the  higher  duty  of  research,  so  different  from  teaching 
that  in  our  academic  work  they  are  rarely  combined,  but  at 
best  only  juxtaposed,  as  vocation  and  avocation.     Internal  has 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    5^9 

by  no  means  kept  pace  with  external  academic  organization, 
and  the  college  president  of  the  external  type  never  was  so 
distant  from  and  so  inadequate  to  cope  with  the  inner  work 
of  stimulating  his  faculty  to  ceaseless  growth,  facilitating 
investigation,  insuring  the  stimulus  of  interselection  and 
migration  between  institutions  as  well  as  between  departments 
of  the  same  institution,  turning  from  the  wearying  quest  of 
students  and  dollars,  the  notes  of  which  ring  in  everything 
done  and  said,  to  the  many  and  vast  questions  now  just  emer- 
ging wherever  those  who  love  truth  supremely  and  labor  in  her 
service  and  pay  constitute  the  germ  of  the  true  university, 
invisible,  not  made  with  hands,  but  eternal  as  science,  and 
which  is  the  supreme  need  of  this  country.  How  shall  the  pro- 
fessional schools  be  manned,  by  those  who  give  all  their  time 
to  their  work,  and  not  by  the  practitioners,  especially  in  law 
and  medicine,  who  give  a  moiety  to  it?  Until  this  question  is 
solved,  the  professional  school  has  no  right,  I  think,  to  demand 
college  graduation  for  entrance.  Were  they  strong  enough 
to  erect  and  enforce  these  standards  and  apply  to  the  college 
tests  corresponding  to  those  they  have  applied  to  the  high 
school,  another  vast,  though  also  no  doubt  temporary,  stimulus 
would  be  given  to  academic  work.  Let  them  take  up  seriously 
such  questions  as  distinguishing  between  pass  and  honor  men, 
some  form  of  which  seems  absolutely  inevitable.  Let  them 
conduct  pedagogic  laboratories  or  experiment  schools  them- 
selves where  they  can  apply  in  each  topic  some  of  the  plans 
recommended  so  freely  to  teachers.  Let  them  try  vigorous, 
able,  original  men  in  their  pedagogic  chairs,  and  give  them 
liberty,  even  to  discuss  college  and  university  policy  and  with 
the  same  freedom  presidents  enjoy,  even  though  their  views 
may  conflict  with  his,  rather  than  the  soft  pedagogy  now  too 
often  given  for  the  special  benefit  of  fitters.  Let  some  large 
institution  lead  the  way  to  better  quality  of  work  by  admitting 
frankly,  as  Berlin  and  Paris  have  done,  that  there  are  grave 
dangers  in  numbers  and  that  there  are  limits  of  student  aggre- 
gation which  can  not  be  safely  transcended,  and  concede  that 
there  are  higher  aims  than  horizontal  expansion,  and  that  the 
phenomenon  of  altitude  should  have  more  attraction.  In  a 
word,  let  them  look  up,  not  down,  squarely  face  the  future 
and  step  out  from  the  trammeling  influence  of  the  past.     Let 


520  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

them  purge  themselves  of  professors  who  ought  themselves 
to  be  in  the  high  school,  and  take  more  interest  in  education 
and  less  in  instruction.  Let  them  add  to  love  and  knowledge 
of  the  subject-matter  the  love  and  observation  of  student  life 
about  them,  and  realize  that  adolescence  has  a  new  message  of 
humanism  to  the  world  from  a  source  richer  and  more  original 
than  that  opened  to  teachers  by  the  Renaissance,  and  that  it 
reinterprets  and  enlarges  all  the  traditions  of  liberal  education 
by  insisting  that  the  only  way  to  fit  for  the  next  stage  is  to 
exhaust  the  possibilities  of  the  present  one. 

Perhaps  no  institution  in  modern  times  ever  itself  needed 
inspection,  visitation,  and  in  general  such  scrutiny  as  have  been 
lately  given  to  high  schools  as  the  private  endowed  American 
colleges  themselves.  This  they  have  never  had,  but  although 
the  age  of  their  students  has  increased  they  have  clung  to  the 
school  methods  of  lesson-setting,  recitation,  minute  marking, 
and  criticism  is  howled  down  by  the  college  yell  as  disloyal,  or 
if  by  a  graduate  of  influence,  passed  lightly  as  an  idiosyncrasy. 
Such  inspection  has  been  done  with  the  greatest  thoroughness 
within  a  few  decades  for  the  universities  of  Italy,  France, 
Germany,  Russia,  and  England,  and  in  every  case  it  has 
been  followed  by  immense  good  and  marked  an  epoch  of  re- 
form. In  this  country  the  Government  will  never  do  this  work, 
but  such  scrutiny  as  is  possible  from  intelligent  high  school 
judgment  below  and  professional  school  influence  from  above 
is  greatly  to  be  desired.  Some  of  these  old  colleges,  whose 
outer  expansion  has  been  phenomenal,  have  failed  of  corre- 
sponding inner  growth.  Grave  evils  have  crept  into  college 
life;  student  habits  and  traditions  have  undergone  changes,  at 
the  very  least,  not  all  for  the  better.  The  growth  in  the  num- 
ber of  students  has  been  so  rapid  that  their  individual  needs 
are  not  met.  In  France  and  Germany  we  already  have  strong 
opinions  against  the  evils  of  large  numbers.  Excessive  wealth 
in  a  university  is  also  a  source  of  dangers  no  less  grave. 

(b)  Effects  on  Secondary  Schools  and  Teachers. — These 
once  had  an  individual  life  all  their  own,  but  this  is  now  gone, 
and  courses  and  methods,  and  even  sports  and  student  life,  are 
"  made  at  Harvard  or  Yale  "  or  other  scholastic  fashion-set- 
ting centers,  although  happily  this  habit  of  subjection  is  not 
"  made  in  Europe,"  where  entrance  examinations  in  our  sense 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND    EDUCATION    5^1 

are  unknown.  Michael  Foster  justly  claims  the  credit  of 
abolishing  the  last  vestige  of  them  at  Cambridge,  and  on  the 
Continent  the  leaving  examination  of  the  school  itself  admits 
to  the  university  without  even  a  certificate  save  that  it  has 
been  passed.  Here  the  evil  often  culminates  in  the  atrocious 
prescription  of  a  fixed  number  of  years  of  study  as  a  condition 
of  admission  to  examinations,  so  that  talent  and  intensive 
study  are  robbed  of  their  natural  reward,  and  those  of  whom 
it  may  be  said  the  college  goes  through  rather  than  that  they 
go  through  it,  are  excluded  till  the  tale  of  years  in  Latin  or 
science  is  accomplished.  Pedagogic  originality  and  inde- 
pendence are  denounced  as  a  whim,  and  no  teacher  who  fails 
to  fit,  whatever  else  he  may  do,  can  hold  his  place.  Uniformity 
is  deadening  to  pupil  and  teacher  alike.  Sadler  says  "  almost 
every  secondary  school  in  England  is  a  type  by  itself  " ;  it  is 
an  idea  that  to  be  understood  must  be  studied  in  its  history. 
Its  principal  is  a  man  of  eminence  and  known  throughout  the 
country.  Here  each  should  have  an  individuality,  a  local 
color,  not  be  merely  a  building,  a  corps  of  teachers,  or  an 
institution,  but  a  state  of  mind.  While  it  should  have  the  same 
liberty  to  prepare  for  college  as  for  anything  else,  it  should 
not  be  a  feeder  nor  a  mere  link  in  the  educational  chain.  The 
first  result  of  the  college  invasion  was  increase  of  interest,  new 
topics,  a  new  bond  of  union  too  much  lacking  before;  but 
among  the  later  results  has  come  the  sterilization  of  educa- 
tional interest.  Requirements  for  admission  have  in  my  judg- 
ment almost  ceased  to  be  pedagogic  themes,  and  yet  in  the  later 
proceedings  of  high  school  and  college  teachers'  association 
meetings,  it  is  hardly  an  extravagance  to  say  that  no  matter 
where  discussion  starts  it  always  settles  upon  the  technicalities 
of  admission.  The  themes  have  narrowed  in  range,  lost  vital- 
ity ;  great  open  questions  have  been  closed  by  colossal  assump- 
tions, and  the  jingle  of  the  college  warden's  keys  is  always 
heard.  The  proceedings  have  lost  interest  save  to  those  per- 
sonally and  practically  concerned.  Where  this  regime  is  most 
perfect,  qualities  of  college  fidelity  and  service  are  brought  to 
the  front,  and  those  who  study  problems  and  attempt  new  solu- 
tions fall  to  the  rear,  find  their  best  endeavors  slighted  and 
thwarted,  pine  for  freedom,  lose  interest,  and  perhaps  acquire 
contempt  for  their  work.    A  recent  writer  thinks  this  one  rea- 


522  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

son  why  so  many  of  the  ablest  young  men  abandon  these  posi- 
tions for  more  independent  careers.  There  is  Httle  incentive  to 
study  individual  pupils,  educational  philosophy,  or  anything 
else  outside  the  prescribed  courses,  for  what  boots  learning  off 
the  narrow  cram-lines,  or  for  those  who  have  lost  initiative, 
autonomy,  and  personal  force.  Thus  those  of  scholarship  and 
fortitude  labor  on,  silently  praying  for  a  day  of  relief  but 
slowly  stiffening  in  the  mold.  The  college  claims  credit  for 
occasionally  varying  the  dietary  of  requirements  to  make 
headway  against  this  process.  To  some  types  of  character  this 
situation  brings  a  sense  of  grateful  relief  from  responsibility. 
They  have  simply  to  do  what  they  are  told  by  men  whose  judg- 
ment they  respect  and  to  which  they  must  conform.  So  those 
who  should  be  teachers  tend  to  become  exactors  of  work  under 
absentee  legislation  slightly  mitigated  by  mutual  visitations  and 
courtesy.  They  are  lay  figures  in  the  councils  of  their  own 
government,  honored  by  the  confidence  of  their  feudal  masters, 
working  under  orders  enforced  by  a  sure  but  unwritten  pen- 
alty for  insubordination.  Those  of  more  supple  fiber  grow 
supine,  proud  to  wear  the  mental,  as  in  France  they  have 
asked  to  wear  the  textile,  livery  made  for  them  by  the  uni- 
versity whose  behests  they  anxiously  await,  happy  of  signs 
of  her  approval  and  content  to  be  called  good  and  faithful 
fitters,  loving  the  jingle  of  the  college  warden's  keys  heard  in 
every  joint-meeting,  increasingly  clerkly,  bureaucratic,  and  it 
is  already  possible,  as  lately  claimed,  that  a  majority  of  them, 
but  not  the  best,  would  vote  that  all  but  college  fitting  was  a 
by-product.  The  hope  of  the  future  lies  with  the  minority, 
now  happily  growing  in  power  and  numbers,  who  set  better 
examples,  successfully  resist  in  their  own  lives  and  studies 
all  these  downward  tendencies,  and  some  of  whom  boldly  and 
openly  point  out  and  challenge  them. 

(c)  On  the  pupils  who  should  be  our  chief  concern  all 
these  evils  of  the  mechanics  of  tutoring  and  of  the  overorgani- 
zation  that  kills  life  fall  with  greatest  force.  As  we  have  seen, 
one  of  the  laws  of  the  biological  world  is  that  overfeeding  is 
the  best  known  cause  of  sterility,  whereas  nothing  so  tends 
to  make  plants  go  to  seed  and  animals  fecund  as  reduced  diet 
or  even  slow  starvation.  Our  academic  youth  have  occasion 
too  early  to  feel  the  vanity  of  erudition.     Their  minds  em- 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  5^3 

brace  too  much  but  hold  too  little.  The  mill-stone  of  condi- 
tions about  their  neck  is  dreaded,  if  not  experienced.  There 
are  many  things  that  it  is  impossible  to  do  and  remain  a  boy. 
The  Greeks  called  their  teachers  inspirers  because  they  deemed 
enthusiasm  the  only  vitalizer  of  the  mind.  To  feel  that  he  is 
to  be  certificated  or  passed  on  what  he  knows  rather  than  on 
what  he  can  do,  to  be  held  up  the  first  year  in  the  high  school 
by  work  that  is  intensely  uninteresting,  so  that  most  who  leave 
do  so  at  the  end  of  the  first  year,  to  have  the  memory  pouches 
too  full  to  swallow,  the  reason  a  little  forced,  and  the  mind 
empty,  to  be  drilled  in  masses,  not  to  be  able  to  differentiate 
their  sex  by  being  always  yoke-fellows  with  girls  in  every 
class-room  from  which  the  boy  of  this  age  revolts,  to  feel  in- 
stitutionalized when  individuality  begins  to  burgeon,  to  feel 
that  his  mind  is  going  to  fat  when  it  ought  to  go  to  mental 
muscle,  to  have  little  time  for  himself  which  is  not  occupied  in 
assigned  tasks,  to  work  non-excusable  knowledge,  and  perhaps 
even  to  have  teachers  so  good,  kind,  and  feminine  that  he  is 
loth  to  exercise  the  prerogative  of  his  age  even  in  deceiving, 
despising,  or  defying,  with  student  life  at  its  minimum  and 
work  at  its  maximum,  makes  a  tame  life  at  this  age.  An  undue 
amount  of  language  work  brings  to  those  whose  chief  training 
is  in  words  a  failing  sense  of  reality.  Their  minds  are  spoiled 
for  other  kinds  of  scholarship.  They  have  no  stomach  for  con- 
tent studies  as  distinct  from  those  that  are  formal.  With  the 
few  best  pupils  and  those  least  apt  to  fall  by  the  way  in  the  pre- 
paratory and  perhaps  classical  courses,  taught  by  the  best 
teachers  and  kept  hardest  at  work,  the  residual  majority  daw- 
dle. It  must  be  of  this  most  obvious  element  that  Cecil  Grant, 
head  master  of  Keswick,  writes  in  Sadler's  volumes,  although 
he  deems  it  true  in  classics  and  mathematics  as  well,  an  account 
of  the  vast  number  of  branches.  He  says  "  nothing  is  more 
striking  to  the  English  visitor  in  American  high  schools  than 
the  comparatively  elementary  nature  of  the  work  done  in  the 
highest  form."  "  This,"  he  says,  "  is  also  due  to  the  some- 
what gentle,  give-and-take  style  of  teaching,  making  no  strong 
demands  either  upon  the  learner's  attention  or  previous  in- 
dustry in  preparation,"  and  also  to  the  fact  that  "  boys  have  to 
sink  to  a  standard  purposely  set  low  for  girls."  ^ 

^  A  recent  case  is  typical  of  the  victimization  of  the  majority  of  pupils  by  college 


524  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

The  chief  misfit  is  between  the  new  public  high  schools  and 
the  old  conservative,  richly  endowed  Eastern  colleges  and 
universities.  Some  of  them  have  even  joined  in  prescribing 
courses  in  science  for  which  they  refuse  to  give  entrance 
credits;  at  least  three  of  these  a  year  ago  gave  no  credits  in 
science  in  their  academic  courses,  so  that  Darwin  and  Spencer 
would  have  been  excluded,  and  Huxley,  had  he  not  known 
Latin.  How  many  credits  are  accepted  in  science,  and  how 
few  are  required  in  dead  languages,  is  one  standard  on  w^hich 
this  disparity  can  be  measured.  Another  evil  chargeable 
in  part  to  this  cause  is  the  excessive  and  perverted  use 
of  text-books.  Here  we  can  learn  from  Germany  even  if 
the  opposite  habit  is  extreme.  There  teachers  teach,  and 
do  not  hear  recitations.  These  I  have  heard  compared  to 
regurgitation  of  food.  The  teacher  of  pubescent  boys  is 
almost  always  a  man,  and  often  a  doctor  of  philosophy,  him- 
self a  living  book,  an  authority  and  not  an  echo,  and  regards 
the  practise  of  commending  students  to  self-help  in  finding 
out  new  lessons  alone  as  a  device  of  the  teacher's  laziness.  All 
study  follows  class  work.  Many  teachers  in  some  branches 
forbade  the  use  of  all  text-books  till  a  governmental  rescript 
was  necessary  to  require  their  use  for  reviews.  Study  hours 
at  school  are  unknown,  and  those  at  home  are  for  revision  and 
details  only.  Everything  comes  orally  from  the  teacher,  whose 
method  is  Socratic  and  heuristic  and  keeps  every  member  of 
the  class  alert.  The  books  are  not  crutches  for  lame  knowledge 
on  the  teacher's  part;  small  compounds,  skeletons,  tables,  and 
the  use  of  dictionaries  in  examinations  in  languages  is  often 
freely  permitted,  so  subordinated  are  mere  vocabularies.  It  is 
quantitative  standardizations  like  those  described  above  that 


aggression.  In  a  public  high  school  a  large  musical  association  gave  both  voca 
and  instrumental  concerts  with  results  beneficent  not  only  for  members,  but  felt  by 
the  whole  school,  who  were  thus  educated  in  this  greatest  "language  of  the  heart." 
The  normal  department  of  a  neighboring  college  heard  of  it  and  bestowed  the 
boon  of  preparing  a  course  of  harmony  which  conferred  entrance  credits.  This 
was  eagerly  demanded  by  leaders  in  the  association,  and  one  who  had  other  plans 
actually  decided  to  try  for  college  on  this  new  hope.  To  study  musical  theory  as 
prescribed,  they  must  withdraw  from  the  association,  which  thus  collapsed.  The 
college  "took  in  the  slack"  and  the  teacher  felt  honored,  but  this  margin  was 
eaten  up  to  the  loss  and  greater  subjection  of  the  school. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    5^5 

favor,  if  they  do  not  compel,  the  teacher  to  be  more  or  less  of 
a  lesson  setter  and  hearer. 

The  inherent  and  historic  primacy  is  with  the  institutions 
that  train  in  the  teens  where  education,  as  we  have  seen,  begins 
widening  up  and  down  with  advancing  civilization.  It  is  the 
most  plastic,  vernal  age  for  seed-sowing,  budding,  and  trans- 
planting from  the  nursery  to  the  open  field,  but  this  requires 
an  ever  longer  time  during  which  youth  is  neither  child  nor 
man.  Many  of  these  changes  focus  at  about  eighteen.  To 
prescribe  for  these  years  as  if  they  were  simply  a  continuation 
of  childhood,  or  as  if  they  were  like  the  college  age,  minus  a 
few  years  of  rectilinear  progress,  is  the  fundamental  mistake 
to  which  many  of  the  great  evils  from  which  we  are  now  suf- 
fering are  due.  Under  the  old  postulate  of  Roman  origin,  that 
knowledge  should  be  imparted  to  boys  according  to  a  theoret- 
ically prescribed  method  and  succession,  approved  by  the 
mature  human  intellect  on  a  plan  which  seems  to  it  most  use- 
ful later  in  life,  college  instructors,  and  indeed  too  often  those 
in  the  high  school,  fail  to  see  even  the  very  existence  of  these 
problems.  For  both  these,  the  high  school  is  an  elastic  struc- 
ture connecting  the  grammar  school  and  the  college  as  best  it 
can — a  machine  to  instil  a  budget  of  carefully  prepared  knowl- 
edge and  thereby  convert  grammar-school  graduates  into 
freshmen.  Conditioned  by  the  material  ascent  up  to  it  from 
the  lower  grades  and  by  the  stints  assigned  it  from  above,  it  is 
in  danger  of  losing  all  its  independence,  and,  sheltered  thus  on 
both  sides,  of  being  the  last  to  respond  to  progressive  influences 
which  so  often  affect  higher  and  lower  grades  first.  It  rarely 
even  considers  the  question,  what  is  intrinsically  best,  although 
the  problems  of  adaptation  here  are  unique  and  far  more 
difficult  than  in  the  college  where  logical  methods  are  more 
in  order  than  genetic.  No  stage  of  life  so  demands  study  or 
suffers  so  much  from  lack  of  appreciation  and  knowledge  of 
it.  From  this  standpoint  the  high  school  should  primarily  fit 
for  nothing,  but  should  exploit  and  develop  to  the  uttermost 
all  the  powers,  for  this  alone  is  a  liberal  education.  It 
should  follow  the  nature  and  needs  of  youth  far  more  closely 
than  is  necessary  either  before  or  after,  make  this  work  its 
vocation,  and  be  the  defender  of  this  age  against  aggression. 
"  The  function  of  secondary  schools  is  distinct  in  itself  and 


526  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

will  one  day  establish  its  independent  right  when  it  has  rid 
itself  of  the  vicious  term  and  still  more  vicious  idea  of  college 
preparation."  ^  The  dangers  that  now  threaten  are  that  the 
work  will  become  mere  routine  of  stated  tasks  and  will  seem 
to  the  pupil  an  artificial  program  imposed  by  the  will  of 
others,  the  purpose  of  which  he  fails  to  see.  He  should  see 
that  his  work  stands  on  the  same  basis  as  that  of  any  man,  and 
that  it  has  a  meaning  and  value  in  itself  to  which  each  day 
contributes  its  share.  Leaders  must  not  concern  themselves 
chiefly  with  scholastic  matters,  but  rise  to  the  largest  views  of 
educational  questions.  "  It  is  evident  that  the  high  school  has 
come  to  be  an  immensely  significant  factor  in  our  American 
life,  raising  our  standard  of  living,  giving  currency  to  higher 
ideas  and  ideals,  increasing  the  range  of  selection  in  all  occu- 
pations calling  for  the  intermediate  and  higher  grades  of 
intelligence,  and  forcing  the  wider  differentiation  of  our  cur- 
riculums  by  the  very  immensity  and  variety  of  the  demands 
for  instruction  which  must  be  satisfied."  ^ 

In  view  of  all  the  facts,  what  should  be  the  next  step?  I 
believe  it  should  be  the  organization  of  the  public  high  schools 
by  themselves,  or  at  least  with  as  much  care  that  their  interests 
predominate,  as  has  been  exercised  in  the  various  joint  com- 
mittees that  the  college  predominate.  Their  question  should 
be  how  best  to  serve  one  unique  age  of  life,  and  thereby  to  do 
the  greatest  good  to  the  community  and  to  their  pupils.  Their 
problems  are  as  distinct  from  those  of  the  private  or  endowed 
fitting  schools  as  the  new  English  Government  schools  are  from 
Rugby,  Harrow,  and  Eton.  Continental  schools  are  over- 
saturated  with  privileges  and  buy  attendance  by  the  increasing 
number  of  civil  offices  open  with  each  new  grade,  and  they 
bifurcate  classes  and  masses  too  early  and  irrevocably.  Ours 
should  now  rise  in  their  might,  win  back  their  sold  birthright, 


'See  a  good  article  by  F.  Whitton,  School  Rev.,  1900,  p.  261. 

'See  articles  on  this  subject  by  W.  J.  Shearer,  School  Rev.,  March,  1901,  p. 
137  et  seq.  Also  my  articles,  How  Far  is  the  Present  High  School  Adapted  to  the 
Needs  of  Adolescence ;  School  Rev.,  December,  1901,  pp.  649-665.  Ideal  School 
as  based  on  Child  Study ;  Proc.  of  the  N.  E.  A.,  1901,  pp.  475-488.  The  High 
School  as  the  People's  College  versus  the  Fitting  School ;  Proc.  Am.  Ass'n  of 
Superintendence,  February,  1902.  See  also  G.  H.  Locke:  Bibliography  of  Sec- 
ondary Education,  Chicago  University  Press,  1903. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    5^7 

repay  with  interest  whatever  debt  they  owe  to  grades  above, 
become  more  than  four  rungs  in  Huxley's  ladder  from  the 
kindergarten  to  the  university,  and  help  the  old  colleges,  most 
of  which  are  struggling  out  of  their  primary  formation,  in 
molting  their  old  soul  and  bringing  a  new  one  to  successful 
delivery.  We  have  had  of  late  some  judicial  statements, 
especially  from  the  West,  where  this  reaction  is  well  advanced, 
as,  e.  g.,  in  the  utterance  of  President  Jordan,  that  if  the  public 
high  school  wants  to  fit  for  college,  well  and  good,  but  that  is 
not  its  object.  If  either  bend  to  the  other,  the  college  should 
bend.  The  high  school  should  say  to  it,  Here  is  our  product, 
take  it  or  leave  it;  we  have  done  the  best  we  are  able  at  this 
stage.  We  are  reminded  that  England,  that  land  of  examina- 
tions, long  since  practically  abolished  them  for  the  university 
because,  as  Mark  Pattison  show^ed,  they  were  no  test  of  power. 
High  schools  should  magnify  the  dignity  of  their  own  diplo- 
mas. The  public  high  schools  do  not  begin  yet  to  realize  their 
advantage  of  position  and  power  in  this  or  other  regards.  Let 
the  tides  that  have  so  long  flowed  from  above  downward  now 
turn  and  flow  upward.  From  the  time  they  insisted  on  doing 
the  best  they  could  for  this  age  in  their  own  way,  the  ob- 
structant  colleges  would  come  to  their  standards  within  a  year. 
The  blood  of  a  new  life  would  flow  through  their  veins.  The 
high  school  would  be,  as  it  ought  to  be,  master  and  not  serv- 
ant, and  in  the  position  of  control  of  supplies.  That  this  next 
step  will  be  taken  and  will  do  great  good,  I  have  not  a  shadow 
of  doubt. 

(F)  The  College. — We  have  seen  that  the  nineteenth  year 
in  boys  is  marked  by  the  practical  cessation  of  growth  for  a 
time,  although  it  is  often  resumed  a  little  later,  by  some  decline 
in  the  curve  of  health  and  by  other  phenomena  that  seem 
characteristic  and  suggest  that,  having  achieved  adult  size, 
there  is  likely  to  be  a  period  of  slightly  reduced  vigor  as  if  to 
rest  and  adjust  after  being  cast  up  by  a  flood-tide  on  the  shore 
of  manhood  a  little  exhausted.  Faint  analogies  are  suggested 
between  this  age  and  that  of  the  beginning  of  the  prepubescent 
increment  of  height  and  weight.  At  this  point  perhaps  the  in- 
dividual represents  the  phyletic  stage  where,  in  its  survival 
value  in  the  struggle  for  existence,  the  advantages  of  increased 
size  and  strength  began  to  be  surpassed  by  those  of  a  higher 


528  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

mentality  and  the  main  current  of  evolution  swerved  thought- 
ward.  Moreover,  the  proportionate  growth  of  the  different 
parts  and  organs  of  both  body  and  soul  which  had  been  lost 
for  five  or  six  years  is  being  restored  in  a  new  unity  on  the 
higher  plane  of  adult  life  not  again  to  be  upset.  Cohesions 
that  were  loosened  are  being  recompacted  and  new  associa- 
tions of  all  the  just  acquired  feelings,  impulses,  and  ideals  are 
being  knit  into  individual  character  and  personality.  Thus 
this  age  is  again  more  or  less  liminal,  but  in  a  new  way  which 
it  would  be  premature  to  attempt  to  fully  define,  yet  which  is 
pretty  clear  in  some  of  its  larger  lineaments.  It  suggests 
another  slight  pause  for  wider  orientation,  leveling  up  arrears, 
developing,  in  Balfour's  phrase,  a  mental  framework,  and 
rounding  out  symmetrically,  ensuring  the  full  benefit  of  every 
advantageous  factor  of  heredity,  acquiring  self-knowledge  and 
perfecting  self-control,  perhaps,  above  all,  seeking  an  en- 
vironment most  favorable  for  ensuring  and  utilizing  to  its 
uttermost  the  last  upward  push  of  physical  growth,  which  is 
so  very  easily  lost,  and  for  nursing  every  new-born  spontaneity 
of  the  soul,  so  liable  to  be  aborted  or  perverted.  For  the 
chosen  few  who  can  do  this,  vocations  must  not  be  too  insistent 
nor  outer  exactions  too  rigorous,  but  the  pressure  of  both 
should  remit  a  little  and  there  should  be  leisure  enough  to  allow 
natural  tastes  and  aptitudes  to  be  heard  from,  and  the  vision 
should  range  wide  enough  to  include  as  many  lines  of  endeavor 
as  possible,  that  every  form  of  ability  and  inclination  may 
either  find  or  strike  out  a  new  way  with  the  least  loss  from 
misfits,  because  with  the  wrong  choice  of  life  the  strongest 
fail,  while  on  the  right  course  the  weakest  often  succeed. 

If  this  diagnosis  is  right,  the  college,  to  fit  it,  should  stand 
for  extensive  more  than  for  intensive  study.  Its  noble  tradi- 
tions of  liberal  training  suggest  something  analogous  to  the 
nuptial  flight  of  many  species  of  insects  before  they  lay  off 
their  wings  and  begin  their  life  work.  It  implies  knowing 
something  of  everything  more  than  everything  of  something. 
It  is  not  the  place  for  specialization  or  technology. 

The  college  should  address  itself  chiefly  to  the  ages  of  from 
eighteen  or  nineteen  to  twenty-one  or  twenty-two,  for  the  age 
of  legal  majority  bears  many  external,  if  not  internal,  signs  of 
being  also  nodal.     It  should  not  insist  on  inserting  itself  be- 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  529 

tween  the  secondary  school  and  the  university,  but  stand  a 
httle  aside  with  doors  hospitably  open  to  those  who  have  time 
to  pause  for  it  on  the  road  to  a  profession,  or  to  spend  a  period 
of  culture  and  acquire  an  avocation  before  entering  a  career, 
and  also  to  earnest  young  men  who  have  not  yet  acquired  the 
tools  of  learning  and  still  need  topics  that  belong  to  the  dis- 
ciplinary stage,  and  who  would  make  up  arrears.  To  all 
these  its  doors  should  open  on  easy  terms.  It  can  hardly 
exclude  even  gilded  youth  who  would  spend  this  period  of  lull 
and  physiological  incubation  in  a  profitable,  social,  and  insti- 
tutional atmosphere.  Entrance  standards  should  admit  all 
who  are  in  a  stage  of  development  to  profit  more  by  its  grade 
of  work  than  by  a  lower.  To  these  ends  poll  and  honor  work 
should  both  have  a  place  and  be  duly  distinguished.  Social 
opportunities  should  be  many  and  open,  and  numbers  should 
not  be  so  large  that  the  faculty  are  not  freely  accessible  to  all. 
The  latter  should  set  examples  of  simple  and  morally  ex- 
emplary lives,  and  everything  should  be  pervaded  by  ethical 
influences,  for  these  years  are  in  some  respects  the  hardest  of 
all  the  trying,  probationary  period  between  puberty  and 
nubility.  The  peculiar  nature  and  needs  of  just  this  stage  of 
life  should  be  studied  by  every  method  now  available,  and  its 
essentially  transitional  character  understood  and  adjustment 
made  to  it,  for  it  is  only  provisional  and  preliminary  to  ma- 
turity. Especially  at  this  age  many  need  to  broaden  by  retard- 
ing, and  some  even  to  be  mere  amateurs  and  loiterers,  who  will 
get  more  from  academic  life  as  a  school  of  human  nature  than 
from  courses.  In  a  sense  not  true  of  specialized  education 
later,  everything  is  propaedeutic  and  preparatory,  hence  culture 
is  here  more  process  than  result. 

While  no  one  can  predict  what  they  will  become,  it  is  not 
so  hard  to  sketch  briefly  and  in  large  outlines  what  colleges 
should  be  if  they  are  to  fit  the  needs  of  youth,  although  our 
knowledge  of  the  latter  is  still  too  meager  for  any  finalities. 
They  should  first,  in  my  opinion,  renounce  all  acuminated 
specialization  and  let  teaching  have  its  perfect  work.  This 
lofty  art  should  culminate  here,  and  to  this  professors  should 
completely  subordinate  all  their  university  aspirations.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  grinding  schoolmaster,  the  lesson-setter,  and 

recitation-hearer,  with  his  daily  marks,  should  be  repressed, 
73 


53°  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

and  the  teacher  should  teach,  demonstrate,  address  his  efforts 
more  to  the  upper  and  less  to  the  lower  half  of  his  class,  forage 
widely  and  incessantly,  and  bring  everything  within  reach  in 
his  field  to  them.  Every  good  illustration  from  popular  science, 
charts,  diagrams,  curves,  tabulations,  apparatus,  and  the  full 
resources  of  the  library  should  be  turned  on,  the  lecture 
method  purged  of  its  admitted  limitations,  made  the  most  of, 
being  conversational  and  designed  to  provoke  reaction  by  fre- 
quent personal  questions,  even  repetitions  or  discussions  on 
the  spot,  if  necessary  to  insure  complete  conveyance,  trans- 
lations, and  perhaps  readings  by  the  instructor  in  class,  and 
every  zest-provoking  device  should  be  in  his  repertory  of  re- 
sources. He  should  teach  every  topic  broadly  and  comprehen- 
sively, and  instead  of  disparaging  mere  information,  it  should 
ooze  from  his  every  pore.  Instead  of  the  affectation  of  mi- 
nute and  exhaustive  detail,  he  should  brave  the  charge  of  su- 
perficiality, and  even  just  this  should  sometimes  be  the  muse  he 
invokes,  because  in  many  topics  it  is  the  natural  and  psycho- 
logical beginning,  if  not  sometimes  the  end,  and  hints, 
glimpses,  and  suggestions  are  often  more  in  order  than  ex- 
haustiveness.  Mental  awakening  should  be  his  goal,  and  he 
should  inspire  to  read  for  pleasure,  for  the  only  real  measure 
of  culture  is  the  number  and  kinds  of  things  done  for  the  love 
of  them.  The  stock  of  knowledge  is  to-day  so  vastly  enlarged 
and  growing  at  such  an  unprecedented  rate  that  new  occasions 
should  teach  him  new  and  larger  duties  than  can  be  found  in 
any  academic  precedents.  Frontier  questions  galore  should 
be  raised  that  can  not  be  answered.  Answers  should  be  few 
and  problems  many,  for  the  reverse  practise  stunts  by  a  sense 
of  finality.  The  ideal  college  teacher  will  go  to  the  limits  of 
his  knowledge  and  let  these  be  plainly  seen,  for  this  is  one 
of  the  strongest  provocations  to  the  student  to  attempt  to  go 
farther.  The  test  of  success  here  is  the  number  of  interests 
and  the  intensity  of  curiosity  aroused  far  more  than  the  size 
of  the  body  of  knowledge  laid  away  in  the  memory.  The 
breaking  down  of  prejudices,  religious,  political,  philosophical, 
literary,  social,  and  the  postponement  of  discipleship  to  any 
school  or  view  in  every  field  where  there  are  many  held  by 
intelligent  and  sincere  men,  should  result  in  all-sided  sympa- 
thetic appreciation  which  should  have  free  course  before  the 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT   AND   EDUCATION    53 ' 

spirit  of  criticism,  which  is  often  the  foible  or  forte  of  the 
feeble. 

The  American  college  in  fact  is  very  different  from  this; 
indeed,  the  president  of  Columbia  declares  that  it  "  hardly  ex- 
ists nowadays."  While  trying  to  subordinate  the  high  school 
it  has  been  led  into  a  yet  sadder  captivity  by  lapsing,  as  if  by 
a  nemesis,  to  be  itself  only  a  "  link,"  if  not  a  hybrid,  between 
the  grades  below  and  those  above.  The  younger  generation 
of  professors  are  experts  inspired  by  ideals  of  a  highly 
specialized  culture  which  should  not  dominate  here.  The  uni- 
versitized  college  is  encroached  on  from  below  till  Presidents 
White,  Harper,  Butler,  and  others,  would  abandon  the  first 
one  or  two  years,  while  the  senior  year  is  often  given  over  to 
the  professional  school.  If  the  older  and  larger  colleges  were 
not  so  firmly  entrenched  in  the  devotion  of  their  graduates 
whose  very  self-respect  as  well  as  filial  piety  would  suffer 
if  their  Alma  Mater  came  to  grief,  if  they  were  not  rich  and 
independent  exactly  in  proportion  to  their  wealth,  if  they 
lacked  the  association  of  age,  the  buildings  and  equipment  that 
only  years  can  bring,  if  they  were  not  so  wrought  into  our  his- 
tory and  habits  of  thought,  and  were  stripped  of  the  prestige  of 
the  A.  B.  degree,  in  none  of  which  the  essentials  of  education 
consist,  but  were  new  fiat  institutions  otherwise  just  as  they 
now  are,  it  is  painful  to  think  what  their  status  and  prospects 
would  be. 

(G)  A  few  years  ago  I  gathered  and  printed  a  list  of  two 
or  three  hundred  text-books  on  philosophical  subjects  that 
have  been  used  in  American  colleges,  and  more  than  a  score 
of  which  I  have  used  myself.^  In  nearly  all  of  the  eighteen 
colleges  of  the  country  in  1880,  and  in  most  since  founded, 
these  have  been  the  culminating  subjects  of  the  A.  B.  course 
taught  the  last  year  or  two,  and  commonly  by  the  president, 
around  whom  everything  centered.  In  some  of  their  many 
forms  these  studies  of  man's  nature  are  the  fitting  close  of  an 
education  that  is  truly  liberal,  and  they  still  constitute  perhaps 
the  most  marked  difference  between  the  college  and  the  tech- 
nical school.     From  1642,  when  the  Harvard  degree  required 

*  The  History  of  American  College  Text-Books  and  Teaching  in  Logic,  Ethics, 
Psychology,  and  Allied  Subjects,  with  I,ist  of  Texts.  Proc.  Am.  Antiq.  Soc,  1894, 
vol.  ix,  pp.  137-174.     See  also  a  series  of  five  articles  in  the  Forum,  1900. 


53^  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

a  synopsis  of  logic,  this  the  oldest  of  these  topics  has  also 
been  the  most  persistent.  It  was  the  organon  of  law  and 
theology.  Disputations  were  at  first  weekly,  and  interest  cen- 
tered in  fallacies  and  syllogistic  reason,  and  the  rules  of  de- 
duction were  the  norms  of  all  thinking,  divine  as  well  as  hu- 
man. It  was  the  culmination  of  the  higher  education  and  the 
only  recognized  method  of  investigation.  This  met  a  real  need 
of  youth.  The  charm  of  personal  encounter  and  rejoinder  and 
colloquy  ever  since  the  sophists  and  the  forensics  of  the  school- 
men needs  rules.  Logic  presided  over  rhetoric  and  oratory, 
taught  to  deal  with  categories  and  intellectual  species,  and 
from  its  forms  of  predication  grammar  was  first  evolved.  Later 
came  the  revival  cult  conveniently  marked  by  the  arrival  of 
Whitefield,  in  1740,  as  described  in  Chapter  XIV.  In  the  stress 
of  youthful  emotion  a  supernal  cult  is  necessary,  for  to  regard 
duties  as  divine  commands  appeals  to  the  subrational  parts  of 
the  soul  now  dominant.  It  teaches  respect  for  duty,  and  avoids 
all  the  hypersubtleties  of  speculative  ethics  which  volatilize 
moral  sanction.  The  third  movement  was  the  introduction  of 
ethics  by  President  Clapp,  of  Yale,  in  1755,  and  later  the 
establishment  of  the  Alford  chair  at  Harvard  in  1789.  Al- 
though morals  was  theological,  "  virtue  is  not  by  nature  but 
by  divine  gift,"  it  encountered  great  opposition,  for  works 
could  not  save  men,  and  this  prejudice  was  greatly  increased 
when  deists  attacked  the  clergy  in  the  name  of  ethics  and 
natural  religion.  Goodness  was  likeness  to  God,  his  will  its 
warrant,  and  impenitence  and  unbelief  were  among  the  chief 
sins.  It  was  established,  however,  by  the  aid  of  the  Unitarian 
movement  and  the  Declaration  of  Independence,  which  turned 
men's  thoughts  to  political  virtues.  The  transition  from  the 
view  that  morality  was  a  code  revealed  in  Scripture,  to  the 
idea  that  it  was  seated  in  innate  intuition  in  the  soul  of  man, 
progressed  for  two  centuries.  Dreary  as  Clarke,  Shaftesbury, 
Cudworth,  Hutchinson,  Beattie,  Mackintosh,  and  even  Paley, 
now  seem,  they  humanized  ethics.  The  fourth  cult  dates  from 
1 7 14,  when  a  copy  of  the  first  edition  of  Locke's  Essay  was 
given  to  Yale,  two  years  before  Jonathan  Edwards  entered  as 
a  lad  of  thirteen.  This  he  read  with  a  joy  such  as  "the  most 
greedy  miser  finds  when  gathering  up  handfuls  of  silver  and 
gold,"  and  at  the  age  of  seventeen  drew  Berkeley's  conclusion 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  533 

without  having  read  him.  It  was  long  before  this  Hne  of 
thought,  which  Hume  and  Kant  completed,  was  installed  in 
American  colleges.  This  tedious  detour  was  short-circuited 
by  the  Scotch  school,  which  non-suited  the  whole  question  of 
reality  of  the  external  world,  self,  and  God,  etc.,  by  an  imme- 
diate appeal  to  common  sense.  Under  Porter,  McCosh,  and 
others  this  view  was  represented  in  many  texts  and  courses 
and  was  maintained  as  an  amiable  if  not  fructifying  modus 
Vivendi  with  religion,  science,  ethics,  and  the  new  psychology, 
and  gave  to  education  its  most  prevalent  philosophic  basis. 
It  was  only  after  the  history  of  philosophy  had  been  tried  and 
found  unsettling,  "  teaching  students  to  hold  no  opinions  on 
any  subject  really  vital,"  that  the  reality  cult  really  began  its 
remarkable  academic  development.  This  at  first  seems  hard 
to  account  for  in  our  practical  land;  but  it  is  here,  as  in  the 
days  of  the  sophists  and  Abelard,  explained  by  the  environ- 
ment. 

Youth  has  a  passion  for  callow  ratiocination.  The  fee  of 
Enathlus,  the  lying  Cretans,  the  syllogismus  crocodilus,  the 
heterozetic  fallacy,  the  Brundisian  ass,  Cratylus  seeing  and  not 
seeing  at  the  same  time  with  one  eye  shut,  delight  the  junior 
sophistes.  The  dialectic  fledgling's  forensic  passion  to  subject 
all  things  to  proof  and  to  cross-examine  is  sometimes  so  strong 
that  it  lapses  to  verbal  quibbles  that  would  do  credit  to 
Euthydemus  or  Hudibras,  for  youth  easily  almost  comes  to 
feel,  as  Plato  said,  that  a  dissatisfied  pig  is  better  than  a  satis- 
fied man.  He  is  becoming  conscious  of  associative  activities 
hitherto  latent,  and  loves  to  propound  and  maintain  theses  of 
his  own.  Reason  is  just  coming  to  seem  a  universal  solvent, 
and  he  would  everywhere  substitute  the  mediate  for  the  im- 
mediate, and  subordinate  intuition  to  understanding,  as  if  he 
faintly  anticipated  Fichte's  ideal  state  with  no  habit  or  instinct, 
but  wherein  knowledge  and  consciousness,  with  the  world's 
purpose  fully  revealed,  ruled  all  in  a  community  of  free  beings. 
The  tender  intellect  sometimes  crepitates  and  grows  dizzy  in 
the  orgy  and  flux  and  loses  its  orientation  and  may  waste 
powers  in  unifying  the  irreconcilable,  in  elaborating  distinc- 
tions that  have  no  existence,  or  giving  the  best  arguments  to 
the  worst  cause,  and  a  kind  of  reasoning  mania  is  easily 
possible. 


534  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

When  rationalistic  parents  and  teachers  ask  me  when  they 
should  cease  to  command  and  when  begin  to  explain  common 
grounds  of  morality,  I  am  almost  tempted  to  the  extravagance 
of  replying  that  there  are  things  for  which  no  reason  should 
be  given  till  the  youth  is  strongest  and  can  whip  his  elders,  for 
these  theories  seem  invented  by  senescent  parents  to  make  the 
weakness  of  old  age  respected  after  physical  strength  is  no 
longer  able  to  compel  the  right,  and  argument  is  sometimes  a 
poor  and  cheap  substitute  for  respect  to  personal  authority. 

Again,  the  very  isolation  of  student  life  weakens  the  sense 
of  reality.  Not  only  has  touch,  its  mother,  given  place  to  the 
eye  with  which  Berkeley  could  juggle  when  men  became  eye- 
minded,  but  within  academic  walls  a  still  further  remove  is 
effected  and  youth  grow  bookish  and  assume  that  all  wisdom 
can  come  by  reading  or  by  theory,  and  that  all  things  can  be 
learned  in  the  library  or  imparted  by  teaching.  Apprenticeship 
means  appropriating  the  ready-made  material  of  culture.  His 
receptive  powers  are  long  overworked  amidst  a  mass  of 
products  far  higher  than  youth  can  ever  hope  to  create,  and 
thus  the  carrying  activities  are  loaded  in  a  way  that  stimu- 
lates emotional  susceptibility,  and  he  is  cloyed  with  little 
opportunity  for  reaction  or  efferent  drainage.  As  the  body  of 
learning  increases  and  tutelage  taxes  all  his  powers  to  under- 
stand, he  grows  flaccid,  limp,  servile  to  authorities,  and  prone 
to  take  things  in  a  bookish  way.  His  activity  is  imitative  and 
examinations  prevent  the  normal  abiiint  studia  in  mores.  With 
overdocility  comes  proneness  to  accept  heteronomous  stand- 
ards and  to  parasitic  objectivism  toward  a  knowledge  that  is 
acquired  but  not  assimilated.  All  his  mental  possessions,  there- 
fore, are  a  little  like  snow  not  yet  melted  and  absorbed  by  the 
soil,  and  his  soul  seems  to  herd  ghosts.  All  this  is  increased 
directly  in  proportion  to  the  length  of  the  status  pupilaris  and 
the  rapidly  growing  size  of  the  body  of  culture-material  to  be 
acquired.  Again  the  life  of  the  professor  is  still  more  perma- 
nently withdrawn  from  the  world  and,  anthropologically,  we 
are  all  hypertrophied  in  intellect  and  anemic  in  will.  As 
salaried,  too,  we  are  removed  from  the  hot  palpitating  struggle 
for  existence  and  the  intense  life  of  feeling  and  passion  that 
surges  about  us.  Hence,  like  the  isolated  Hindus  of  old,  we 
dream  when  we  wake  and  wonder  if  the  world  exists  and  if 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  535 

reality  is  really  real.  We  grow  bulbous-headed  and  over- 
cephalized  and  teach  alien  and  not  indigenous  living  systems, 
and  our  hypertrophied  self-consciousness  falters  and  is  not  sure 
of  even  itself.  We  have  been  so  long  so  warm  in  our  hospi- 
tality to  all  kinds  of  thoughts  by  others  that  the  proprium  of 
our  individuality  has  been  submerged,  and  at  best  we  only 
sort,  classify,  and  present  alien  ideas.  Thus  we  incline  to 
involute  when  we  should  evolute  ourselves. 

It  is  under  such  conditions  that  the  modern  morbus  academi- 
cus  of  ultra  epistemology  has  taken  root  and  flourished. 
Berkeley's  ephebic  paradox  was  suggested  by  theological 
questionings  in  the  vain,  but  since  too  common,  endeavor  to 
parallel  the  spiritual  and  the  material  world,  which  in  fact  rest 
on  bases  so  distinct  that  even  analogies  between  them  are 
danger  signals.  Hume  showed  the  absurdity  of,  and  Kant, 
with  German  seriousness,  brought  the  wisdom  of  age  to  bear 
to  correct,  this  seductive  extravasation  of  the  speculative 
passion  of  the  youthful  Irish  genius.  Should  youth  suffer  this 
disenchantment,  and  is  this  an  essential  part  of  a  truly  aca- 
demic training  in  this  field?  Should  they  agonize  with  prob- 
lems that  only  age  can  solve,  and  that  but  imperfectly  and 
with  infinite  intrication,  or  is  it  a  handicap?  While  cloistered 
youth  easily  take  infection  with  the  bane,  is  it  possible  to  so 
administer  the  cure  as  to  make  it  effective  within  a  year  or  two 
so  that  the  subject  of  it  shall  be  well  and  immune  enough  to 
do  his  work  in  life  with  no  diminution  of  impulsion?  All  this 
I  utterly  disbelieve  and  hold  that  the  loss  far  exceeds  the  gain, 
that  the  destruction  of  mental  and  moral  tissue  by  the  negation 
which  any  philosophaster  can  cause,  can  not  be  made  good  by 
any  pedagogic  art  yet  known  to  man,  and  that  the  process  is 
precocious  for  youth,  if  not  what  history  will  regard,  whenever 
it  has  been  taken  seriously,  as  an  aberration  of  the  adult  in- 
tellect.   The  process  may  be  roughly  characterized  as  follows : 

I.  The  solipsistic  hopo  is  one  of  the  strangest  pot-holes 
in  the  roaring,  eddying  currents  of  human  thought.  It  is  at- 
tractive to  the  same  class  of  mildly  paranoiac  minds  that  of  old 
muddled  themselves  with  Zeno's  paradoxes.  The  spirit  that 
always  denies  and  that  applies  rigorously  the  Cartesian  prin- 
ciple of  doubting  to  the  uttermost,  finds  that  his  mind  does  not 
strip  well.    Reduced  from  a  state  of  buoyant  confidence  to  an 


53^  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

ignorance  that  seems  hopeless,  denuded  of  every  vestige  of  his 
earlier  beliefs,  his  mental  eyeballs  seared  by  the  sight  of  this 
hell  of  adolescence,  nature  seems  deflowered  of  its  freshness 
and  bloom,  and  whole-souled  devotion  to  any  of  the  objective 
sciences  is  thenceforth  impossible.  This  experience,  it  must 
be  admitted,  is  often  a  strange  exhilarant  for  thought  and 
poetic  and  metaphysical  expression.  There  is  a  quaint  and 
moving  pathos  about  those  who  have  ever  really  stood,  or  even 
affected  to  stand,  in  this  Ultima  Thule  of  self-involution. 
Formerly  the  ecstatic  worked  himself  up  to  the  seventh  heaven 
and  lost  the  earth  in  the  contemplation  of  God  and  super- 
essential  being.  His  modern  congener  is  lost  to  all  else  in  the 
contemplation  of  his  own  inner  states.  The  latter  alone  are 
real  and  true,  and  if  he  ever  acquires  any  other  knowledge  or 
belief,  it  must  be  laboriously  manufactured  out  of  this  mother 
lye  of  experience.  He  is  reduced  back  not  to  the  condition  of 
primitive  thinkers  before  all  we  call  culture  existed,  but  to  a 
hypothetical  mesh  of  weltering,  amoeboid,  psychic  rudiments 
from  which  he  must  evolute  himself.  Many  literary  novelties 
impossible  before  are  now  easy.  Do  these  psychic  states,  in 
themselves  utterly  unconnected,  drift  together  in  shoals  by 
chance,  or  are  they  bundled  up  into  personalities  by  bodily  or 
brain  sequences  on  which  we  must  rely  for  everything  causal  ? 
What  a  vast  and  almost  megalo-maniacal  respect  for  them- 
selves human  aggregations  of  atomic  mind-states  acquire, 
when  it  is  realized  that  the  whole  vast  cosmos,  even  space 
itself,  is  essentially  and  really  created  by  and  projected  from 
them  as  caryatides,  bearers  of  the  universe!  How  plastic 
everything,  even  natural  and  moral  law,  seems !  There  are 
as  many  possible  cosmoses  as  there  are  combinations  and  per- 
mutations among  all  these  its  elements,  and  how  far  above 
the  old  delusion  of  any  absolute  truth,  duty,  law,  etc.,  we  have 
ascended !  How  supreme  over  its  base  creation,  matter,  mind 
becomes !  How  near  the  divine  creative  energy  is  each  think- 
ing subject!  How  dull  the  souls  that  labor  with  matter  as  if 
it  were  ultimate,  or  with  human  opinion  as  if  it  could  be  taken 
seriously ! 

This  state  of  mind  stimulates  brilliancy  and  paradox  be- 
cause everything  is  an  open  question  and  the  other  side  of 
every  problem  is  perhaps  true.    It  goes  with  a  special  proclivity 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  537 

for  insoluble  questions  instead  of  for  those  that  may  be  re- 
solved. A  vital  soul  thus  flayed  knows  no  rest  till  it  can  at 
least  cicatrize.  Most  who  have  been  thus  suddenly  out  of  their 
depth  and  had  to  swim  for  their  lives  or  sink,  have  felt  utterly 
lost  in  this  charmed  circle  of  agnosticism  and  instinctively  seek 
some  "  urposition  "  or  residuum  incombustible  in  the  hottest 
fire  of  skepticism.  Some  lose  heart  at  the  exhortation  to  drop 
all  tradition,  custom,  inclination,  instinct,  and  feeling,  at  an 
age  when  these  latter  are  at  their  best,  despair  of  building 
up  again  the  world  they  have  lost  out  of  its  acosmic  elements, 
and  commit  suicide  because  they  can  not  endure  the  pangs  of 
an  ingrowing  intellect,  or  with  a  baffled  sense  of  failure  turn 
aside  to  some  practical  calling.  Others  shoot  the  chutes  by  a 
salto  mortale  into  some  saturated  orthodoxy,  for  the  mind  now 
is  like  a  chemical  element  in  the  nascent  stage,  ready  to  com- 
bine with  substances  with  which  it  ordinarily  has  little  affinity, 
or  they  may  accept  some  professor's  private  patent  way  out 
of  agnosticism.  The  religious  "  ways  out  "  are  manifold,  but 
all  postulate  an  analogy  between  a  belief  in  an  external  world 
and  that  in  God,  soul,  and  perhaps  other  theological  and  meta- 
physical concepts,  which  are  made  unwarrantably  close,  if  in- 
deed they  exist  at  all.  A  pleasant  pathway  of  ascent  through 
Wundt's  theory  of  attention  and  Fichte's  conception  of  will  has 
a  profitable  historic  background  and  leads  in  sight  of  some  rich 
laboratory  material,  but  it  implicates  what  God  made  plain, 
requires  a  struggle  for  psychic  existence  that  is  too  intense  for 
many,  and  is  essentially  sophronistic.  Those  W'ho  win  out  and 
achieve  full  epistemological  salvation  become  adepts,  with  a 
certain  aloofness.  The  sense  of  reality  the  vulgar  have  and 
the  things  they  strive  for  are  hardly  worth  while,  and  even 
though  they  follow  after  them,  an  unique,  residual  indifference 
is  felt.  They  deal  in  reasons  good  or  otherwise  for  what 
healthy  souls  believe  by  instinct,  because  a  life  unexplained 
is  no  longer  worth  living  and  no  act  can  be  virtuous  if  not 
based  on  knowledge.  All  must  be  done  in  or  by  or  go  through 
consciousness,  and  there  is  eternal  warfare  against  all  that  is 
naive.  So  their  minds  are  rily  at  the  bottom  and  frothy  at  the 
top.  Just  as  dogmatic  assertion  tends  to  paralyze  the  sense 
of  veracity,  so  to  work  out  by  reason  what  nature  gives  by 
instinct  both  weakens  and  teaches  distrust  of  the  best  things 


538  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

in  the  soul.  The  world  rings  a  little  hollow,  the  logical  char- 
acter of  the  universe  is  a  subject  of  anxiety,  and  occasionally 
the  gnostic  soul  falls  a  prey  to  the  night  terrors  of  the  baffled 
ontologists.  Initiates  slowly  adjust  themselves  to  an  altitude 
so  high  that  there  is  danger  of  mental  asphyxia,  where  the  view 
is  vast  but  nothing  can  be  clearly  seen  for  distance  and  haze. 
Although  physically  they  frequent  the  haunts  of  men,  they  are 
really  Mahatmas  living  in  remote  places  and  prodigies  of  pre- 
mature and  extreme  senescent  wisdom. 

Now,  this  treatment  of  the  adolescent  mind  is  wrong  be- 
cause it  turns  the  soul  inward  at  a  stage  which  nature  designed 
to  be  most  objective.  It  needs  an  atmosphere  that  has  not 
lost  its  full  proportion  of  oxygen.  It  is  psychically  starved 
when  hunger  and  assimilative  powers  are  at  their  maximum. 
An  impoverished  diet  makes  for  cephalization,  but  prevents  the 
final  molt.  Those  who  know  the  true  Georgics  of  the  mind 
devote  themselves  to  positive  work  and  leave  the  negative 
processes  of  decay  to  care  for  themselves.  At  this  age  the 
powers  of  the  soul  are  measured  by  the  capacity  to  believe 
rather  than  to  doubt.  How  much  real  knowledge  the  mind 
can  absorb  to  its  saturation  point,  and  not  how  little,  is  the 
criterion.  Our  problem  as  teachers  is  how  to  conserve  all  the 
freshness  of  life  now  nearing  its  culminating  point,  and  not 
how  the  sad  wisdom  of  years  can  be  affected  in  the  earliest 
twenties.  Volo,  or  sentio  ergo  sum,  or  sum  ergo  cogito  is  now 
better  than  cogito  ergo  sum ;  the  natural  thinking  is  better  than 
treating  consciousness,  like  a  St.  Martin's  stomach,  by  pulling 
out  and  examining  its  contents  to  study  the  stages  of  assimi- 
lation. The  old  fiddling  on  the  categories,  the  raucous,  idle 
proclamation  of  what  knowledge  truly  is,  debate  whether  we 
can  really  know  and  what  is  the  essential  nature  of  mind,  the 
disposition  to  hold  up  the  work  of  science  till  the  spurious 
mortgage,  which  the  theory  of  knowledge  affects  to  hold,  is 
canceled,  should  now  yield  to  the  view  that  whatever  nature 
is,  we  are,  that  it  is  the  truth  of  all  things,  and  what  does  not 
agree  with  it  is  by  every  token  false.  Truth  is  now  profitable- 
ness, and  the  purest  philosophy  is  that  which  applies  most  im- 
mediately to  the  problems  of  right  living.  It  is  thinking  the 
universe  in  the  easiest  and  most  effective,  and  not  in  the  hard- 
est and  most  abstract  way. 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  539 

Probably  Aristotle  had  such  cases  in  mind  when  he  in- 
sisted that  no  young  man  should  be  allowed  to  study  the  high- 
est philosophy,  and  so  doubtless  did  Plato,  who  would  flog 
youth  who  continued  this  study  too  long.  When  the  instinct 
of  ratiocination  buds  and  the  callow  youth  loves  to  play  with 
arguments,  he  should  have  his  fling  and  be  inducted  into  the 
largest  problems  in  the  history  of  philosophy,  but  the  pang  of 
it  all  should  at  this  age  be  in  a  benign,  homeopathic  form. 
Plato  allowed  the  citizens  of  his  ideal  state  to  return  to  it  at 
the  age  of  fifty,  after  they  had  been  duly  seasoned  in  the  world. 
Everything  we  know  of  the  stages  of  life  indicates  that  serious 
and  prolonged  study  of  such  problems  has  its  place,  but  it  is  in 
maturity  and  old  age.  Perhaps  we  may  grant  that  a  little 
more  of  it  has  been  justifiable  here  to  free  the  mind  from  dog- 
matic fetters  than  in  ages  and  among  races  where  the  youth- 
ful mind  has  been  less  wound  about  by  the  cerements  of 
religious  orthodoxy.  But  just  as  long  after  the  doctrine  of 
total  depravity  had  been  mitigated,  religious  cults  insisted 
upon  a  very  radical  re-creation  of  life  ;  so  after  the  late  dangers 
of  hide-binding  creeds  have  abated,  philosophers  continue  their 
exorcisms  of  natural  thinking,  even  the  errors  of  which  are 
far  more  harmless  than  their  methods  imply,  while  many  of 
them  still  regard  healthy  common  sense  a  little  as  clergymen 
once  regarded  the  natural  man. 

II.  This  is  not  the  place  to  state  my  own  philosophy,  which 
I  reserve  for  another  work.  Every  system  bases  on  certain 
postulates  believed  by  the  author  to  have  peculiar  advantages 
for  grasping  more  of  the  complex  modern  world  of  thought 
and  fact  with  greater  mental  ease  and  certainty  and  in  better 
order  than  any  other  and  securing  most  moral  effectiveness. 
But  while  their  scientific  exposition  belongs  elsewhere,  the 
pedagogic  value  of  certain  fundamentals  for  college  adoles- 
cents seems  to  me  so  great  and  indisputable  that,  with  power 
to  do  so,  I  might  be  almost  capable  of  enforcing  my  orthodoxy 
here  against  all  heretics  by  methods  condemned  by  modern 
ideas  of  the  freedom  of  individual  thought.  So  lost  are  we 
to  all  genetic  perspective  in  education,  and  particularly  in  this 
department  of  it,  in  opening  everything  intellectual  to  every- 
body, with  no  reference  to  stages  of  development  or  grades 
of  ability,  that  it  is  high  time  to  remember  that  youth  have  a 


540  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

certain  non  possumus  that  it  is  dangerous  to  longer  ignore. 
The  articles  of  this  creed  may  be  roughly  and  dogmatically 
stated  as  follows : 

( I )  There  is  one  infinite  background  or  tabula  of  the  uni- 
verse— the  most  objective  and  ineluctable  of  all  the  data  of 
consciousness — and  that  is  space,  or  sheer,  pure  extensity, 
which  seems  infinite  and  which  is  a  perfect  continuum.  To 
try  to  think  it  away,  to  make  it  at  root  subjective,  a  mental 
projection  or  mere  form  of  sensory,  is  fatuous,  and  has  been 
a  product  of  speculation  which  has  involved  endless  waste  of 
effort  and  confusion  of  thought.  God,  soul,  thought,  every- 
thing that  truly  is,  is  somewhere,  although  we  can  neither 
locate  it  nor  define  its  form.  All  that  exists,  or  ever  has  or  can, 
must  be  present  somewhere,  in  room,  in  certain  directions  from 
us,  and  this  absolute  space  must  be  received  as  a  universal, 
logical  postulate,  and  as  a  genetic  prius  to  all  vigorous  logical 
thought*.  It  is  common  three  dimensional  space  subject  to 
Euclidean  laws  throughout.  It  makes  motion  possible;  it  is 
simple,  undecomposable,  unaffected  by  any  content,  uniform 
throughout,  permeable  alike  in  all  directions,  and  one  in  a 
sense  true  of  nothing  else.  No  thing  or  thought  is  so  neces- 
sary. Every  negation,  if  complete,  ends  in  its  affirmation.  It 
is  certainty.  It  is  perhaps  the  only  object  which  can  neither 
be  transcended  nor  thought  away.  It  is  so  immediate  and  pre- 
suppositionless  that  it  is  beyond  proof,  non-relative,  and  un- 
conditioned. Anything  so  aboriginal  can,  of  course,  never  be 
adequately  stated  or  described,  because  language  is  only  a  tool 
by  which  we  handle  its  content.  It  is  a  merely  verbal  logic 
that  either  identifies  it  with  nothing  or  denies  it,  merely  be- 
cause blank  nothing  can  not  be  said  to  exist.  Even  though  it 
be  a  special  kind  of  nothing — a  nihil  privatizmm — it  is  not  sub- 
stantialized by  the  subtle  connotations  of  the  predicate  of  the 
substantive  verb  to  he,  when  we  say  it  is.  It  is  also  the  principle 
of  negation  and  the  purest  nothingness  conceivable.  Were 
there  naught  else,  it  might  be  full  of  light  or  dark,  and  neither 
thought  nor  words  could  distinguish  one  from  the  other.  Con- 
ceived as  the  fathomless  Abgnind  or  abyss,  it  has  not  even 
direction  and  nothing  to  orient  by,  while  its  infinity  has  been 
intoxicating,  and  not  only  Oriental  and  ancient  Greek,  but 
^^^estern  thought,  from  Bruno  and  Eckhart  down,  has  reveled 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  54 1 

in  the  monstrousness  of  it  all.  Everything  must  submit  then 
to  the  category  of  space,  which  takes  precedence  over  that  of 
being.  Nothing  is  real  that  has  no  position  or  that  is  confined 
to  an  absolutely  mathematical  point.  Thus  deity,  sentiments, 
ideas,  and  force  are  either  mere  abracadabra  or  word-stuff,  or 
else  they  exist  somewhere  in  this  most  extensive  and  least 
intensive  of  objects.  This,  then,  is  the  first  article  of  a  new 
creed  in  which  science  and  religion  can  now  unite :  I  believe 
in  space.  The  most  disastrous  modern  sin  against  it  has  been 
Kant's  fallacy  of  subjectifying  it,  when  in  fact  nothing  is  so 
indifferent  to  the  very  existence  of  man  and  his  little  mind  as 
space.  If  it  is  not  real  and  objective  in  the  sense  above 
described,  nothing  is  or  can  be  so.  That  we  are  in  space  is 
perhaps  the  most  a  priori  and  native  of  all  deliverances  of  the 
soul  as  well  as  its  most  axiomatic.  We  are  in  space  in  a  larger 
and  earlier  sense  than  that  in  which  space  is  in  us.  To  deny 
the  void  was  an  early  heresy,  and  this  proton  pseudon  of  modem 
epistemology  is  a  decadence  akin  to  the  fatal  hubris  which 
Greek  tragedy  makes  the  gods  condemn  in  those  who  try  to 
think  thoughts  not  suitable  to  man's  estate.  No  proof  can 
strengthen  a  healthy  mind's  belief  in  it.  For  the  ingenuous 
student  to  doubt  is  to  mortgage  his  life-work  with  a  contract 
he  can  never  absolve,  which  will  make  everything  else  seem 
a  little  less  real.  Modern  efforts  to  analyze  the  space  radical 
are  aberrations  of  our  day  which  have  involved  great  and 
wasteful  strain. 

(2)  So  abstract  a  tabula  will  not  stay  rasa,  and  thought 
so  abhors  a  vacuum  that  it  persistently  gives  it  color,  form, 
conceives  it  as  perhaps  arched,  laminated,  granular,  and  so 
forth.  This  may  help  the  mind  to  welcome  the  conception 
of  ether,  which  etymologically  suggests  an  all-encompassing 
empyrean  fire.  For  Hippocrates  this  was  continuous  with  air, 
and  grew  subtle  and  charged  with  immortality,  as  we  ascend 
mountains,  where  man  is  literally  inspired  by  breathing  in  the 
same  atmosphere  which  the  gods  inhale.  When  imponderable 
gases  were  discovered,  thoughts  of  ether  faded.  In  the 
seventeenth  century,  however,  many  ethers  less  metaphysical 
than  that  of  Descartes  were  conceived  for  planets  to  swim  in 
as  media,  and  as  vehicles  for  magnetic  influences  or  sensations, 
until  in  the  eighteenth  they  had  been  multiplied  like  scholastic 


542  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

entities  and  the  mind  revolted  against  them.  But  Newton 
needed  ether  to  explain  gravity,  and  Huyghens,  as  a  light- 
bearer,  and  modern  magnetism  demands  it,  so  that  now  it  ap- 
pears to  have  a  secure  place  as  the  largest  of  all  objects  we 
know,  containing  the  whole  visible  universe,  not  perhaps  infi- 
nite, but  the  least  material  of  all  that  exists,  known  only  to 
mind  and  not  sense,  far  less  dense  than  the  radical  solar  nebula 
which  Lockyer  makes  1/200,000,000  as  tenuous  as  hydrogen. 
Indeed  so  frictionless  is  it  that  it  can  not  transform  molar  mo- 
tion into  heat  or  be  heated  itself,  so  that  density  and  inertia  lose 
their  meaning  when  applied  to  it.  It  is  non-atomic,  structure- 
less, homogeneous,  and  so  continuous  that  were  it  ever  so  mag- 
nified it  would  show  no  pores.  It  dissolves  and  absorbs 
nothing,  is  isotropic  with  no  distinction  of  direction.  It  is  non- 
magnetic, non-luminous,  non-gravitative,  and  non-material. 
While  it  is  so  tenuous  that  it  can  not  be  defined,  it  can  main- 
tain immense  stresses  going  through  it  in  all  directions 
without  interference.  Perhaps  atoms  are  vortexes  in  or  other 
transformations  of  it,  and  all  physical  and  vital  energy  comes 
from  and  is  ultimately  resolvable  into  it.  Although  without 
temperature,  weight,  or  other  property,  it  is  a  reservoir  of 
vastly  more  energy  than  has  yet  appeared,  so  that  new  uni- 
verses may  erupt  from  it  almost  anywhere.  Thus  it  is  the 
source  and  destiny  of  all  things,  a  kind  of  omnipresent,  super- 
nal substance  or  natura  non  naturata,  which,  although  its  prop- 
erties are  still  unharmonized,  satisfies  man's  long  quest  for  nou- 
menal,  ontologic,  and  purely  metaphysical  reality.  The  Vedas, 
Parmenides,  Hegel,  Spinoza,  Jonathan  Edwards,  would  have 
found  here  the  pleroma  or  fulness  of  being  which  they  sought. 
It  fits  every  philosophical  definition  of  substance  or  ultimate 
reality  that  is  valid.  Every  distinction  between  Sein  and  Nicht- 
sein  describes  its  relations  to  infinite  space.  It  meets  all  the 
ontological  arguments  for  the  being  of  God.  It  makes  the 
soul  happier  and  more  at  home  because  it  is  so  much  more 
positive  and  nearer  to  life  than  vacuous  space.  It  is  a  new 
plenum  that  fills  the  world  of  thought,  because  the  universe 
seems  charged  to  its  maximal  with  a  being  compared  to  which 
all  that  the  senses  can  know  is  relative,  defective,  and  unreal. 
Paulsen  suggests  that  the  perhaps  22,000  million  stars  which 
it  is  conjectured  a  forty-inch  telescope  can  see  are  cells  in  the 


INTELLECTUAL   DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    543 

brain  of  a  divine  Autos,  but  all  that  is  here  maintained  is  that 
the  modern  concept  of  ether  gives  the  mind  a  satisfaction  that 
is  deep  and  profoundly  more  religious  than  vacuity.  It  is 
existent  to  a  degree  that  our  puny  theories  dream  not  of.  It 
makes  philosophical  nihilism  henceforth  impossible,  so  that  the 
second  article  of  our  new  creed  is :  I  believe  in  being  or  ether. 
(3)  The  world  as  the  senses  know  it  is  essentially  dy- 
namic. All  life  and  perhaps  all  forms  of  existence  follow  the 
law  of  the  conservation  of  energy.  Dynamism  largely  takes 
the  place  of  materialism  in  modern  physics  and  chemistry. 
There  is  probably  no  dead  or  inert  matter.  Though  perhaps 
all  the  force  we  know  was  developed  from  ether,  it  appears 
to  be  a  fixed  and  unchanging  quantity  under  this  law,  so  that 
now  none  is  lost  or  created.  It  appears  also  that  the  greatest 
quantum  of  force  possible  in  such  a  world  as  we  know  exists 
either  latent  or  patent.  Perhaps  matter  itself  is  an  eddy  hover- 
ing or  floating  in  these  great  tides,  an  accident,  it  may  be,  of 
temperature.  Vortexes  are  stored  with  apparently  inexhausti- 
ble energy.  Suns  and  worlds,  conjecturally  at  least,  a  million 
times  larger  than  our  sun  hurtle  through  space,  some  of  them 
perhaps  several  hundred  miles  per  second,  and  when  they  col- 
lide they  are  resolved  into  some  unknown  but  apparently  ultra- 
gaseous  state  by  the  heat  evolved.  Planetary  paths  may  be 
the  tracks  of  selective  movements,  countless  impacts,  accord- 
ing to  Pruss,  having  eliminated  all  orbits  not  fitted  to  survive. 
The  potencies  of  many  and  perhaps  more  worlds  than  now 
exist  are  hovering  diffused  in  the  great  sea  of  ether  and  will 
shape  themselves  from  out  the  void  in  time,  for  time  is  motion. 
Practical  science  consists  largely  in  diverting  tiny  rills  of  force 
and  making  it  serve  man's  purpose ;  the  rills  are  lamps  by  which 
we  study  some  of  its  great  tides.  This  dynamic  view  of  the 
physical  universe  brings  it  still  nearer  to  man.  He  must  for- 
ever interpret  force  in  terms  of  will,  and  is  even  prone  to  postu- 
late a  nisus  or  effort  behind  it.  Both  animism  and  philosophy 
show  this  inveterate  instinct.  Not  only  this,  but  man  often 
delights  to  consider  himself  as  a  pillar  of  dust  thrown  up  by 
an  eddy  or  whirlwind  of  cosmic  forces,  and  to  feel  that  in  the 
end  he  will  be  resolved  back  into  their  play  when  the  kinesis 
he  has  diverted  shall  turn  again  to  its  original  home,  and  he  will 
sink  back  like  a  cloud,  the  spindrift  of  a  passing  wave  or  a 


544  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

bubble,  into  the  wide  sea.  From  such  concepts,  imperfectly 
grasped  before  the  day  of  modern  science,  theology  formed  its 
ideas  of  omnipotence  as  an  attribute  of  the  divine.  If  the 
force  in  the  universe  can  be  made  to  take  any  direction  it  can 
accomplish  anything  that  has  ever  entered  into  the  mind  of 
man  to  conceive  and  vastly  more.  The  world  energy  knows 
no  fatigue.  Its  flux  makes  change  the  law  of  life.  It  takes 
all  the  Protean  forms,  man  and  perhaps  mind  being  one,  and 
then  all  are  changed  like  vestments  and  something  we  call 
higher  or  lower  takes  their  place.  It  sometimes  seems  too  vast 
to  have  any  law  at  all  as  if  our  science  were  concerned  only 
with  its  small  rivulets,  or  where  its  momentum  was  nearly 
spent,  and  as  if  it  were  all  a  postulate  or  fiction  for  man's  self- 
deception;  but  to  grasp  the  great  thought  that  everything  is 
dynamic  brings  the  divine  to  a  higher  potence  still  nearer  man, 
so  that  if  we  can  add  to  our  creed  a  third  article — I  believe  in 
energy — we  thus  in  some  sense  humanize  the  world  and 
approach  still  nearer  to  the  divine  with  augmented  com- 
placency. 

(4)  Experience  with  and  reflection  on  the  phenomena  of 
nature,  the  organization  of  society,  and  especially  modern 
science,  have  brought  law  into  the  world,  so  that  the  play  of 
forces  is  not  mere  cosmic  weather.  There  is  now  no  Miltonic 
chaos,  no  tohu  vabohn,  no  chance,  no  limbo,  where  anything 
can  happen  with  no  sequence.  The  great  epochs  when  man 
discovered  the  rotation  of  the  earth  about  the  sun,  and  gravity, 
brought  the  phenomena  of  physics  and  chemistry  under  exact 
law,  slowly  developed  all  the  tables  of  constants,  detected  the 
evolution  of  worlds,  chemical  elements,  geologic  strata,  the  as- 
cending orders  of  life,  integration  and  disintegration,  and  was 
able  to  control  conditions  with  absolute  certainty  that  results 
would  then  follow;  these  have  convinced  us  that  even  where 
we  do  not  know  it  the  universe  is  lawful  to  the  very  core.  This 
feeling  Helmholtz  makes  the  heart  of  even  esthetic  pleasure. 
Science,  set  like  a  great  and  growing  island  in  the  middle  of 
a  stormy,  foggy  sea,  is  the  most  precious  achievement  of  the 
race  thus  far.  It  has  made  nature  speak  to  man  with  the  voice 
of  God,  has  given  man  prevision  so  that  he  knows  what  to 
expect  in  the  world,  has  eliminated  shock,  and.  above  all,  has 
made  the  world  a  uni-verse  coherent  and  consistent  through- 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    545 

out,  not  the  prey  of  caprice  and  supermundane  beings,  and 
not  the  victim  of  the  conflict  of  good  and  evil  powers  in 
the  world,  but  a  great  whole  with  a  logical  character,  working 
in  every  part,  could  we  but  know  it,  with  the  exactness  and 
regularity  of  a  machine.  Thus,  from  the  inadequate  stand- 
point of  a  mechanical  view  of  the  universe,  man  is  further  con- 
soled, as  if  eternal  arms  were  beneath  him,  and  not  merely 
the  unknown  but  the  intrinsic  character  and  nature  of  the 
world  is  thus  made  so  akin  to  his  own  reason  that  he  can  grasp 
it  with  increasing  objective  truth.  All  sequence  involves  a 
cause,  and  thus  we  feel  still  more  at  home  in  our  world  and 
can  affirm  with  fulness  of  heart  almost  in  direct  proportion  to 
our  knowledge  of  science  that  we  believe  in  reason,  law,  and 
cause  in  the  universe. 

(5)  The  mechanical  view,  although,  as  Lotze  urged, 
always  present,  is  always  subordinate,  at  least  in  our  present 
state  of  knowledge.  The  mysterious  spirit  of  life  hovers  over 
it  and  is  ever  evolving  a  higher  order  of  existence.  Many 
biologists  have  shown  its  exuberance  which  leaves  no  possi- 
bility unexhausted  for  plants  or  animals.  Creatures  adapt 
themselves  with  marvelous  plasticity  to  inhospitable  and 
changing  environments.  They  migrate,  hibernate,  haestivate. 
If  one  per  cent  of  one  per  cent  of  the  6,000,000  eggs  of  the 
cod  matured,  in  less  than  100  years  all  the  seas  would  be  packed 
like  a  pork-barrel  with  cod.  Each  year  we  are  told  3,000 
million  million  menhaden  visit  the  coast  of  North  America. 
Averaging  five  estimates,  each  herring,  of  the  countless  shoals 
that  rove  the  sea,  lays  27,800  eggs  per  year.  A  recent  writer 
calculates  that  if  all  the  human  beings  in  the  world  were  fed 
to  all  the  forms  of  animal  existence  in  the  sea  and  on  the  land, 
our  race  would  last  them  but  a  few  seconds.  If  the  careful 
balance  of  life  with  its  cruel  law,  eat  or  be  eaten,  is  disturbed, 
rabbits  swarm  in  Australia,  locusts  destroy  the  crops  in  vast 
areas,  microbes  sweep  away  the  race  in  pestilences.  Various 
writers  have  estimated  the  number  of  animal  species  in  the 
past  and  present  as  from  900,000  to  100,000,000.  Life  so 
abounds  that  it  sometimes  seems  to  our  fancy  almost  as  if  it 
threatened  to  make  the  whole  inanimate  universe  over  into 
vital  forms  of  life,  as  Pryor  conceives  it  was  in  the  beginning, 
and  that  all  inanimate  existence  is  secondary  and  derived  from 
74 


546  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

decadent  life.  Not  only  that,  but  in  the  struggle  for  survival 
everything  seems  impelled  upward  and  onward  to  higher  and 
fuller  life  with  which  we  all  wish  to  tingle  and  glow.  To  be 
sure,  we  can  not  now  develop  dead  to  living  things  by  abio- 
genesis,  but  the  world  of  life  seems  utterly  inexhaustible  and 
inconceivable.  It  is  as  if  everything,  in  the  terms  of  Schelling's 
philosophy,  struggles  up  to  blossom  into  life. 

This,  then,  is  another  of  the  great  affirmations  which  make 
themselves  irresistibly  felt  in  the  modern  soul.  We  hunger  for 
the  maximum  of  life.  We  want  it  in  all  its  depth  and  breadth, 
now  and  forever.  The  thought  of  extinction  of  life  is  horrific. 
At  the  very  top  of  the  organic  series,  the  most  complex  of  all 
tissues,  we  have  the  brain,  the  most  intricate  chemically  and 
morphologically,  with  its  several  thousand  million  cells  and 
fibers,  with  its  wondrous  power  of  using  up  the  energies  that 
flow  to  it  from  the  blood,  the  mouthpiece  of  the  absolute  in  the 
world,  through  which  all  revelations  have  and  must  come,  and 
which  is  the  apparatus  through  which  we  apprehend  nature. 
Thus  with  an  ever  fuller  conviction  the  man  truly  instructed 
in  science  must  affirm  his  faith  in  life  abounding  as  a  yet 
higher  law  of  the  world. 

(6)  Nothing  so  reen forces  optimism  as  evolution.  It  is 
the  best,  or  at  any  rate  not  the  worst,  that  survive.  Develop- 
ment is  upward,  creative,  and  not  de-creative.  From  cosmic 
gas  onward  there  is  progress,  advancement,  and  improvement. 
Even  the  most  arrant  systems  of  pessimism  place  absolute  pain 
in  atomic  disintegration  at  the  beginning  and  perhaps  at  the 
end  of  things,  and  regard  organization  as  amelioration  of 
agony  even  if  it  never  yields  a  surplus  of  pleasure.  For  the 
normal  individual,  animal  or  man,  the  very  will  to  live  and 
the  competitive  struggle  for  life  indicates  excess  of  enjoyment 
over  pain.  In  his  present  mundane  life,  man  rarely  has 
need  of  falling  back  on  Stuart  Mill's  convention  that  a  little 
pleasure  at  long  intervals  outweighs  ages  of  floods  of  pain. 
Statistics  show  that  the  average  length  of  human  life  is  slowly 
increasing.  Modern  hygiene  makes  what  vital  capital  we  in- 
herit more  effective  and  prevents  the  ravages  of  the  great  joy- 
killer,  disease.  Again,  though  in  early  infancy  there  are  more 
tears  than  smiles,  growth  itself,  to  say  nothing  of  culture, 
is  marked  by  a  steadily  widening  field  of  pleasure.    Pain  tends 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  547 

toward  extinction  and  pleasure  measures  the  abundance  of  life. 
Few  men  have  suffered  such  fear  of  death  as  the  arch-misera- 
bilist,  Schopenhauer,  who  could  taste  real  joy  only  in  the  fleet- 
ing contemplation  of  works  of  art  embodying  Platonic  ideals. 
Nature's  vis  medicatrix  that  heals  wounds,  expels  disease, 
brings  the  balm  of  comfort  in  sorrow,  and  the  recurrence  of 
spring  which  awakes  beauty  in  the  world  and  love  in  the  heart 
of  everything  that  lives ;  all  these  make  for  optimism.  Hence, 
to-day  more  than  ever,  as  we  see  in  every  field  that  retrogression 
and  hard  times  are  relative  and  transient  and  that  every  prin- 
ciple of  growth  is  benign,  the  conviction  is  borne  in  upon  the 
soul,  consciously,  and  perhaps  more  unconsciously,  that  there 
is  something  like  good-will  or  beneficence  at  the  root  of  things ; 
that  man  is  a  favored,  protected,  and  chosen  being,  whose 
supremacy  in  nature  is  not  an  accident;  that  there  is  a  power 
that  makes  for  his  unfoldment  and  welfare  as  if  it  were  inter- 
ested in  or  friendly  to  him ;  and  thus  he  feels  more  at  home  in 
the  place  nature  has  prepared  for  him  and  more  disposed  to 
trust  that  all  that  is  beyond  his  ken  is  well ;  that  real  evil  can 
not  befall  the  good  men,  living  or  dead ;  and  that  he  can  afford 
to  be  glad  and  euphorious  that  he  is  alive.  Thus  the  ground 
is  prepared  in  the  soul  for  those  who  desire  them  for  the  more 
anthropomorphic  doctrines  and  arguments  of  divine  love,  of 
which  these  sentiments  are  the  dim  prelusions. 

It  makes  little  difference  whether  we  call  these  formulae  of 
this  simple  grammar  of  assent  articles  of  faith,  a  new  kind  of 
theologia  prima  or  first  principles  of  science  or  philosophy,  or 
mere  psycho-pedagogic  Anlagcn  for  atoning  reason  and  relig- 
ion. If  they  do  not  satisfy  all  the  demands  of  all  the  watch- 
dogs of  Zion,  who  often  demand  the  whole  or  nothing,  they 
are  very  much  farther  from  blank  negations  and  skepticism. 
They  tend  to  win  back  a  world  growing  indifferent  to  it,  to  re- 
ligion, and  to  give  poise,  peace,  and  sanity,  and  restore  its  lost 
unity  to  the  soul.  They  lessen  the  waste  of  double  bookkeeping 
for  the  Dicsscits  and  the  Jenseits  that  sets  the  body  over  against 
the  soul,  tend  to  close  the  yawning  chasm  between  them  and 
to  cleanse  its  marasmic  marshes  of  superstition  rank  with  the 
unsightly  weeds  of  spiritism,  theosophy,  faith  cures,  telepathy, 
and  what  Kant  thought  the  appalling  explanation  of  the  appari- 


548  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

tion  and  hallucination  of  visionaries  by  the  speculations  of 
metaphysicians.  This  takes  us  at  once  far  beyond  the  age  of 
Tyndall  and  Huxley  on  the  one  hand,  and  of  religious  dog- 
matists on  the  other,  makes  religionists  who  speak  of  "  sci- 
ence falsely  so  called  "  and  scientists  who  sneer  at  religion, 
relicts  of  a  vanished  stage  of  culture,  and,  above  all,  heartens 
youth,  whose  mental  integrity  has  suffered  most. 

III.  In  Chapters  X  and  XII  is  implied  something  of  the 
standpoint  from  which  I  would  have  courses  m  the  philosophic 
field  enlarged  and  more  positive  teachings  given.  It  is  the 
crown  of  a  purely  liberal  as  distinct  from  both  special  and 
professional  study.  A  living  and  indigenous  philosophy  differs 
with  every  age  and  ethnic  basis,  but  without  it  youth  fail  to 
glimpse  the  larger  logic  in  which  all  systems  move.  It  unified 
the  Greek  and  later  the  Teutonic  spirit.  It  is  the  best  ex- 
pression of  the  passion  for  the  ideal.  At  its  largest  it  is  a 
natural  science  of  man.  Our  own  land  has  not  yet  thus  sum- 
mated  itself,  and  till  it  does  so  and  depends  less  upon  alien 
systems  its  pedagogy  of  academic  youth  must  remain  incom- 
plete. Russia  sees  the  evils  of  a  too  radical  unsettlement  and 
so  forbids  modem  philosophy  in  her  universities  till  she  can 
evolve  one  that  expresses  her  own  life  and  her  needs  in  the 
same  spirit  that  many  of  our  guild  cry,  back  to  Kant,  Aquinas, 
or  even  Plato,  nature,  etc.,  for  a  new  start,  pending  a  better,  a 
larger  systematization. 

( I )  The  work  needed  is  an  outline  of  each  chief  science 
in  its  place  in  a  larger  system.  The  general  principles,  methods, 
and  results  served  up  as  in  the  best  popular  science  by  the  best 
masters  come  first,  and  not  the  meager  matter  and  tedious 
detail  or  logical  first  steps  so  entrenched  in  the  conventional 
beginnings.  Every  great  expert  should  feel  it  his  duty  to  put 
the  best  that  is  in  him  in  a  form  most  interesting  and  profitable 
to  a  cultured  lay  audience,  and  such  matter  should  be  the  staple 
of  this  course.  From  the  different  sciences  it  should  be  ordered 
in  evolutionary  sequence  into  an  unitary  whole  as  an  up-to-date 
philosophy  of  nature.  First,  perhaps,  should  come  astronomy, 
now  pedagogically  almost  dead  in  school  and  astro-physicized 
in  college,  with  its  great  lessons  of  vast  times  and  space  of 
which  the  average  student  has  but  wretchedly  dwarfed  and 
puerile  ideas,  utterly  inadequate  to  the  purposes  of  modern 


INTELLECTUAL   DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    549 

culture,  especially  in  the  case  of  those  who  grow  glibbest  in  the 
arguments  for  their  subjectivity.  The  first  principles  of  force 
and  matter,  some  account  of  life  and  work  in  the  great  observa- 
tories, the  difficulties  and  triumphs  of  their  devotees  past  and 
living  to  date,  what  is  lately  done  and  now  doing,  the  lessons 
from  nebulae,  variable  stars,  the  motions  of  systems,  the  birth, 
growth,  and  death  of  worlds,  and  curious  speculations,  true, 
and  perhaps  sometimes  those  that  are  false:  all  these  can  and 
perhaps  sometime  will  be  easily  set  forth  aright  by  the  astrono- 
mer himself,  and  his  pedagogic  problem  now  ignored  should 
be  recognized  as  having  a  special  importance  and  dignity  of 
its  own.  From  the  great  celestial  clockwork  to  the  geologic 
evolution  of  the  world  is  the  natural  next  step.  If  the  college 
geologist  brings  out  the  true  culture  value  of  his  field,  as 
Le  Conte  could  so  well  do,  and  if  all  had  taken  this  course,  it 
could  be  hastened  over,  but  if  he  has  abdicated  the  high  func- 
tion of  education  and  lapsed  to  petrographic  or  paleontological 
specializations,  the  philosophic  propasdeutist  should  find  here, 
too,  a  new  duty  to  do  his  best  for  edification.  The  same  is 
true  in  meteorology,  physical  geography,  and  of  studies  of  the 
sea.  Physics  and  even  chemistry  often  need  this  supplemental 
office  in  college.  Not  only  is  the  culture  value  of  these  topics 
often  failed  of  by  experts,  but  many  graduates  who  do  not 
take  them  are  doomed  to  go  through  life  in  dense  and  utter 
ignorance  of  what  these  great  sciences  mean  in  the  world. 
Thus  for  nearly  twenty  years  I  have  given  lectures  entitled 
the  pedagogy  of  each  of  these  sciences,  which  consist  largely  of 
compendious  statements  from  diligent  and  non-expert  reading 
of  text-books  and  semi-popular  literature,  and  have  made  of 
this  course,  despised  by  some  of  my  expert  colleagues  in  their 
fields,  matter- which  I  must  believe,  from  the  testimony  of  my 
students,  has  helped  to  fill  chasms  of  ignorance  and  open  new 
fields  of  interest,  and  that  has  made  their  thought  both  more 
sure-footed  and  wider  in  range.  It  is  a  rescue  work  alike  from 
the  premature  distortions  of  specialization  and  wretched  home- 
opathy of  hyper-elementarizing  methods.  My  lectures  on  ether, 
atoms,  nebulae,  the  sun,  moon,  extinct  plants,  animals,  with 
biographic  and  historic  matter,  on  a  few  geological  types,  the 
sea,  air,  etc.,  are,  from  the  standpoint  of  science,  cheap  and 
wretched  compilations  which  some  of  my  pupils  would  affect 


550  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

to  despise  from  a  layman,  and  such  as  would  cause  most  to 
think  me  very  superficial,  if  I  did  not  either  assume  that  they 
had  the  knowledge  and  only  pretended  to  tell  them  how  to  teach 
it  and  to  suggest  its  pedagogic  value,  or  else  introduced  it  in  the 
attempt  to  broaden  the  history  of  philosophy,  so  as  to  include 
that  of  science.  Some  who  take  this  work  disparage  all,  as 
perhaps  all  do  some  parts  of  it,  but  my  sense  of  service  and 
my  conscience  and  my  conviction  that  it  has  a  great  and  in- 
evitable future  survives  despite  all  this.  Should  it  ever  merit 
the  more  academic  title  of  cosmology  or  the  philosophy  of 
nature,  or  if  I  admitted  the  fact  that  my  work  in  its  present 
form  really  belongs  in  the  last  year  of  the  normal  or  high 
school,  and  that  I  am  really  trying  to  help  make  up  arrears 
that  date  here,  all  would  perhaps  be  better. 

When  we  come  to  life  the  pathway  is  smoother  and 
broader.  What  is  botany — commercial,  agricultural,  physio- 
logical, experimental  rather  than  merely  structural — doing ;  its 
general  problems  and  results  and  culture  values?  These  are 
problems  of  which  every  college  youth  should  know  something, 
if  he  takes  no  special  courses;  and  biology  is  still  more  im- 
portant, conditioning,  as  it  does,  all  views  of  life,  health,  repro- 
duction and  disease.  In  the  latter  the  choice  that  must  be  made 
between  blank  nescience  and  elaborate  technic  is  pathetic. 
Sometimes  both  alike  end  in  almost  equal  ignorance  of  what 
the  great  ideas  of  Darwin,  Huxley,  Spencer,  and  Weismann 
and  their  followers  are  and  really  stand  for  and  are  inspired  by, 
and  the  incalculable  culture-value  of  their  writings  is  unfelt, 
while  anthropology,  in  which  evolution  culminates,  is  almost 
unknown  in  college  courses.  Even  if  the  development  theory 
were  false,  its  economic  value  in  enabling  the  mind  to  grasp 
vast  masses  of  vital  facts  into  a  unity  as  the  simplest  way  of 
thinking  the  universe,  demands  that  it  should  be  taught  with 
intensity  and  devotion.  Cowardice,  stupidity,  and  laziness  are 
the  only  true  causes  of  our  colossal  failure  to  rise  to  this  new 
opportunity.  The  waste  ineffable  is  most  pathetic  when  we 
realize  that  here  is  a  new  basis  of  teaching  practical  morality, 
the  highest  aim  of  all  education,  and  that  springs  of  enthu- 
siasm, of  ethical  impulsions,  and  of  deep  religious  sentiments 
are  lost.  Animals,  children,  savages,  laboratory  psychology, 
defectives,   psychic    devolution    in   degeneration,   and   disease 


INTELLECTUAL   DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    551 

mental  and  moral  can  be  understood  only  in  their  develop- 
mental perspective,  and  they,  too,  should  be  more  fully  sur- 
veyed, but  on  this  background. 

(2)  On  the  side  of  the  history  of  philosophic  thought,  once 
deemed  a  system  in  itself,  and  which  some  modern  extremists 
on  the  other  hand  would  abolish,  great  stress  should  be  laid, 
but  the  topical  rather  than  the  chronological  method  should 
be  ol3sg^ed,  and,  of  course,  each  great  man,  system,  and 
st^^fpoint  should  be  taught  sympathetically.  The  story  of 
^P^'s  efforts  to  comprehend  the  world  under  categories  in- 
tuitive or  innate  or  a  priori  ideas  is  perhaps  the  greatest  ro- 
mance of  the  human  spirit.  These  first  entered  philosophy  as 
simple  efforts  at  definition  under  the  obstetric  art  of  Socrates. 
In  Plato  they  were  more  developed  and  hypostatized  in  his 
doctrine  of  ideal  forms.  In  another  way  they  appear  in  Aris- 
totle's categories,  half  deduced  and  half  based  on  an  ob- 
jective study  of  what  people  talked  of  in  the  market.  Kant 
assumed  a  table  of  them  without  criticism  and  with  too  little 
change.  The  universals,  exemplary  forms  and  species  of  the 
schoolmen,  Hegel's  diamond  network  or  ganglionic  thought 
centers,  which  made  the  universe  real  because  it  made  it  ra- 
tional, and  even  the  natiira  ipsissima  of  God  himself  to  know 
w^hich  was  conscious  immortality :  all  these  are  only  different 
stages  in  the  history  of  these  unique  products.  They  are  no 
less  historically  represented  in  the  theory  of  fixed  types  in  na- 
ture which  have  constituted  the  chief  obstacle  evolution  has 
to  encounter  in  every  field  and  form.  This  assumption  of 
fixed  substantial  norms,  precious  partly  because  products  of 
such  severe  travail  of  soul,  by  some  conceived  as  immanent, 
and  by  some  transcendent,  here  in  the  field  of  nature,  there  of 
mind,  partly  inherited  from  the  Greeks,  yet  instinctive  in 
every  soul,  is  the  key  of  much  of  the  thought  and  many  of  the 
great  controversies  of  the  world,  and  properly  treated  is  of  the 
highest  educational  value. 

These  viltimate  fundamental  concepts,  or  primeval  posit- 
ings  of  the  soul,  are  great  words,  the  history  of  which  has 
value  unsurpassed  in  all  the  discipline  of  higher  culture. 
Matter  is  one,  the  history  of  its  conception  from  the  non-being 
of  Greek  idealism  all  the  way  to  modern  materialism,  as  told 
by  Lange,  now  the  only  reality,  here  passive  and  inert,  there 


552  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

purely  dynamic,  a  Democritic  chaotic  rain,  now  a  few  score 
elements,  the  combination  of  which  follows  laws  strangely 
analogous  to  those  of  the  solar  system,  by  some  even  Christian 
orthodoxies,  from  Tertullian  down,  constituting  the  essence  of 
souls,  and  by  others  the  extreme  polar  opposite  of  everything 
psychic,  a  shibboleth  not  only  of  philosophic  creed  but  of  vir- 
tue or  bestiality,  illustrate  the  persistent  and  qJl-pervasive 
power  of  an  abstract  idea.  Another  group  of  SBkals,  no 
less  mighty,  are  the  concepts  of  energy  and  its  manycfc|^^- 
tions,  including  force  and  motion,  attraction  and  repul 
etc.  Substance  with  its  specifications,  the  thing-in-itseli 
monads,  reals,  and  the  ontological  group  constitute  another. 
Cause  in  all  its  forms,  material,  final,  personal,  is  another 
standpoint.  In  biology  are  life,  hunger,  love,  and  even  hered- 
ity, sex,  cell-development,  and  manifold  other  apperceptive 
centers.  In  the  psychological  field  are  pleasure,  pain,  will, 
feeling,  instinct,  conscience,  duty,  good,  reason,  the  ego, 
Gemilth,  progress,  law,  truth,  beauty,  consciousness  and 
unconsciousness,  faith,  friendship,  monism  and  pluralism, 
quality  and  quantity,  inherence,  freedom,  etc.  To  know  and 
realize  what  these  soul-compelling  concepts  have  been  and 
done  in  the  world  is  the  highest  philosophic  culture,  and  to  see 
them  all  completed  and  coordinated  into  an  organic  unity  now 
seems  sure  to  be  something  like  the  final  stage  of  philosophic 
evolution,  a  science  of  human  experience.  Thought  and  dis- 
cussion free  language  from  its  bondage,  to  serve  disexiled 
above  and  make  it  an  instrument  of  the  intellect.  Some  kind  of 
metaphysics  is  essential  for  both  mental  and  moral  health,  and 
without  it  thinking  tends  to  be  superficial. 

There  are,  of  course,  ultra-categorical  minds  and  books 
in  which  philosophizing  consists  only  in  adopting  one  or  more 
root  ideas,  and  pigeonholing  in  them  all  the  facts  of  life  and 
mind  that  fall  within  a  narrow  ken.  Such  men,  if  they  teach, 
do  so  as  if  they  were  initiating  hierophants  into  esoteric  mys- 
teries and  jealously  guarding  metaphysical  orthodoxies,  and 
all  with  an  air  of  repressed  omniscience,  easily  explainable  by 
the  fact  that  they  live  on  a  plateau  of  higher  certainty,  that 
is  so  narrow  that  they  can  rarely  lose  sight  of  its  precipitate 
edges.  Easily  made  changes  in  the  order,  prominence,  or,  if 
worst  comes  to  worst,  the  number  of  these  norms,  meet  any 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND   EDUCATION    553 

exigency  of  controversy,  for  few  as  they  are  and  many  as 
are  the  books,  the  combinations  are  by  no  means  exhausted  or 
the  vast  intellectual  spaces,  that  can  be  triangulated  by  these 
definitions,  yet  all  explored.  Whether  decomposable  by  fur- 
ther psychic  analysis  or  not,  whether  they  mark  the  point 
where  knowledge  starts  or  stops,  knowledge  and  experience 
can  no  momJjecome  objects  of  science  without  them  than  can 
physical^imre  without  the  concept  of  forces  and  laws ;  but  no 
ms  of  them  can  possibly  be  so  exact  as  to  sustain  long 
)f  arguments  unswervingly,  and  whenever  we  study 
fit  or  consistency,  rather  than  their  validity,  we  interfere 
with  their  formulation,  which  should  be  steadily  progressive, 
and  which  the  history  of  philosophy  shows  has  been  generally, 
though  not  always,  arrested  whenever  they  have  been  knit  up 
into  concatenated  systems. 

Not  all  should  be  subjected  to  this  discipline,  but  those  who 
are  should  have  felt  sympathy  for,  if  not  have  been  for  a  time 
by  turns,  materialists,  spiritualists,  positivists,  dogmatists, 
optimists,  pessimists,  necessitarians,  freedomists,  realists  and 
idealists,  Hellenists  and  Hebrewists,  dualists  and  monists, 
hedonists,  intuitionalists,  empiricists,  dynamists,  Platonists, 
pantheists,  Spinozists,  associationists,  and  all  the  rest;  should 
have  realized  how  the  world  looks  from  each  of  these  stand- 
points, and  have  felt  their  partial  truth  far  more  than  their  lim- 
itations. Every  soul  contains  the  germ  of  all  these,  as  we  saw 
in  Chapter  XIV  it  does  those  of  all  religions  and  sects,  and 
needs  something  from  them  all.  Here  breadth,  toleration,  hos- 
pitality of  mind,  and  not  early  discipleship  to  one  system  and 
indoctrination  with  the  arguments  of  one  against  all  others, 
should  be  sought.  Circumnutation  should  again  be  the  watch- 
word. The  lesson  of  history  here,  that  all  are  right  in  most 
that  they  afiirm  and  wrong  in  most  that  they  deny,  should  be 
heeded,  or  else  narrowness,  bigotry,  and  stupration,  and  not 
enlargement  of  soul,  result.  The  real  tragedies  of  this  field 
are  not  so  much  the  loss  of  old  beliefs  as  premature  partizan- 
ship.  The  history  of  philosophy  presents  an  anthology  of 
types  of  mind  and  standpoints,  to  be  all  known  and  felt,  so 
that  the  individual  sees  his  bearings  in  the  macrobiotic  world 
of  thought.  Thus  insemination,  not  incrustation,  is  the  goal, 
and  the  young  man  who  feels  an  inner  call  to  enlist  in  the  war 


554  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

of  one  view  against  the  rest  is  precocious,  for  of  all  fields  con- 
scious maturity  comes  last  in  this,  and  slow  unconscious  cere- 
bration, experience  in  life,  and  the  gradual  development  of 
mental  character  are  the  basis  of  every  true  and  natural  sys- 
tem of  philosophy,  which  is  the  completest  of  all  the  expres- 
sions of  matured  personality,  and  to  evolve  a  philosophy  that 
utters  it  is  the  supreme  charm  and  dignity  of  old  age. 

Picard,  in  the  Grande  Salle  des  Fetes,  in  trwMJotel  de 
Ville  of  Paris,  well  represents  true  philosophy  or 
love,  not  as  a  conventional  hoary  sage,  burdened  with 
but  as  a  youth  carrying  a  glowing  torch  of  science  into  a 
cave,  while  all  the  enemies  of  culture  clutch  at  his  feet,  seek 
to  snatch  and  hurl  back  his  torch ;  sirens  allure  to  idleness,  but 
he  presses  on,  resolute  to  defy  every  danger  and  overcome 
every  difficulty,  feeling  that  before  and  in  him  lies  the  hope  of 
the  world  and  determined  that  it  shall  not  fail.  This  is  cor- 
rect. Youth  is  the  pioneer,  often  the  discoverer,  capable  of 
passionate  love  of  truth,  turns  naturally  to  expert  mastery  as 
the  best  way  of  forging  out  a  new  and  recognized  place  for 
himself  in  the  intellectual  world  near  the  frontier  which  it  is 
his  very  nature  to  love.  But  the  great  systematizers  in  both  the 
fields  of  nature  and  mind  whom  all  specialists  great  and  small 
expect  and  serve,  in  whom  all  the  promises  in  the  world  of 
thought  await  their  fulfilment,  will  be  ideal  senescents  in  the 
earliest  stages  of  involution  which  complements  the  culmina- 
tion of  adolescence.  Each  is  incomplete  without  the  other,  and 
proper  cooperation  of  the  best  type  of  each  at  their  best  age  is 
the  essential  problem  of  the  true  university. 

H.  The  University. — Science,  in  the  largest  sense  of  that 
term  that  includes  the  humanities,  is  the  greatest  achievement 
of  the  race  thus  far.  It  includes  the  important  facts  that 
are  certain  and  exact,  the  verified  laws,  and  all  that  has 
the  highest  culture  power  for  the  feelings  and  will  as  well  as 
for  the  intellect.  It  makes  the  best-welded  cohesions  and  the 
most  compactly  woven  cerebral  tissue.  Of  this,  universities, 
"  the  noblest  term  in  the  vocabulary  of  our  age,"  in  what 
abroad  are  called  their  philosophical,  as  distinct  from  all  pro- 
fessional faculties,  are  the  peculiar  organs.  To  them  are  com- 
mitted the  highest  interests  of  man.  They  became  and  re- 
mained  the   asylums   of   free  thought   and   conviction   when 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  555 

Rome  and  al'  privileged  orders  declined,  and  their  germs  were 
brought  and  piously  and  early  planted  here  by  our  fathers. 
They  are  the  best  nurseries  of  talent,  where  is  kept  alive  the 
holy  fervor  of  investigation,  that  in  the  passion  for  truth  is 
fearless  of  consequences,  and  that  has  never  been  more  truly 
and  loftily  ideal  than  now,  when  some  of  the  objects  of  study 
are  crassly  material.  It  is  their  quality  that  chiefly  determines 
the  status  of  the  technological  and  of  all  the  so-called  learned 
professions.  It  depends  largely  upon  them  whether  a  land  is 
cursed  with  medical  quacks,  pettifogging  lawyers  and  politi- 
cians, a  superstitious  and  bigoted  clergy,  incompetent  engineers 
and  architects,  or  whether  these  professions  fulfil  their  noble 
ideals.  More  and  more  the  trained  expert  who  has  attained  the 
mastery  that  comes  by  specialized  concentration  speaks  the  de- 
ciding word  in  every  critical  stage  and  in  all  departments  of  life. 
Experience  here  reiterates  and  enforces  the  conclusion  of  the 
largest  of  all  the  English  Parliamentary  Reports,  that  of  all 
the  great  popular  charities  university  education  has  proven 
safest,  wisest,  and  best,  and  that  for  two  chief  reasons :  first, 
because  the  superior  integrity  and  ability  of  the  guardians  who 
consent  to  administer  such  funds,  the  intelligence  and  grate- 
ful appreciation  of  those  aided  by  them,  and  the  general  inter- 
est and  resulting  publicity,  all  three  combine  to  hold  them 
through  the  ages  truest  to  the  purpose  and  spirit  of  the  founder ; 
and,  secondly,  because  by  improvement  here,  all  other  good 
causes  are  most  efficiently  aided. 

Of  all  the  many  ways  of  advancing  this  highest  grade  of 
education  personal  aid  to  select  students  is  one  of  the  most  ap- 
proved. The  University  of  Leipzig  has  over  four  hundred 
distinct  funds  for  this  purpose,  the  oldest,  still  carefully 
guarded,  dating  from  1325.  Oxford  and  Cambridge  provide 
for  some  eighteen  hundred  fellows  and  scholars  and  other 
stipendiaries.  Since  the  first  endowment  of  learning  in  the 
Athenian  porch  and  grove,  thousands  of  such  donations  have 
been  tangible  witnesses  to  the  sentiment  that  in  all  the  world 
there  is  no  object  so  worthy  of  service  as  eugenic,  gifted 
youth,  for  in  them  is  the  hope  of  the  world,  and  to  bring  them 
to  ever  fuller  maturity  is  the  surest  guarantee  of  progress. 
For  such,  the  idea  was  early  developed  that  nothing  was  too 
good,  and  so  they  have  also  enjoyed  many  exceptions  from 


556  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

taxation,  military  service,  criminal  law  for  minor  offenses, 
and  also  special  privileges  of  theaters,  travel,  etc.  To  aid  such 
young  men  into  the  established  learned  callings  is  a  very  differ- 
ent thing  from  developing  non-professional  specialists  and  in- 
tending professors,  and  on  just  these  our  academic  system  has 
till  lately  been  unprecedentedly  hard.  Mostly  from  the  middle 
classes,  their  means  were  usually  exhausted  before  the  severest 
stage  of  apprenticeship,  needful  for  those  who  would  extend 
the  boundaries  of  knowledge  by  research  and  devote  their  lives 
to  the  pure  service  of  truth,  was  passed.  Many  of  the  choicest 
of  these  spirits  have  worn  out  their  bodies  prematurely  by 
privation  and  their  minds  by  worry  and  the  drudgery  of  tutor- 
ing, never  so  lifeless  and  mechanical  as  under  our  college  sys- 
tem. They  have  never  even  enjoyed  the  rights  of  docentship, 
which  permits  competition  for  the  suffrages  of  students'  favor 
with  the  established  professors,  which  is  such  a  wholesome 
stimulus  to  both.  Therefore,  when  the  Johns  Hopkins  Uni- 
versity focused  attention  on  just  this  choicest  but  most  neg- 
lected class  of  adolescents  in  the  last  stages  of  this  develop- 
ment, it  marked  an  epoch,  and  not  only  added  a  new  and 
higher  story  to  our  educational  system,  but  gave  to  them  at  a 
period  of  life  so  precious,  but  so  easily  repressed  or  perverted, 
the  possibility  of  a  fuller  intellectual  maturity.  This  was  the 
beginning  of  true  university  life  in  this  country.  Laboratories 
and  seminaries  are  the  workshops  of  the  Holy  Ghost  for  youth, 
and  this  influence  was  felt  and  these  methods  copied  through- 
out the  whole  field  of  higher  education,  and  will  always  mark 
this  spot  and  these  early  years  as  the  brightest  in  the  history  of 
the  academic  development  of  this  country.  Here  the  vocation 
of  the  scholar  found  the  leisure  and  seclusion  amidst  largest 
opportunities,  which  it  needs,  and  if  the  supremest  pleasure  in 
life  is,  as  Fichte  said,  to  see  the  best  youth  unfold  the  highest 
powers  and  grow  by  increments  that  can  be  seen  each  month 
and  almost  every  week,  as  it  always  does  if  given  a  fit  environ- 
ment, this  bliss  was  here  experienced. 

But  the  young  investigator,  even  in  the  best  environment 
too,  no  matter  how  great  his  talent,  is  often,  in  the  widening 
field  of  knowledge,  as  helpless  as  a  new-born  babe,  and  needs 
at  first  daily  guidance  and  help  to  prevent  waste  of  effort  and 
discouragement.    To  do  this  involves  a  higher  pedagogy,  un- 


INTELLECTUAL  DEVELOPMENT  AND  EDUCATION  557 

known  before,  abounding  in  vast  new  problems  and  requiring 
the  whole  time  and  energy  of  those  devoted  to  them.  The 
new  charity,  which  is  also  a  science,  insists  that  we  have  no 
right  to  give  doles  to  the  poor  unless  personally  or  by  agencies ; 
to  that  end  we  follow  each  case  to  see  that  good  and  not  harm 
is  caused  thereby.  Just  so  it  is  not  enough  to  provide  leisure 
by  stipends  and  fellowships  even  for  the  best,  and  this  may  be 
even  positively  injurious  unless  we  also  accept  the  responsibil- 
ity of  laborious  and  protracted  individual  help.  We  must  ex- 
haust all  our  own  resources  of  suggestion  and  references  to 
sources,  devise  new  apparatus,  impart  all  our  best  thoughts 
with  no  reserves,  criticize,  encourage,  ceaselessly  confer,  act- 
ively forage  for  material  to  feed  every  new  development  of 
interest,  wisely  appeal  to  emulation,  renounce  for  all  such  stu- 
dents every  claim  of  priority,  be  content  to  see  our  choicest 
ideas  appropriated  without  thanks  or  even  without  conscious- 
ness that  they  came  from  us,  renounce  all  thought  of  self,  and 
be  Aquarii  that  water  and,  if  need  be,  become  very  dung  to  fer- 
tilize the  rich  soil  whence  talent  burgeons.  Half  the  battle,  per- 
haps, is  the  selection  of  topics  that  will  not  abort,  that  are  special 
enough  to  bring  all  powers  and  resources  to  a  sharp  focus, 
but  with  a  broad  background  of  wider  interest  to  insure  gen- 
eral culture-effects  quite  apart  from  particulate  results  in  a 
way  not  always  wholly  directed  toward  original  contributions 
of  knowledge,  which  the  older  investigator  may  have  wholly  in 
view.  The  theme  must,  if  possible,  have  a  deep  root  of  per- 
sonal zest,  perhaps  of  long  but  half-unconscious  incubation. 
The  novice  must  keep  up  constant  and  intense  mentation  and 
not  lapse  to  a  mere  counter,  tabulator,  collector  of  slides  or 
quotations,  nor  skirt  too  closely  every  indentation  of  the  coast- 
line of  fact,  but  launch  out  a  little  from  the  shore.  He  must 
not  be  a  famulus,  to  fetch  and  carry  for  his  professor's  larger 
work,  but  his  epistle  known  and  read. 

A  real  new  result,  achieved  and  published  as  it  should  be 
very  promptly,  often  marks  an  epoch  in  the  life  of  a  young 
student.  Success  is  like  the  first  taste  of  blood  to  a  young 
tiger.  The  sense  of  having  contributed  ever  so  tiny  a  stone 
to  the  temple  of  learning  is  the  beginning  of  a  new  intellectual 
life,  and  marks  a  kind  of  majority.  It  brings  a  sense  of  being 
an  authority  and  not  an  echo,  and  teaches  what  mental  free- 


558  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

dom  really  means.  It  harks  back  to  the  feeling  of  pristine 
newness  in  the  youth  of  the  world,  and  makes  the  luxury  of 
merely  knowing  pale  before  the  joy  of  doing.  The  thesis  is  a 
kind  of  royal  accolade  when  the  Alma  Mater's  salute  is, "  Stand 
erect  on  your  feet  and  look  about  you  through  your  own  eyes 
and  henceforth  light  your  own  way  by  independent  knowl- 
edge." Education  that  does  not  end  in  some  such  experience 
is  incomplete,  for  it  makes  the  master  and  not  the  servant  of 
knowledge,  marks  the  advent  of  a  new  citizen  in  the  world  of 
the  higher  culture,  all  the  more  docile  in  all  other  respects  be- 
cause in  some  ever  so  small  matter  he  can  teach  all  men  and 
be  taught  by  none.  This  step  is  the  close  of  the  last  stage  of 
psychic  adolescence,  and  manhood  is  now  fully  achieved.  The 
finished  Ephebos  is  not  an  alien  or  even  a  guest,  but  hence- 
forth a  member  of  the  university  invisible,  not  made  with  hands. 

Thus  the  fellow^ship  should  not  interfere  with  the  freest 
working  of  the  law  of  natural  selection  between  universities. 
Each  graduate  student  should  ponder  and  compare  with  care 
to  find  where  he  can  really  do  best,  and  there  he  should  be 
found.  The  doctorate  should  be  the  highest  intellectual 
honor  the  older  can  confer  upon  the  younger  generation  of 
scholars,  and  the  aspiration  of  the  university  should  be  to  ad- 
vance the  kingdom  of  man.  The  teacher  should  so  marshal 
his  pupils  that  he  learns  far  more  from  them  collectively  than 
he  can  ever  hope  to  teach  them,  and  so  that  in  the  group  where 
their  knowledge  is  well  pooled  they  will  owe  more  to  each 
other  than  to  his  lectures  or  demonstrations.  The  spirit  of 
research  blows  where  it  listeth,  and  rules  and  overorganiza- 
tion  are  fatal  to  it.  It  can  never  be  administered  or  controlled 
from  without.  Very  few  professors  indeed  can  either  inspire  or 
conduct  successful  research,  and  failures  here  are  more  or  less 
inevitable.  Of  this  the  brevet  who  conducts  platoons  of  students 
through  text-books  can  know  nothing.  Pedants  of  method  can 
never  know  how  the  world  looks  from  the  frontiers  of  human 
knowledge,  and  mere  scholarship  is  selfish  to  the  core.^ 

To  degrade  the  noble  word  investigation,  to  mean  doing 

'  All  this  is  fully  described  in  my  Confessions  of  a  Psychologist,  Ped.  Sem., 
March,  1901,  and  What  is  Research  in  a  University  Sense  and  How  may  it  Best 
be  Promoted?  Address  at  the  Ass'n  of  Am.  Universities,  Ped.  Sem.,  March, 
1902. 


INTELLECTUAL   DEVELOPMENT   AND   EDUCATION    559 

over  what  has  been  done  a  thousand  times,  is  really  only  a 
wasteful  new  curriculization  of  second-hand  knowledge,  is 
holding  old  forts  and  not  conducting  offensive  and  defensive 
warfare  in  new  fields.  The  way  to  treat  new  protocols  is  never 
laid  down  in  logic.  The  Rubicon  is  crossed  only  when  a  divi- 
ning mind  has  thought  the  data  all  out,  till  they  grow  hot  in 
the  process,  and  are  then  forged  into  a  new  unity.  Many 
gather  at  the  foot  of  the  mount,  some  ascend  a  little  way,  but 
only  a  chosen  few  can  scale  the  summit  above  the  clouds  and 
bring  down  the  tables  of  the  law  for  those  who  wait  below. 
There  is  a  veritable  aristocracy  of  mind  above  the  peddling 
knowledge  of  the  schools,  which  democracy  can  never  oblit- 
erate and  which  examination  can  not  test.  Mere  knowledge  is 
superficial  and  even  vulgar,  and  it  often  makes  conceited  and 
unpractical,  for  great  learning  in  little  minds  brings  psychic 
and  moral  wreckage,  and  is  sometimes  inversely  as  creative- 
ness.  But,  the  best  is  also  the  hardest  to  maintain.  The  ideal 
was  "  the  more  and  better  books,  apparatus,  collections,  and 
teachers,  and  the  fewer  but  more  promising  the  students,  the 
better  the  work  and  the  greater  the  highest  service  to  the  com- 
munity." Numbers  mean  mechanism,  dealing  with  masses  in- 
stead of  individuals,  and  the  withdrawal  of  the  professor  from 
close  personal  intercourse.  The  college-dominated  high  school 
will,  in  the  end,  work  out  its  needed  autonomy,  but  the  uni- 
versitized  college  is  dragging  its  anchor,  has  lost  its  chart 
and  compass,  and  is  at  the  mercy  of  the  elements.  In  the  mad 
race  for  wealth  and  numbers,  the  university,  the  promise  of 
which  was  the  dawn  of  the  brightest  hope  in  all  the  history 
of  our  republic,  is  being  progressively  mergered  as  a  depart- 
mental annex  of  the  great  colleges,  and  the  apex  of  our  na- 
tional system  of  education  is  still  in  Germany.  Its  primacy,  the 
absolute  freedom  of  thought  and  investigations,  which  is  its 
life,  is  unrecognized  and  imperiled  by  overorganization ; 
standards  of  quality  are  subordinated  to  those  of  quantity,  and 
the  interests  of  the  few  score  professors  and  the  few  hundred 
picked  and  ripened  adolescents  who  could  and  would  live 
solely  for  research  and  the  advancement  of  the  kingdom  of 
man  and  of  truth  in  the  world  are  too  often  lost  in  the  grow- 
ing academic  crowds.  Our  largest  institutions  are  already 
both  too  populous  and  too  rich  for  their  highest  interests,  and 


56o  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

have  lately  acquired  wealth  faster  than  they  have  learned  hov^r 
to  use  it.  With  best  advantages,  the  sense  for  individual- 
ity of  students,  even  in  the  bestowal  of  the  highest  degrees, 
is  lost,  and  the  need  of  place-hunting  for  the  learned  prole- 
tariat already  swarming  at  the  exits  of  some  departments,  has 
had  to  be  met  by  teachers'  bureaus  and  experts  for  placing 
their  own  young  doctors  in  a  market  small  at  best,  but  cheap- 
ened by  competition  of  the  half-competent  with  the  best.  There 
are  professions  and  lines  of  research  that  have  been  paralyzed 
by  endowments,  creative  talents  that  are  sterilized  by  the 
luxury  of  too  much  knowledge,  departments  that  have  lost 
vigor  and  life  by  architectural  installations  and  even  by  too 
much  manufactured  apparatus,  and  that  have  grown  con- 
fused amidst  a  too  copious  literature  and  too  insistent  library 
opportunities,  because  resolute  neglect  of  everything  that  is 
only  second  best  is  the  scholar's  only  safety.  But  even  despite 
all  these  disheartening  tendencies,  there  is  a  precious  remnant 
of  the  elect,  and  we  are  not  left  entirely  to  the  last  resource 
against  pessimism  that  God  and  the  destiny  of  America  will 
bring  us  through  the  darkest  hour  all  right. 


CHAPTER    XVII 

ADOLESCENT    GIRLS    AND    THEIR    EDUCATION 

I,  Differences  of  the  sexes  in  strength,  mortality,  brain,  senses,  agility,  mental 
traits,  crime,  disposition,  variability,  conservation,  progressive  sexual  diver- 
gence. II.  Medical  and  biological  views  in  other  lands  and  in  this  country  since 
Dr.  E.  H.  Clarke.  III.  Health  and  its  tests — Danger  of  overdrawing  reserves. 
IV.  Marriage  of  educated  women — Latest  statistics  or  nubility  rates  of  male 
and  female  colleges — Comparisons  and  lessons.  V.  Fecundity  in  earlier 
generations  in  America — Sterility  in  this  and  other  countries,  and  its  causes 
and  stages — Best  age  for  parenthood  in  mother  and  in  father — Effects  of  over- 
nutrition  and  mental  strain — Statistics  of  children  of  graduates  of  girls'  col- 
leges compared  with  rate  of  reproduction  of  male  graduates — Dangers  of  late 
marriages  and  of  only  children — Fertility  as  a  test  of  civilization — ^Individua- 
tion versus  genesis — Dominance  of  the  instinct  for  marriage  and  motherhood 
in  normal  women  and  substitutes  provided  for  it.  VI.  Education — New  Eng- 
lish opinions — Coeducation  of  various  degrees — Its  advantages  and  dangers 
for  both  boys  and  girls — The  age  of  eighteen — Changes  to  the  dollish,  disap- 
pointed, and  devotee  type — Dangers  of  aping  man-made  education  and  of  com- 
placency— •'Vrrest  in  the  first  stages  of  a  movement  just  begun — Training  for 
spinsterhood  and  self-support  versus  for  maternity — Hints  and  general  out- 
lines of  a  higher  education  for  girls  based  on  their  nature  and  needs  and  not 
on  convention  or  the  demands  of  feminists — Branches  of  such  a  curriculum — 
Methods — Hygiene. 

I.  The  Biological  and  Anthropological  Standpoint. — Our 
modern  knowledge  of  woman  represents  her  as  having  char- 
acteristic differences  from  man  in  every  organ  and  tissue,  as 
conservative  in  body  and  mind,  fulfilHng  the  function  of  see- 
ing to  it  that  no  acquired  good  be  lost  to  mankind,  as  anabolic 
rather  than  katabolic,  or  disposed  to  assimilate  or  digest  on 
a  higher  plane,  as  normally  representing  childhood  and  youth 
in  the  full  meridian  of  its  glory  in  all  her  dimensions  and 
nature  so  that  she  is  at  the  top  of  the  human  curve  from  which 
the  higher  super-man  of  the  future  is  to  evolve,  while  man  is 
phylogenetically  by  comparison  a  trifle  senile,  if  not  decadent. 
Her  sympathetic  and  ganglionic  system  is  relatively  to  the 
cerebro-spinal  more  dominant.  Her  whole  soul,  conscious  and 
75  56r 


562  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

unconscious,  is  best  conceived  as  a  magnificent  organ  of  hered- 
ity, and  to  its  laws  all  her  psychic  activities,  if  unperverted, 
are  true.  She  is  by  nature  more  typical  and  a  better  repre- 
sentative of  the  race  and  less  prone  to  specialization.  Her 
peculiar  organs,  while  constituting  a  far  larger  proportion  of 
her  body  than  those  of  man,  are  hidden  and  their  psychic 
reverberations  are  dim,  less  localized,  more  all-pervasive.  She 
works  by  intuition  and  feeling;  fear,  anger,  pity,  love,  and 
most  of  the  emotions  have  a  wider  range  and  greater  inten- 
sity. If  she  abandons  her  natural  naivete  and  takes  up  the 
burden  of  guiding  and  accounting  for  her  life  by  conscious- 
ness, she  is  likely  to  lose  more  than  she  gains,  according  to  the 
old  saw  that  she  who  deliberates  is  lost.  Secondary,  tertiary, 
and  quaternary  sex  qualities  are  developed  far  beyond  her  ken 
or  that  of  science,  in  a  way  that  the  latter  is  only  beginning 
to  glimpse.  While  she  needs  tension  that  only  the  most  ad- 
vanced modem  psychology  sees  to  be  sexual  at  root,  we  shall 
never  know  the  true  key  to  her  nature  until  we  understand 
how  the  nest  and  the  cradle  are  larger  wombs;  the  home,  a 
larger  nest;  the  tribe,  state,  church,  and  school,  larger 
homes  and  irradiations  from  it.  Biological  psychology  al- 
ready dreams  of  a  new  philosophy  of  sex  which  places  the 
wife  and  mother  at  the  heart  of  a  new  world,  and  makes  her 
the  object  of  a  new  religion  and  almost  of  a  new  worship,  that 
will  give  her  reverent  exemption  from  sex  competition  and 
reconsecrate  her  to  the  higher  responsibilities  of  the  human 
race,  into  the  past  and  future  of  which  the  roots  of  her  being 
penetrate ;  where  the  blind  worship  of  mere  mental  illumina- 
tion has  no  place;  and  where  her  real  superiority  to  man  will 
have  free  course  and  be  glorified  and  the  ideals  of  the  old 
matriarchates  again  find  embodiment  in  fit  and  due  degree. 
Patrick  ^  has  summarized  the  salient  points  of  difference 
between  men  and  women  as  follows :  The  latter  are  shorter 
and  lighter  save  for  a  brief  period  at  about  thirteen,  as  we 
have  shown  in  Chapter  I.  Her  adult  height  to  that  of  man  is 
as  about  16  to  17,  and  her  weight  as  9  to  10.  Her  form  is 
rounder,  she  has  more  fat,  more  water,  less  muscle ;  her  dyna- 


1  The   Psychology  of  Woman.     Pop.   Sci.   Mo.,  June,    1895.      See  also  Ellis : 
Man  and  Woman.     London,  p.  409. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND  THEIR   EDUCATION         5^3 

mometer  strength  foots  up  about  two-thirds  that  of  man;  her 
trunk  is  relatively  slightly  longer;  the  pelvic  bend  makes  her 
a  little  less  erect ;  the  head  is  less  upright,  and  her  gait  slightly 
less  steady;  her  plantar  arch  is  flatter;  her  forefinger  is  rela- 
tively longer  than  the  other  three ;  the  thyroid  larger ;  the  lung 
capacity  relatively  less ;  the  blood  has  less  red  corpuscles ;  her 
bones  a  little  less  specific  gravity ;  she  is  more  anemic,  and  her 
pulse  is  faster.  In  the  United  States  about  105  boys  are  born 
to  100  girls,  but  through  life  the  male  death-rate  is  higher, 
so  that  in  nearly  every  land,  after  the  first  year  or  tw^o,  there 
are  more  females  than  males.  She  is  more  liable  to  whooping- 
cough,  scarlet  fever,  phthisis,  diphtheria,  but  resists  diseases 
best  and  dies  less  often  than  man  at  nearly  every  age. 
Ballod  ^  shows  that  the  average  increased  duration  of  life 
in  the  last  decennium  is  for  women  and  not  for  men,  and 
that  large  cities  and  factories  tend  to  shorten  average  male 
longevity.  Hegar  (Geschlechtstrieb)  concludes  that  before 
forty,  married,  and  after  forty,  unmarried,  women  are  more 
liable  to  die,  but  that  married  outlive  unmarried  men.  He 
is  more  prone  than  she  to  rheumatism,  cancer,  brain  troubles, 
sudden  death  from  internal  or  external  causes,  can  less  sur- 
vive severe  surgical  operations  and  grows  old  more  rapidly; 
his  hair  is  gray  earlier  and  he  is  more  prone  to  loss  of  sight, 
hearing,  memory,  senile  irritability,  to  deformities  and  anoma- 
lies, is  less  hardy  and  less  resembles  children.  Woman's  skull 
is  smaller,  especially  at  the  base,  but  large  in  circumference  at 
the  crown,  which  is  flatter  and  more  angular ;  her  forehead  is 
more  vertical ;  the  glabella  and  superorbital  ridges  are  less,  as 
are  the  occipital  and  mastoid  prominences  and  the  parietal 
prominence ;  her  face  is  smaller  and  a  little  lower,  and  she  is 
slightly  more  prognathic.  Her  absolute  brain  weight  to  that 
of  man  is  about  as  9  to  10,  but  her  smaller  size  makes  her 
brain  about  equal,  if  not  heavier,  in  weight.  The  lower  cen- 
ters are  larger  in  women,  and  in  nearly  all  these  respects 
women  differ  less  among  themselves  than  do  men.  Martin 
and  Clouston  found  the  female  brain  slightly  better  irrigated 
by  blood,  especially  in  the  occipital  regions,  although  the  num- 
ber of  its  corpuscles  as  compared  to  those  of  man  was  as  9 


^  Die  mittlere  Lebensdaur  in  Stadt  u.  Land.     Leipzig,  1897. 


564  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

to  10.  The  anterior  regions  of  the  brain  were  best  supplied 
in  man.  The  specific  gravity  of  the  gray  matter  of  all  parts 
of  the  brain  was  less  in  women,  but  in  the  white  matter  there 
was  no  difference.  The  female  brain  has  more  bilateral  sym- 
metry, i.  e.,  its  right  and  left  hemispheres  are  more  alike.  In 
all  save  the  occipital  regions  the  male  has  more  secondary  gyri 
and  probably  the  convolutions  are  deeper.  In  most  forms  of 
lunacy  the  male  brain  is  most  wasted  at  death,  and  four  men 
to  one  woman  die  of  general  paralysis  between  thirty  and  fifty. 
Women  are  more  often  insane,  but  men  most  often  die  of  in- 
sanity, while  women  who  die  in  lunatic  asylums  more  often 
die  of  body  diseases.  Mental  stimulus,  according  to  Warner, 
more  readily  lowers  their  general  nutrition.  Mobius,^  on  the 
other  hand,  who  sees  danger  in  the  emancipation  movement 
of  the  feminists,  thinks  that  the  fact  that  they  have  accom- 
plished so  little  in  the  world  of  art  and  science  is  not  due  to 
subjection  but  to  inferiority.  He  lays  stress  on  Riidinger's  re- 
sults, viz.,  that  in  infants  the  convolutions  about  the  Sylvian 
fissures  are  simpler,  with  fewer  bends,  that  the  island  of  Keil  is 
smaller,  less  convex,  and  simpler,  as  is  the  third  frontal  gyrus, 
and  the  whole  parietal  lobe  is  inferior  in  females  at  all  ages 
to  that  of  men,  these  being  the  portions  most  closely  connect- 
ed with  mentation.  The  sexes  have  the  same  convolutions, 
but  of  different  sizes,  and  the  same  powers,  but  in  differing 
degrees. 

Women  seem  slightly  more  obtuse  in  sight,  touch,  and 
hearing,  and  less  sensitive  to  pain.  Concerning  taste  discrim- 
inations, investigators  differ.  Ellis  and  Galton  conclude  that 
she  has  less  sensibility  but  more  affectibility  and  nervous  irrita- 
bility. Only  about  four-tenths  of  one  per  cent  of  women  are 
color  blind  as  against  three  and  a  half  per  cent  of  men.  In 
visual  discriminations  in  the  indirect  field  of  vision,  she  excels, 
indicating  that  the  retinal  function  is  less  focused  in  the  fovea. 
With  her  eyes  fixed  straight  ahead  on  the  streets  she  observes 
persons  and  things  farther  right  and  left  than  man  can  do. 
Bryan  found  that  in  rapid  movements,  she  excelled  from  five 
to  sixteen,  except  at  about  thirteen,  while  in  precision  boys 
slightly  excel.    Gilbert  concludes  that  boys  tap  fastest  at  every 

1  Ueber  den  physiolog.  Schwachsinn  des  Weibes.     Fifth  ed.     Halle,  1903. 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         5^5 

age,  and  that  reaction  time  is  less  at  all  ages  for  boys.  Ellis 
concludes  that  in  dexterity,  as  shown  in  cotton  spinning, 
woolen  weaving,  cigar  and  cigarette  making,  and  other  fine 
work,  man  excels  where  opportunity  and  numbers  are  equal. 
In  quick  reading,  where  the  sense  of  a  paragraph  is  to  be 
grasped  in  minimal  time  and  with  equal  knowledge  of  the 
subject,  woman  excels  in  quick  apprehension  of  wholes. 
Women  go  in  flocks,  and  in  social  matters  are  less  prone  to 
stand  out  with  salient  individuality.  They  are  more  emo- 
tional, altruistic,  intuitive,  less  judicial,  and  less  able  to 
make  disinterested  and  impersonal  judgment.  Girls  are  most 
likely  to  know  their  environment,  while  the  boys  oftenest  show 
surprising  gaps  in  knowledge  of  what  is  right  about  them  and 
unexpected  acquaintance  with  something  afar,  special  or  un- 
usual. 

Miss  Thompson  ^  found  from  laboratory  tests  that  men  ex- 
cel women  in  strength,  rapidity,  and  in  rate  of  fatigue,  and 
slightly  in  accuracy,  but  the  latter  are  superior  in  new  motor 
combinations ;  that  men  have  the  lower  sensory  threshold  for 
light,  and  w^omen  for  distinguishing  two  points  on  the  skin, 
in  sweet,  salt,  sour,  and  bitter  taste,  in  smell,  color,  and  pain 
by  pressure,  and  in  discriminative  pitch  and  color.  Men  excel 
in  distinguishing  lifted  weights,  sweet,  sour,  and  bitter. 
Women  excel  in  memory.  This  waiter  becomes  feministic  in 
crediting  abstract  deductions  and  taking  Lourbet's  jesting  re- 
mark that  the  smaller  and  more  agile  male  cell  might  better 
represent  the  female  and  the  larger  ovum  the  male,  seriously, 
and  defies  Weismannism  by  ascribing  sexual  differences  of 
type  of  mental  action  to  the  differences  of  the  influences  that 
surround  the  sexes  in  early  years. 

Her  thought  is  more  concrete  and  individual  and  she  is 
more  prone  to  associations  in  space,  and  man  in  time.  Men 
are  more  prone  to  bring  things  under  general  rules  and  with 
regard  to  symmetry.  Her  logical  thought  is  slower,  but  her 
associations  quicker  than  those  of  man,  she  is  less  troubled 
by  inconsistencies,  and  has  less  patience  with  the  analysis  in- 
volved in  science  and  invention. 

Of  483,517  patents  recorded  in  Washington  up  to  October, 

'  The  Mental  Traits  of  Sex.     Chicago  Univ.  Press,  1903. 


566  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

1892,  3,458  were  by  women.  In  education  men  have  made 
most  of  the  reforms,  while  recent  developments  show  that 
they  can  excel  even  in  dressmaking  and  cooking.  Woman 
has  rapid  tact  in  extricating  herself  from  difficulties ;  girls 
speak  quicker  than  boys  j  old  women  are  likely  to  be  talkative, 
old  men  glum ;  men  progress  most  after  graduation ;  women 
are  very  prone  to  lose  accomplishments  and  special  culture  and 
training,  are  more  punctual  in  school  and  college,  more  reg- 
ular in  attendance,  and  in  higher  grades  have  the  best  marks, 
but  var}^  less  from  the  average;  they  excel  in  mental  repro- 
duction rather  than  in  production ;  are  superior  in  arts  of  con- 
versation, more  conservative  and  less  radical;  their  vaso- 
motor system  is  more  excitable ;  they  are  more  emotional, 
blush  and  cry  easier ;  are  more  often  hypnotized ;  quicker  to 
take  suggestions;  have  most  sympathy,  pity,  charity,  gener- 
osity, and  superstitions.  Male  crime  to  female  is  as  6  to  i, 
woman  exceeding  only  in  poisoning,  domestic  theft,  and  in- 
fanticide. She  is  about  as  superior  to  man  in  altruism  as  she 
is  behind  him  in  truth-telling,  being  more  prone  to  ruse  and 
deception.  She  is  more  credulous  and  less  skeptical,  more 
prone  to  fear  and  timidity,  and  has  greater  fidelity,  depend- 
ence, reverence,  and  devotion.  She  dresses  for  adornment 
rather  than  use.  In  savage  and  civilized  life,  her  body  is  more 
often  mutilated  and  she  is  more  primitive.  Her  hair  is  long ; 
she  is  more  prone  to  wear  ornaments  which  show  wealth 
rather  than  to  dress  solely  for  protection  or  concealment;  is 
still  fond  of  feathers,  skin,  and  fur,  flowing  garments,  and 
partial  exposure  of  person,  so  that  she  betrays  rank  and  wealth 
more  often  than  men.  She  still  pinches  her  waist  and  feet; 
uses  pins,  powders,  and  perfumes,  neck  ornaments,  beads, 
overshoes,  and  sometimes  shoes  that  are  not  rights  and  lefts; 
is  more  subject  to  fashion;  her  work  is  far  less  specialized 
than  that  of  man  and  less  reduced  to  mechanism  or  machinery. 
Man  is  best  adapted  to  the  present ;  woman  is  more  rooted 
in  the  past  and  the  future,  closer  to  the  race  and  a  more  ge- 
neric past.  Thus  again,  in  very  many  of  the  above  traits, 
woman  is  far  nearer  childhood  than  man,  and  therefore  in 
mind  and  body  more  prophetic  of  the  future  as  well  as  remi- 
niscent of  the  past. 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         5^7 

Professor  Pearson  ^  condemns  as  a  superstition  the  current  idea 
of  the  greater  variability  of  man  than  of  woman.  He  first  eliminates 
everything  characteristic  of  sex  and  all  that  is  pathological,  and 
focuses  on  size  alone.  Even  color  blindness,  v/hich  is  characteristic 
of  sex,  he  sets  aside.  By  so  doing  and  measuring  the  limited  number 
of  persons,  he  finds  slightly  more  variation  in  females  than  in  males 
and  so  excoriates  the  common  belief  that  the  reverse  is  true.  That 
his  method  is  profoundly  mistaken,  if  it  does  not  indeed  prove  the 
contrary,  will,  I  think,  be  plain  to  all  biologists.  Some  have  thought 
that  every  variation  from  the  parental  type  was  slightly  abnormal. 
Certainly,  normal  and  pathological  shade  into  each  other  by  imper- 
ceptible degrees,  and  Professor  Pearson  merely  eliminates  those  classes 
of  facts  on  which  the  whole  question  rests.  As  Ellis "  well  s(^s,  the 
real  question  of  organic  variational  tendencies  is  untouched.  If  in 
size  woman  is  more  variable,  it  may  be  due  to  her  less  severe  struggle 
for  existence,  or  to  the  fact  that  male  children  being  larger  make 
greater  demands  on  the  mother  and,  therefore,  have  harder  conditions 
to  surmount.  The  biometric  method,  which  Pearson  so  ably  repre- 
sents, miscarries  here  because  the  preliminary  basis  in  the  selection 
of  facts  is  fundamentally  wrong. 

W.  K.  Brooks,^  approaching  the  subject  from  the  stand- 
point of  biology,  characterized  the  female  body,  instincts,  and 
habits  as  conservative,  devoted  to  keeping  what  has  been  ac- 
quired by  successive  generations  as  new  layers  of  snow  are 
added  to  glaciers.  Thus  woman  is  best  in  acting  and  judging 
in  ordinary  matters ;  man  in  those  that  are  extraordinary. 
The  male  is  the  agent  of  variation  and  progress,  and  transmits 
variations  best,  so  that  perhaps  the  male  cell  and  sex  itself 
originated  in  order  to  produce  variation.  Influence  is  more 
potent  than  argument  with  women.  An  ideal  or  typical  male 
is  hard  to  define,  but  there  is  a  standard  ideal  woman.  Be- 
cause her  mind  is,  more  than  that  of  man,  essentially  an  organ 
of  heredity,  we  find  that,  although  she  may  sometimes  seem 
volatile  and  desultory,  the  fact  that  her  processes  seem  to  be 
unconscious  emancipates  her  from  nature  less  than  is  the  case 
with  man.  Her  thought  is  a  mode  of  thinking.  Brooks  pre- 
sents the  following  suggestive  scheme : 


*  The  Chances  of  Death. 

'Variation  in  Man  and  Woman.     Pop.  Sci.  Mo.,  January,  1903. 
'  The  Condition  of  Woman  from  a  Zoological  Point  of  View.     Two  articles, 
Pop.  Sci.  Mo.,  June,  1879. 


568 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 


The  power  of 

to  foresee  the  conduct 
of  or  to  influence 

is  greater  than 
the  power  of 

to  foresee  the  conduct 
of  or  to  influence 

Women 
<< 

Women 
Men 

Men 

Men 
Women 
Men 
Women 

Hyatt  ^  says  that  "  men  and  women,  like  the  males  and 
females  of  most  animals,  show  by  their  organization  that  they 
have  been  evolved  from  a  type  in  which  both  sexes  have  been 
combmed  in  the  same  individual.  The  separation  of  the  sexes 
did  not  destroy  this  dual  nature,  as  is  demonstrated  by  the 
development  of  secondary  male  characters  in  the  old  age  of 
many  species  of  animals,  and  of  women  in  extreme  age,  and 
of  feminine  characters  in  aged  men.  This  opinion  can  also 
be  supported  by  the  structure  of  the  tissue  cells  in  the  body, 
the  nuclei  of  which  are  made  up  of  paternal  and  maternal 
parts.  This  dual  structure  enables  us  to  understand  the  fact 
that  secondary  sexual  characters  are  latent  in  both  males  and 
females."  He  also  urges  that  "  in  the  early  history  of  man- 
kind the  women  and  men  led  lives  more  nearly  alike  and  were 
consequently  more  alike  physically  and  mentally  than  they, 
have  become  subsequently  in  the  lives  oi  highly  civilized  peo- 
ples. This  divergence  of  the  sexes  is  a  marked  characteristic 
of  progression  among  highly  civilized  races.  Coeducation  of 
the  sexes,  occupations  of  a  certain  kind,  and  woman's  suffrage 
may  have  a  tendency  to  approximate  the  ideals,  the  lives,  and 
the  habits  of  women  to  those  of  men  in  these  same  highly 
civilized  races.  Such  approximation  in  the  future,  while  per- 
fectly natural  and  not  in  the  common  sense  degenerate,  would 
not  belong  to  the  progressive  evolution  of  mankind."  They 
would  be  convergences,  and  although  they  might  bring  intel- 
lectual advance  would  tend  to  virify  women  and  feminize  men, 
and  would  be  retrogressive.  We  find  gerontic  changes  even 
in  the  younger  stages  of  adults,  when  the  phylum  is  declining, 
or  in  its  epacme.  Perhaps,  he  thinks,  a  type  like  an  individual 
has  only  a  limited  store  of  vitality  and  a  cycle,  so  that  we  can 


^  The  Influences  of  Woman  in  the  Evolution  of  the  Human  Race. 
Science,  August,  1897,  p.  89. 


Natural 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS  AND   THEIR  EDUCATION         5^9 

speak  of  phylogerontic  stages.  If  man  is  approaching  this 
stage,  it  is  especially  important  that  every  degenerative  influ- 
ence be  avoided,  because  our  organisms  may  be  such  that  we 
can  not  rely  upon  continuous  or  certain  progress,  one  neces- 
sity of  which  is  that  the  sexes  be  not  approximated,  for  this 
would  inaugurate  retrogressive  evolution. 

II.  The  Medical  Standpoint. — Even  the  demands  of  the 
new-school  hygiene  now  represented  by  so  many  experts,  new 
journals,  conferences,  etc.,  have  revealed  no  point  of  such 
wide  divergence  between  doctors  and  current  methods  and 
ideals  as  in  the  education  of  adolescent  girls.  We  have  no 
space  for  even  the  outline  of  or  history  of  this  holy  war,  one 
of  the  most  important  of  many  that  physiology  and  biology 
have  had  to  wage  with  ignorance  and  well-entrenched  custom, 
but  must  be  content  with  sampling  a  few  of  the  most  repre- 
sentative medical  opinions  in  chronological  order  since  this 
issue  was  so  fairly  and  opportunely  raised.  What  follows  in 
this  section  is  immediately  connected  with  Chapter  VII. 

Dr.  Storer,^  one  of  the  first  and  most  sagacious  American 
writers  in  this  field,  urged  that  girls  should  be  educated  far 
more  in  body  and  less  in  mind,  and  thought  delicate  girls  fre- 
quently ruined  in  both  body  and  mind  by  school.  He  was 
not  only  one  of  the  first  to  urge  that  surgery  should  be  per- 
formed at  the  uterine  ebb  w^hich  affected  the  system  even  dur- 
ing pregnancy,  but  to  hold  that  education  should  be  regulated 
throughout  with  reference  to  monthly  changes.  An  epoch, 
however,  was  marked  by  Dr.  Clarke's^  book  in  1873,  ^^^  the 
reply  to  it  by  Miss  Brackett  ^  and  twelve  other  ladies  eminent 
in  the  movement  for  the  higher  education  of  girls.  The  for- 
mer was  a  not  very  scholarly,  but  a  simple  and  sensible,  plea  by 
a  practitioner  of  experience  that  woman's  periods  must  be 
more  respected.  It  appeared  at  the  height  of  the  movement 
to  secure  collegiate  opportunities  for  girls,  was  suspected  of 
being  unofficially  inspired  by  the  unwillingness  of  Harvard 
College  to  receive  them,  and  reached  a  seventeenth  edition 

^  Female  Hygiene,  by  H.  R.  Storer,  M.D.  California  State  Board  of  Health, 
1871,  and  in  many  other  publications. 

'^  Sex  in  Education,  or  a  Fair  Chance  for  the  Girls,  by  Edward  H.  Clarke,  M.D. 
Boston,  1873. 

*  The  Education  of  American  Girls.     New  York,  1874. 


570  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

in  a  few  years.  The  women  who  repHed  took  very  diverse 
views.  To  one  it  was  an  intrusion  into  the  sacred  domain 
of  womanly  privacy.  To  another  it  seemed  insolent  and 
coarse,  an  affront  to  the  sex.  To  another  it  was  only  a  sneer, 
not  doing  as  men  would  be  done  by,  for  the  vices  of  men  were 
worse,  twitting  themi  of  their  sex,  throwing  sex  in  their  teeth ; 
"  these  things  must  not  be  thought  of  in  this  wise."  One 
writer  deplored  that  women  had  not  said  this  for  and  of  them- 
selves, and  advised  that  they  study  physiology,  etc.  On  the 
whole.  Dr.  Clarke  raised  the  most  important  issue  in  the  his- 
tory of  female  education,  and  his  book  is  still  a  shibboleth  of 
a  woman's  attitude  on  most  questions  pertaining  to  her  sex 
and  its  so-called  sphere.  The  misery  of  being  a  girl,  said 
Byford,^  consists  in  feeling  at  this  age  that  she  is  prone  to 
pain,  depression  of  spirits,  bears  a  badge  of  inferiority  which 
must  be  endured,  must  wear  corsets,  pads,  and  long  clothes 
that  impede  her  movements  and  that  must  never  be  soiled  or 
rumpled  by  free  activity  to  which  she  was  accustomed  as  a 
girl.  Her  studies  are  laid  on  her  sensitive  consciousness  and 
her  pride  and  self-respect  prompt  her  to  overwork.  Girls' 
schools  are  governed  too  much,  for  girls  need  now  not  less 
but  far  more  freedom  than  boys.  Some  parts  of  the  body 
are  clothed  too  thickly,  and  some  too  little  for  health.  No- 
where in  the  world  do  men  work  so  hard  or  girls  and  women 
do  so  little  useful  work  or  render  so  little  real  service  to  the 
community  as  in  this  country.  Young  men  are  often  fastid- 
ious and  unpractical,  and  are  attracted  by  accomplishments 
that  fall  off  and  are  lost  soon  after  marriage,  while  they  do  not 
know  how  to  seek  or  recognize  what  is  useful,  and  thus  defer 
matrimony  as  a  too  expensive  luxury.  In  this  self-imposed 
celibacy  they  become  dangerous  to  the  virtue  of  the  debili- 
tated if  not  degenerate  girls  in  the  community. 

Dr.  Beard  ^  says,  after  sending  many  circulars  and  study- 
ing the  returns  they  brought :  "  Nearly  everything  about  the 
conduct  of  the  schools  was  wrong,  unphysiological  and  un- 
psychological,  and  they  were  conducted  so  as  to  make  very 
sad  and  sorrowing  the  lives  of  those  who  were  forced  to  attend 

'  The  Second  Decade  of  Life.     Cincinnati  Lancet  and  Observer,  1877,  p.  342. 
*  American  Nervousness  :   Its  Causes  and  Consequences.     New  York,  1881. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         57 ^ 

them.  It  was  clear  that  the  teachers  and  managers  of  these 
schools  knew  nothing  of  and  cared  nothing  for  those  matters 
relating  to  education  that  are  of  the  highest  importance,  and 
that  the  routine  of  the  schools  was  such  as  would  have  been 
devised  by  some  evil  deity  who  wished  to  take  vengeance  on 
the  race  and  the  nation.  .  .  .  Everything  pushed  in  an  unsci- 
entific and  distressing  manner,  nature  violated  at  every  step, 
endless  reciting  and  lecturing  and  striving  to  be  first — such 
are  the  female  schools  of  America  at  this  hour.  The  first 
signs  of  ascension  or  of  declension  in  nations  are  seen  in 
women.  As  the  foliage  of  delicate  plants  first  shows  the 
early  warmth  of  spring,  and  the  earliest  frosts  of  autumn, 
so  the  impressible,  susceptive  organization  of  woman  appre- 
ciates and  exhibits  far  sooner  than  that  of  man  the  manifesta- 
tion of  national  progress  or  decay."  Nathan  Allen  ^  urged 
that  while  in  men  everything  depended  upon  bodily  vigor,  this 
was  even  more  important  for  girls,  for  in  them  we  were  edu- 
cating the  race.  The  best  balance  for  weak  nerves  or  other 
organs  was  well-developed  muscles,  and  in  this  at  proper 
periods  he  saw  the  way  of  safety  for  the  well  and  of  salvation 
for  the  sickly.  Stated  and  out-of-door  and  not  excessive  phys- 
ical culture  he  thought  had  a  normative  influence  upon  the 
monthly  function,  and  he,  too,  held  to  periodic  remission  of 
work  for  mind,  heart,  and  muscles. 

The  current  prejudices  that  menstruation  is  a  disagree- 
able function  or  a  badge  of  inferiority.  Dr.  Galippe  ^  thinks 
arose  from  educational  establishments  for  girls.  The  senti- 
ment, which  prevails  in  these  schools,  is  that  it  is  somewhat 
shameful  and  at  least  not  worthy  of  serious  and  respectful 
consideration  by  well-bred  minds.  Instead  of  indicating  her 
state  to  some  person  selected  for  that  purpose  and  receiving 
from  her  the  delicate,  hygienic  instruction  and  consideration 
needed,  the  pubescent  girl  conceals  it  and  is  left  to  herself, 
and  metrorrhagia  or  anemia  and  often  local  states  result  which 
are  simply  pathetic.  Girls  do  not  complain  of  easily  remov- 
able suffering,  thinking  often  that  pain  is  inseparable  from 

'  The  Education  of  Girls  as  Connected  with  their  Growth  and  Physical  Develop- 
ment.     Sanitarian,  1879. 

2  De  la  Menstruation  dans  ies  Etablissements  Consacres  k  I'Education  des  Jeunes 
Filles.     Rev.  de  Hygiene  et  de  Police  Sanitarie,  1880,  ii,  p.  605  et  seq. 


572  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

this  function,  and  take  part  in  all  the  exercises  of  the  school, 
both  physical  and  mental,  when  they  have  crying  need  of  all 
the  highest  functions  of  true  motherhood  to  teach  them  the 
effects  of  fatigue  and  excitement,  the  need  of  rest,  and  proper 
regimen  and  toilet.  It  is  vain  to  assume  that  because  savages 
or  peasants  can  live  in  a  state  of  nature,  that  well-born  girls 
at  school  can  be  thus  abandoned.  Civilization  in  some  respects 
is  an  artificial  state  and  needs  new  habits  and  functions  be- 
cause it  involves  greater  susceptibility. 

Dr.  F.  C.  Taylor  ^  presents  some  pertinent  considerations 
as  follows :  Civilization  is  hard  on  woman,  and  constantly 
stimulates  her  beyond  her  strength,  nres  her  with  ambitions 
she  can  not  realize,  and  robs  her  of  the  tranquillity  she  needs. 
Imperfect  sexual  hygiene  is  a  prolific  source  of  evil  to  the 
individual  woman  and  to  the  race.  If  the  latter  deteriorates 
it  will  be  through  the  degeneration  of  woman.  In  her,  sex 
and  its  wider  irradiations  overshadow  all  else  during  her 
ripening  period,  is  an  ever-present  influence  controlling  mind 
and  body,  and  in  old  age  is  the  glory  of  the  declining  day  of 
life.  If  the  sexual  life  is  lowered  or  suppressed,  a  tonic 
needed  for  vigor  in  all  directions  is  lost.  Owing  in  part  to 
the  fact  that  her  organs  are  internal  and  therefore  less  or 
later  known,  they  are  less  often  consciously  connected  with 
impressions  that  are  indirectly  if  not  directly  sexual,  and  there 
is  greater  convertibility  of  emotions.  Women  can  remain  in 
what  is  really  a  suppressed  semi-erotic  state  with  never-cul- 
minating feeling,  so  scattered  in  their  interests  and  enthu- 
siasms that  they  can  not  fix  their  affections  permanently. 
Particularly  repressed  molimina  may  become  vicarious  and 
issue  in  estheticism  and  all  kinds  of  noble  or  ignoble  interests. 
Women  are  sometimes  led  astray  when  their  feelings  are  made 
especially  delicate  by  bereavement,  and  on  the  other  hand,  ex- 
cessive erotic  sensations  sometimes  cause  loss  of  power  in  the 
limbs.  Unmarried  women  are,  and  ought  to  be,  great  walk- 
ers, but  wives  and  mothers  expend  the  same  energy  normally 
in  other  ways.  Where  the  normal  exercise  of  functions  is 
unduly  restrained,  it  finds,  therefore,  many  other  outlets.     Dr. 

'  Effects  in  Woman  of  Imperfect  Hygiene  of  Sex  Functions.     Am.   Jour,   of 
Obstet.,  1882,  p.  161. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         573 

Taylor  thinks,  however,  that  the  difference  between  boys  and 
girls  in  learning  self-abuse  on  account  of  the  more  obvious 
anatomy  of  the  former  is  overestimated,  and  that  the  latter, 
more  commonly  than  is  thought,  not  only  find  their  organs 
and  use  them  improperly,  but  are  more  difficult  to  cure  of 
this  vice. 

Clouston,  in  various  articles  and  books,  has  expressed  him- 
self in  very  trenchant  terms.  Each  generation,  he  premises, 
can  use  up  more  than  its  share  of  energy,  and  women  have  a 
peculiar  power  of  taking  out  of  themselves  more  than  they 
can  bear.  All  should  carry  a  reserve  to  meet  emergencies  and 
not  use  up  all  their  power,  and  thus  rob  future  generations.^ 
His  conception  is  also  that  human  life  is  divided  into  stages, 
each  of  which  must  be  lived  out  in  such  a  way  as  not  to  draw 
upon  the  later  stages.  We  should  ask  what  nature  aims  at 
in  each  period  and  surround  each  by  its  own  ideal  conditions, 
and  see  to  it  that  in  no  stage  we  strive  for  what  belongs  to 
another  later  one.  Again,  any  organ  like  the  brain  or  repro- 
ductive parts,  if  overworked,  may  draw  upon  the  vigor  of 
others.  Each  individual  stage  and  organ  has  just  so  much 
energy.  We  should  strive  sedulously  to  keep  the  mental  back 
in  all  and  especially  in  females,  and  not  "  spoil  a  good  mother 
to  make  a  grammarian."  In  the  United  States,  Clouston 
thinks  that  most  families  have  more  or  less  nervous  taint  or 
disease ;  that  heredity  is  weak  because  woman  has  lost  her 
cue,  although  nature  is  benign  and  always  tends  to  a  cure  if 
we  have  not  gone  too  far  astray.  Adolescence  is  more  im- 
portant for  girls  than  for  boys.  Science  and  learning  are 
happily  less  likely  to  take  a  dominating  hold  of  woman's 
nature,  because  they  are  not  along  the  lines  on  which  it  was 
built.  Clouston  is  fond  of  reminding  us  that  none  of  Shake- 
speare's women  were  learned,  that  even  Portia  describes  her- 
self as  "  an  unlettered  girl,  unschooled,  unpractised."  Most 
great  men's  mothers  were  women  of  strong  mind,  but  not 
highly  educated.  Would  their  sons  have  been  better,  he  asks, 
had  the  mothers  been  schooled  ?  Would  they  have  been  really 
better  companions  for  men,  and  is  learning  bought  at  the 


'  Female  Education  from  a  Medical  Point  of  View,  by  T.  S.   Clouston,  M.D. 
Pop.  Sci.  Mo.,  1884,  two  articles,  pp.  214,  319. 


574  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

expense  of  any  degree  of  cheerfulness,  which  is  the  best  sign 
of  health,  not  too  costly?  "There  is  no  time  or  place  of 
organic  repentance  provided  by  nature  for  sins  of  the  school- 
master." A  man  can  work  if  he  is  one-sided  or  defective,  but 
not  so  a  woman.  "  If  she  is  not  more  or  less  finished  and 
happy  at  twenty-five,  she  will  never  be."  Parents  want  chil- 
dren to  work  in  order  to  tone  down  their  animal  spirits,  and 
it  almost  seems  to  Clouston  as  if  the  devil  invented  the  school 
for  spite.  He  quotes  approvingly  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes, 
who  refers  to  the  "  American  female  constitution  which  col- 
lapses just  in  the  middle  third  of  life  and  comes  out  vulcanized 
India-rubber,  if  it  happens  to  live  through  the  period  when 
health  and  strength  are  most  wanted,"  and  thinks  girls'  brains 
should  be  put  to  grass  for  a  few  generations.  Fun  is  to  the 
mind  what  fat  is  to  the  body.  A  large  part  of  study  should 
be  what  to  omit  and  skip  and  not  to  know.  Possibly  we  may 
be  developing  an  unique  kind  of  girl,  a  different  species.  A 
true  fully  developed  woman  is  very  hard  to  mature,  but  when 
ripe  can  stand  very  much. 

Thorburn  ^  fears  disproportion  between  the  development 
of  muscle  and  of  nerve  in  women.  Girls  should  do  hardly  any 
steady  work  for  one  year  before  and  two  after  puberty.  They 
can  not  work  without  peril  for  about  one-fourth  of  the  time, 
and  should  adjust  themselves  to  this  law  of  their  nature  and 
plan  to  lie  fallow  about  a  quarter  of  the  time.  Teachers  and 
others  should  not  wait  to  be  asked  before  excusing  them  from 
their  task,  but  should  command  it  without  request.  Girls 
should  cultivate  the  festina  lente  of  poise  and  develop  the  dig- 
nity and  the  efficiency  of  going  slow,  but  this  should  be  in  no 
wise  construed  as  inimical  to  their  education.  This  problem 
we  shall  not  have  solved  until  there  is  no  more  danger  of 
college  unfitting  women  to  be  wives  than  of  its  unfitting  men 
to  be  husbands. 

Most  frequent  among  all  the  menstrual  disorders  of  schoolgirls, 
Dr.  Wilson  ^  thinks,  is  dysmenorrhea.    Next  comes  suppression,  while 

'  Female  Education  from  a  Medical  Point  of  View,  by  John  Thorburn,  M.  D. 
Manchester,  1884. 

'  Menstrual  Disorders  in  Schoolgirls.  The  Texas  Sanitarium,  June,  1885. 
J.  T.  Wilson,  M.  D.     See  also  subsequent  discussion. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         575 

menorrhagia  is  rare  at  this  age.  He  urges  more  attention  to  physical 
development  before  puberty.  Constipation,  headache,  sallowness,  acne, 
leucorrhea,  insomnia,  perversity  of  appetite,  dyspepsia,  overtension  of 
nerves,  tea-ism,  coffee-ism,  cold  feet,  emotional  strain,  he  finds  amaz- 
ingly prevalent  in  the  schools.  American  girls  come  to  this  crisis 
without  having  known  much  control  or  restraint,  and  with  their  habits 
and  actions  almost  entirely  unsystematized.  They  appear  rosy  and 
healthy  because  energies,  that  should  go  to  perfecting  other  parts  and 
functions,  have  been  diverted  to  cerebration.  Influences  from  those 
about  her  tend  to  make  her  give  up  free  and  girlish  sports  and  romp- 
ing, and  to  feel  herself  a  woman  too  suddenly.  Her  dress  interferes 
with  portal  circulation,  digestion,  respiration,  and  favors  displace- 
ment at  a  time  when  her  entire  system  is  most  susceptible  to  disturb- 
ances, which  it  did  not  heed  before.  She  is  thrown  on  her  own  re- 
sponsibility, is  often  among  strangers,  her  emotional  nature  is  excited 
by  music  and  art.  From  childhood,  she  is  petted,  pampered,  and 
spoiled,  thought  cute  and  cunning,  can  not  submit  to  restraint,  and  often 
has  a  small  body  of  misinformation  about  herself,  which  is  far  worse 
than  ignorance.  She  is  made  egotistic  and  superficial,  is  distracted  by 
the  beginnings  of  many  sorts  of  knowledge.  She  lays  the  foundation 
of  invalidism  at  a  time  when  she  should  become  a  mother,  has  a  horror 
of  maternity,  partly  instinctive  and  partly  induced,  hankers  for  pastry, 
sweets,  and  hot  bread  that  insult  and  vex  the  stomach,  and  dreads 
the  recurrence  of  periods  which  bring  irritation  and  depression.  She 
does  not  turn  to  her  mother  for  care  or  advice,  for  unconscious  in- 
stinct teaches  her  that  there  is  no  help  from  that  source.  Probably 
most  American  girls  now  have,  Wilson  thinks,  more  or  less  hereditary 
tendencies  towards  functional  disorders,  so  that  to  inaugurate  a  proper 
hygiene  that  should  lead  to  healthy  and  vigorous  womanhood  in  most 
cases  needs  nothing  less  than  medical  supervision ;  while  gynecologists 
agree  in  recognizing  a  steady  increase  of  female  troubles,  as  well  as 
the  increased  use  of  drugs  or  patent  nostrums,  their  own  endeavors 
tend  less  to  specific  and  more  to  general  regimen. 

The  views  of  Dr.  S.  Weir  Mitchell  ^  are  well  known  and 
have  been  often  expressed.  Woman,  he  holds,  is  physiolog- 
ically other  than  man  and  no  education  can  change  her.  No 
one  knows  woman  who  does  not  know  sick  woman.  She  takes 
to  being  a  patient  naturally  and  comfortably,  although  if  long 
ill  she  warps  morally.  Her  doctor  must  often  read  the  riot 
act  to  a  mob  of  emotions ;  must  look  beyond  drtigs,  for  she  is 
prone  to  think  three  pills  a  day  easier  than  diet  or  regimen. 
He  must  listen  and  sympathize  with  her  ills  and  with  the  joy 

^  See  e.  g.  his  Doctor  and  Patient.     Philadelphia,  i8S8,  passim,  and  many  other 
of  his  writings. 


576  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

of  convalescence  in  order  to  be  of  real  use  to  her.  He  must 
recognize  how  prone  nervous  and  feeble  women  are  to  crave 
pity  and  love  power ;  how  prone,  like  all  who  have  not  learned 
the  great  lesson  of  bearing  pain,  they  are  to  some  narcotic 
habit.  Out-of-door  life,  the  camp  cure,  sewing  for  its  moral 
value,  and  all  that  pertains  to  regimen  and  psychic  influence 
must  be  at  her  doctor's  command. 

Grant  Allen  ^  insists  that  there  ought  to  be  a  woman  ques- 
tion and  movement,  but  it  must  accept  the  fact  that  most  adult 
women  will  be  wives  and  mothers.  In  any  ideal  community 
the  greatest  possible  number  of  women  must  be  devoted  to 
maternity  and  marriage,  and  support  by  men  must  be  assumed 
and  not  female  celibacy.  The  accidental  and  exceptional  must 
not  be  the  rule  or  the  goal.  This  is  only  a  pis  aller.  It  is  not 
so  much  the  unmarried  minority  that  need  attention  as  the 
mothers.  We  must  not  abet  woman  as  a  sex  in  rebelling  against 
maternity,  quarreling  with  the  moon,  or  sacrifice  wifehood  to 
maidenhood.  The  whole  question  of  sex  must  be  reconsid- 
ered. This  woman  will  never  do,  nor  will  she  go  as  far  as 
men  in  emancipating  herself.  He  even  goes  so  far  as  to  sug- 
gest that,  wives  or  not,  we  must  have  mothers.  Men  must 
be  made  more  virile,  women  more  feminine,  and  sex  dis- 
tinctions must  be  pushed  to  the  uttermost.  Woman  must  not 
be  allowed  to  cramp  her  intellect  or  her  waist.  What  seem 
to  men  feminine  idiosyncrasies  must  be  unfolded.  She  must 
be  set  free  from  her  craven  fear  of  the  Grundian  sfoddess. 
Her  sexuality  is  in  danger  of  enfeeblement.  She  eschews 
marriage  often  from  the  want  of  a  normal  physical  impulse. 
Instead  of  the  ideal  of  becoming  a  self-supporting  spinster, 
she  ought  to  be  married  at  twenty-five  and  plan  to  be.  It  is 
a  shame  to  any  normal  woman  not  to  long  to  be  a  wife  and 
mother,  and  not  to  glory  in  her  femininity,  or  to  prate  of  those 
who  insist  on  the  laws  of  nature  "  as  traitors  to  their  sex," 
and  "  casting  sex  in  their  teeth."  Allen  estimates  that  about 
six  children  per  marriage  are  necessary  to  keep  up  the  popu- 
lation, as  more  than  one-half  die  before  maturity.  If  the  best 
abstain  from  child-bearing,  then  the  population  is  kept  up  by 
the    lowest.      Savages    make    but    little    provision    for    their 

^  Plain  Words  about  the  Woman  Question.     Pop.  Sci.  Mo.,  December,  1889. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         577 

women,  so  that  analogy  would  lead  us  to  suppose  with  Comte 
that  in  the  highest  state  women  will  care  only  for  children, 
and  men  do  all  the  work. 

Le  Bon  ^  pleaded  that  the  education  we  now  give  to  girls 
consists  of  instruction  that  fits  brains  otherwise  constructed, 
perverts  womanly  instincts,  falsifies  the  spirit  and  judgment, 
enfeebles  the  constitution,  confuses  their  moods  concern- 
ing their  duties  and  their  happiness,  and  generally  disequili- 
brates  them.  It  charges  the  brain  with  too  much  information 
that  is  useless,  fails  to  give  what  can  be  applied,  and  fits 
them  neither  for  domesticity  nor  for  gaining  their  livelihood. 
It  makes  them  misconceive  their  role  in  society  and  in  the 
family,  and  often  jealous  of  man  and  at  heart  inimical  to  the 
social  order,  and  threatens  future  degeneration  of  the  race. 

In  a  suggestive  series  of  ten  articles.  Dr.  James  Crichton 
Browne  ^  defies  Weismannism  if  it  mitigates  the  woe  that 
impends  to  a  land  if  mothers  decay.  Girls,  he  says,  suffer  far 
more  change  and  instability  at  the  onset  of  puberty  than  boys, 
and  he  deprecates  sowing  the  tares  of  ambition  for  careers  in 
girls.  He  finds  headaches  far  too  common  among  young  girls 
from  ten  to  seventeen ;  advocates  the  abolition  of  evening 
study;  finds  danger  that  the  ovum  and  sperm  cell  may  have 
their  activity  so  reduced  before  meeting  that  the  infant  comes 
to  life  old  and  without  a  fair  chance.  Despite  the  average 
increase  of  life  for  men,  and  still  more  for  women,  during  the 
last  forty  years,  he  finds  that  beyond  middle  life  there  is  little 
reduction  of  death-rate  and  that  wear-and-tear  diseases  are 
increased;  that  even  cancer  is  perhaps  coming  to  have  a 
nervous  element;  that  neurasthenia  and  functional  nerve 
troubles  are  augmenting ;  he  thinks  all  "  voluminous  states  "  of 
nerves  or  souls  are  harbingers  of  epilepsy  and  especially  de- 
plores the  propensity  to  take  short-sighted  views  seeking  im- 
mediate causes  ("the  lobster  salad  did  it  ")  for  the  outcrops 
of  troubles  of  long  and  perhaps  of  ancestral  incubation. 

He  ^  also  holds  that  differences  between  sexes  are  involved 
in  every  organ  and  tissue,  and  deprecates  the  present  relentless 

1  Revue  Scientifique,  1890,  p.  460. 
'Brit.  Med.  Jour.,  vol.  i,  1892. 

'  Sex  in  Education,  by  Sir  James  Crichton  Browne,  M.  D.     Educational  Re- 
view, 1892,  p.  164. 
76 


578  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

zeal  of  intersexual  competition,  concerning  the  results  of 
which  it  is  appalling  to  speculate  from  a  medical  point  of 
view.  When  the  University  of  St.  Andrews  opened  its  theo- 
logical department  to  woman,  it  was  not  a  retrograde  move- 
ment, because  our  ancestors  did  no  such  thing,  but  a  down- 
hill step  fraught  with  confusion  and  disaster.  He  quotes  with 
approval  Huxley's  phrase  that  "  what  has  been  decided  among 
prehistoric  protozoa  can  not  be  annulled  by  an  act  of  Parlia- 
ment." This  is  a  condition  that  no  senatus  academiciim  can 
obliterate  by  pen  strokes.  In  unicellular  organisms  the  con- 
jugating cells  are  alike,  but  forms  become  more  and  more 
dimorphic.  As  we  go  higher  sexes  diverge  not  only  in  pri- 
mary and  secondary  sex  characteristics,  but  in  functions  not 
associated  with  sex.  Reciprocal  dependence  increases  as  does 
harmony,  and  each  is  in  some  respects  higher  and  each  lower. 
In  union  they  are  strong ;  in  competition  mutually  destructive. 
Warner,  he  thinks,  is  right  in  saying  that  "  mental  stimulus 
applied  to  children  lowers  their  general  nutrition."  Gastric 
troubles  and  anorexia  scholastica  increase,  and  all  the  abdomi- 
nal viscera  become  more  or  less  exhausted  until  often  apathy 
passes  into  mild  coma,  "  the  cyclone  of  mania,  the  anti-cyclone 
of  melancholia,  the  hurricane  of  morbid  impulse,  oc  the  settled 
bad  weather  of  moral  perversion."  Work  is  man's  greatest 
enemy  when  he  is  worn  out  or  fatigued.  On  this  point  he 
believes  there  is  a  growing  consensus  of  opinion,  although 
admitting  that  direct  and  trusty  evidence  is  hard  to  obtain. 
Valuable,  too,  is  the  observation  ^  that  women  are  prone 
from  their  physical  constitution  and  their  lives  to  desire  what 
they  have  not,  and  for  that  reason  alone  they  particularly  need 
absorbing  occupations,  and  are  spoiled  by  idleness  and  vacuity 
of  mind,  which  makes  them  either  lazy,  phlegmatic,  and  un- 
ambitious, or  else  restless.  Their  education  should  not  aim 
to  cultivate  the  thinking  powers  alone  or  chiefly.  Woman's 
work  is  all-round  work,  but  friendship  between  men  and 
women  is  a  great  power,  and  intellectual  oneness  increases 
all  the  fruitions  of  married  life.  Men  are  at  fault  because 
they  do  not  realize  this  possibility  and  are  prone  to  be  less 


'The  Waste  of  Woman's  Intellectual  Force,  by  M.  G,  Van  Rensselaer,  M.D. 
Forum,  1892,  p.  616. 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS  AND  THEIR  EDUCATION         579 

interested  in  the  minds  than  in  the  bodies  of  women.  Love 
should  be  less  haphazard  and  less  purely  sentimental,  and 
happy  marriages  should  be  bulwarked  by  mental  affinity,  but 
this  does  not  mean  the  higher  education  as  now  administered 
for  women.  Women  are  weaker  in  body  and  mind  than  men, 
but  they  can  achieve  great  things  even  intellectually,  and 
might  take  courage  from  examples  like  that  of  Darwin,  who 
did  much  of  his  best  work  in  years  of  such  weakness  that 
he  could  apply  himself  for  only  an  hour  or  two  a  day.  Some 
men,  however,  will  perhaps  always  respond  to  the  charm  of 
weakness  and  even  ignorance  in  women. 

Edson  ^  avers  that  if  our  race  is  to  go  on  and  up,  no 
matter  what  our  ideals,  the  animal  basis  must  be  kept  pure  and 
wholesome.  From  i88o-'90  the  birth-rate  in  the  United 
States  decreased  from  36  per  thousand  inhabitants  to  30,  and 
Billings  thinks  the  chief  factor  in  this  decline  is  the  voluntary 
avoidance  of  child-bearing.  From  i875-'85  in  Massachu- 
setts this  decline  was  from  20.6  to  18.47.  ^^  the  United 
States  as  a  whole  from  i86o-'90  the  birth-rate  declined  from 
25.61  to  19.22.  Many  women  are  so  exhausted  before  mar- 
riage that  after  bearing  one  or  two  children  they  become 
wrecks,  and  while  there  is  perhaps  a  growing  dread  of  partu- 
rition or  of  the  bother  of  children,  many  of  the  best  women 
feel  that  they  have  not  stamina  enough  and  are  embarrassed 
to  know  what  to  do  with  their  leisure.  Perhaps  there  will 
have  to  be  a  "  new  rape  of  the  Sabines,"  and  if  women  do  not 
improve,  men  will  have  recourse  to  emigrant  wives,  or  healthy 
girls  with  stamina  will  have  an  advantage  equal  to  that  of 
pretty  girls  now. 

Jankau  ^  thinks  that  great  suffering  and  even  unhappy 
marriages  are  due  to  lack  of  knowledge  of  puberty  and  sex  by 
teachers  and  youth,  the  essentials  of  which  he  seeks  to  supply 
in  an  illustrated  68-page  book,  which  he  would  have  the 
mother  and  not  the  father  give  to  pubescent  boys.  In  no  way 
can  she  secure  greater  and  more  lasting  gratitude  than  by  very 
frankly  stating  normal  facts  and  fully  warning  of  dangers. 

'  American  Life  and  Physical  Deterioration,  by  Cyrus  Edson,  M.  D.  North 
Am.  Rev.,  October,  1893. 

*  Anatomic,  Physiologic  und  Hygiene  des  Geschlechtsreifen  Sohnes.  Miinchen, 
1894. 


580  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Every  youth,  he  asserts,  indulges  at  least  once  in  self-abuse, 
and  it  depends  on  his  heredity,  character,  training,  and  instruc- 
tion whether  or  not  it  becomes  a  confirmed  habit.  The  symp- 
toms and  progress  of  gonorrhea,  syphilis,  chancre  and  its 
three  stages,  modes  of  treatment  and  even  of  preventive 
methods  to  be  employed  in  intercourse  are  described;  but  in 
every  case  and  stage  the  young  sufferer  must  turn  to  his 
mother,  if  he  has  one,  and  then  without  delay  to  the  physician, 
and  must  not  be  despised  but  treated  with  sympathy  and  pity. 
The  more  the  father  has  himself  sinned  and  suffered,  the  more 
severe  and  the  less  compassionate  a  counselor  will  he  be. 

Prof.  E.  Hegar  ^  advises  definite  instruction  in  sexual  hy- 
giene for  the  pupils  of  the  middle  schools,  based  on  demon- 
stration on  the  cadaver:  this  he  thinks  would  solemnize  all  the 
teaching  in  both  anatomy  and  physiology  necessary  for  the 
proper  regimen,  and  check  morbid  direction  of  curiosity.  Dr. 
W.  Stekel,  of  Vienna,  would  have  children  watched  by  day, 
and  especially  by  night,  for  a  few  years,  and  thinks  that  the 
sexes  should  never  be  taught  in  the  same  classes.  This,  too, 
Hegar  seems  to  approve. 

To  prevent  the  seeds  of  mischief  in  girls  at  this  most  pe- 
culiarly sensitive  age,  Dr.  Playfair  ^  says,  in  substance,  we 
must  constantly  bear  in  mind  the  highly  emotional  and  sensitive 
nervous  organization  which  distinguishes  woman  from  man  and 
affects  the  nature  and  progress  of  every  disease  to  which  she  is 
subject,  and  especially  those  of  the  reproductive  functions. 
Regimen  during  the  settled  establishment  of  the  great  func- 
tion of  menstruation  determines  whether  she  shall  have  stam- 
ina and  powers  of  resistance,  or  perhaps,  with  the  appearance 
of  health,  collapse  to  invalidism  at  every  strain.  The  prime 
and  alarming  fault  of  the  heads  of  high  schools  and  colleges 
for  girls  is  that  they,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  assume 
the  absolutely  untenable  theory  that  the  sexual  question  is  of 
secondary  importance,  and  that  there  is  little  real  distinction 
between  girls  and  boys  from  fourteen  to  twenty.  The  dis- 
tinction caused  by  the  menstrual  functions,  says  Dr.  Playfair, 


■  Der  Geschlechtstrieb :    Eine  socialmed.  Studie,  1895. 

^  Remarks  on  the  Education  and  Training  of  Girls  of  the  Easy  Classes  at  about 
the  Period  of  Puberty.     Brit.  Med.  Journal,  vol.  ii,  1895,  p.  1405  et  seq. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         S^i 

is  absolute  and  should  be  systematically  attended  to,  while  in 
fact  the  feeling  of  school-mistresses  is  directly  antagonistic  to 
every  such  admission.  Their  point  of  view  is  that  there  is  no 
real  difference ;  that  what  is  good  for  one  sex  is  good  for  the 
other;  or  if  there  is  a  difference,  it  is  a  relict  of  an  evil  past 
where  woman  has  been  cruelly  denied  many  advantages  open 
to  man,  and  that  identity  of  opportunity  and  occupation  will 
open  a  new  and  happy  era,  when  such  differences  as  remain 
will  vanish.  Why  is  it  then  that  the  most  characteristic  dis- 
eases of  girls,  anemia  and  chlorosis,  associated  with  menstrual 
disturbances,  are  almost  never  seen  in  boys?  Physical  exer- 
cise out  of  doors  should  be  required,  for  girls  are  often  list- 
less ;  muscular  activity  is  the  best  antidote  to  the  sentimental- 
ism  and  morbid  fancies  so  liable  after  puberty.  For  all  school- 
girls, every  form  of  corset  should  be  absolutely  forbidden. 
The  first  danger  signals  should  be  carefully  watched  for,  and 
when  they  appear  everything  should  give  way  till  perfect 
health  is  restored.  The  recent  expression  of  a  female  prin- 
cipal that  if  the  function  was  in  abeyance  for  a  time  in  the 
teens,  it  was  of  no  great  consequence,  for  she  had  noticed 
that  it  came  around  all  right  afterward  when  the  girls  left 
school,  it  is  feared  represents  a  point  of  view  far  too  com- 
mon, but  which  bodes  the  greatest  danger  for  the  future. 
The  development  of  ideal  lawn-tennis  girls  would  be  a  bet- 
ter goal  for  modern  institutions  than  scholars  made  at  such 
a  cost. 

Taylor,^  who  also  bases  his  opinion  on  large  experience, 
holds  that  school  modesty  often  promotes  habitual  constipa- 
tion, and  thinks  the  enfeeblement,  lack  of  luster,  debility, 
squeamishness  about  food,  lack  of  interest  in  life,  languid  con- 
fidence and  lack  of  incentive,  clammy  hands  so  common 
among  pubescent  girls,  should  be  combated  by  romping,  ball, 
beanbags,  battledore,  hoops,  running,  golf,  tennis,  bicycling, 
self-bathing  in  cold  water,  deep-breathing  exercises  once  or 
twice  a  day,  etc.,  rather  than  by  systematic  physical  culture; 
that  too  early  interest  in  the  refinements  of  life  arrests  devel- 
opment and  that  nothing  should  be  undertaken,  especially  at 


*  Puberty  in  Girls  and  Certain  of  its  Disturbances,  by  J.  Madison  Taylor,  M.  D. 
Pediatrics,  July  15,  1896. 


582  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

this  age,  by  girls  which  can  not  be  entered  into  with  great 
heartiness  and  spontaneity.  Interesting,  too,  are  his  sugges- 
tions on  the  psycho-pedagogy  of  flattery.  Dr.  Smith  ^  states 
that  "  a  very  large  per  cent  of  females  in  every  physician's 
practise  are  affected  more  or  less  by  mental  troubles,  owing 
to  menstrual  disorders." 

Henry  T.  Finck  ^  insists  that  women  attach  far  too  much 
importance  to  politics;  that  their  sphere  is  domestic,  ninety- 
four  out  of  every  hundred  marrying;  that  they  control  the 
all-determining  first  five  years  of  a  child's  life  and  manners, 
which  are  almost  as  important  as  morals.  One  of  the  great 
functions  of  motherhood,  he  says,  is  to  find  husbands  for 
daughters.  The  latter  are  often  neglected,  and  vanity,  which 
prompts  American  girls  to  dress  like  heiresses,  produces,  in 
his  opinion,  nearly  as  much  unhappiness  as  whisky.  In  great 
cities  superfine  dressing  opens  pitfalls  of  temptation.  He 
thinks  the  suffragists  should  take  hold  of  solvable  problems  like 
that  of  servants  and  of  gastronomy,  until  the  kitchen  is  trans- 
formed into  an  art  studio.  They  should  develop  the  arts  of 
entertainment,  none  of  which  are  complete  without  a  woman. 
Instead  of  becoming  greedy  money-makers,  they  should  serve 
as  an  antidote  to  our  extreme  commercialism  and  politicism. 
Ten  per  cent  more  girls  than  boys  are  on  the  way  to  college 
in  our  high  schools.  Men's  right  to  decide  what  women 
should  be  like  is  "  inalienable  and  eternal."  Men  will  con- 
tinue to  make  women  what  they  want  them  to  be  by  marrying 
those  who  correspond  to  their  ideals;  thus  real  womanly 
women  are  not  doomed. 

Max  O'Rell  denies  that  Paris  is  a  paradise  of  women,  but 
declares  that  if  he  could  be  bom  again  and  select  his  life,  he 
would  be  born  an  American  woman.  The  female  is  higher 
than  the  male  and  represents  more  nearly  than  he  the  type 
which  man  is  approaching.  Woman's  virtues  are  of  a  much 
higher  quality  than  those  of  the  male.  In  ancient  days  the 
virtues  most  admired  were  masculine — courage  and  patriot- 
ism ;  but  now,  with  Christianity,  the  female  virtues  of  mod- 


'  Menstruation  and   Some   of   its   Effects  upon  the  Normal   Mentalization  of 
Woman.     M.  M.  Smith,  M.  D.     Memphis  Med.  Month.,  August,  1896,  p.  393. 
'  Independent,  May  30,  1-901. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         5^3 

esty,  charity,  chastity,  etc.,  take  precedence.  Finck  agrees 
with  Ruskin  that  there  has  never  been  "  a  loveHness  so  vari- 
ably refined,  so  modestly  and  kindly  virtuous,  so  innocently 
fantastic,  and  so  daintily  pure  as  the  present  girl  beauty  of 
our  British  Isles,"  who  is  "  nothing  but  soul  and  tenderness." 
Heine's  poem  "  Du  bist  wie  eine  Blume,"  where  woman  is 
likened  to  a  flower,  Finck  says  has  been  set  to  music  nearly 
two  hundred  times,  or  more  often  than  any  poem  in  existence. 
This  writer  objects  strongly  to  Miss  I.  H.  Harper's  statement 
that  most  women  would  gladly  devote  the  years  necessary  to 
rearing  two  or  three  children,  but  object  to  giving  up  more 
time  to  this  function.  He  thinks  that  sex  in  mind  is  no  less 
marked  than  that  in  body  and  is  steadily  unfolding. 

Prof.  A.  W.  Small  thinks  that  to  train  women  to  com- 
pete with  men  is  like  poison  administered  as  a  medicine, 
the  evils  being  quite  as  bad  as  the  disease.  He  doubts  that 
on  the  whole  women  are  better  than  men,  because  you  can  not 
compare  things  so  different,  and  each  have  an  equal  right  to 
do  what  they  can  do.  The  question  of  voting  is  merely  one 
of  social  expediency.  "  The  distinctively  social  mission  of 
college  women  is  to  counterpoise  women."  The  latter  is  so 
absorbing  that  none  exclusively  devoted  to  it  can  lead  rounded 
lives.  Women  must  be  stewardesses  of  the  mysteries  of  ap- 
propriate human  life,  so  that  aspiration  for  its  adornments 
be  not  arrested.  Men  are  weak  in  spiritual  elements  which 
college  women  may  enforce.  She  is  too  ready  to  surrender 
her  leverage. 

HI.  Health  and  its  Tests. — In  view  of  this  consensus  of 
professional  opinion,  let  us  turn  to  the  question  of  the  health 
of  educated  American  women,  which  is  the  chief  criterion  of 
the  value  of  all  institutions  which  affect  it.  The  first  com- 
prehensive statistical  investigation  ^  on  college  women  was 
made  in  1882  and  included  705  graduates  of  12  colleges,  who 
answered  40  questions  of  a  circular.  Of  these,  44  per  cent 
said  they  did  not  worry  over  studies,  60  per  cent  reported 
having  had  some  disorder,  and  those  who  studied  hard  had 
bad  health.     Of  the  whole  number,  239  abstained  from  phys- 


'  Health  Statistics  of  Women  College  Students,  by  Annie  G.  Howes.     Boston, 
1885. 


584  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

ical,  2  from  mental  labor,  and  73  from  both,  during  their 
periods.  Of  the  705,  only  169  never  had  any  trouble  at  these 
times,  and  of  course  more  had  been  sickly  during  the  age  of 
first  menstruation  than  in  college. 

Professor  Dewey  found  that  of  290  college  girls,^  those 
who  reported  good  health  on  entering  college  were  78.1  per 
cent;  those  during  college,  74.9;  those  after  graduation,  77.9. 
Again,  19.6  per  cent  reported  deterioration  of  health  during 
college;  44.4  per  cent  reported  that  they  did  not  worry.  In 
the  period  of  pubescence,  53  per  cent  were  troubled  by  pains, 
irr^ularity,  etc. ;  during  college  life,  66  per  cent,  and  after 
it,  64  per  cent.  Of  those  who  entered  college  one  or  two 
years  after  the  commencement  of  menstruation,  20.5  reported 
bad  health ;  of  those  who  entered  from  three  to  five  years 
after,  17.7  per  cent;  of  those  who  entered  five  years  or  more 
after,  15.4  per  cent.  Of  those  who  entered  at  sixteen  or  less, 
28  per  cent  lost  in  health  and  17  per  cent  gained;  of  those  who 
entered  over  twenty,  18  per  cent  lost  and  28.5  per  cent  gained. 
After  graduation,  83  per  cent  reported  good  health  and  17 
per  cent  bad.  Among  female  colleges  55  per  cent  reported 
abstinence  from  study  or  exercises  during  menstruation,  and 
in  coeducational  colleges  25  per  cent.  In  coeducational  col- 
leges 33  per  cent  studied  seriously,  as  did  26  in  female  col- 
leges. On  the  w^hole,  Dewey  concluded  that  one-third  more 
break  down  from  emotional  strain  in  female  colleges  than  in 
coeducational  institutions. 

A  later  investigator  ^  found  a  far  more  hopeful  state  of 
things.  Of  over  200  college  girls  it  was  found  that  57  per 
cent  suffered  no  prostration ;  29.8  per  cent  were  free  from 
pain;  72.7  per  cent  were  regular;  and  that  only  2.75  per  cent 
dropped  out  from  ill  health  as  against  2.85  per  cent  of  college 
boys  from  Amherst.  Of  the  causes  for  the  interruption  of 
studies,  nervous  debility  leads,  and  headaches  and  imperfect 
eyesight  follow.  Of  the  complaints  of  1,000  students  who 
consulted  the  author  during  her  six  years  at  Smith,  30.8  per 
cent  were  for  catarrhal  disorders,   17  for  digestive,    11    for 


'  Health  and  Sex  in  Higher  Education,  by  John  Dewey.     Pop.  Sci.  Mo.,  1886. 
'The  Influence  of  College  Life  on  Health,  G.  A.  Preston,  M.  D.     Communica- 
tions of  Mass.  Med.  Soc,  Boston,  1895,  p.  167. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR  EDUCATION         S^S 

menstrual,  8  for  nervous,  etc.  Scanty  was  far  more  common 
than  excessive  flow,  and  this  excess  is  greatest  in  the  autumn, 
where  most  of  the  suppressions  fall.^ 

Mrs.  Sidgwick  in  England  and  Miss  Hayes  ^  in  this  country 
asked  32  and  42  questions  respectively,  the  former  addressed 
to  4  English  and  the  latter  to  12  American  coeducational 
institutions.  The  results  show  that  the  Americans  are  better 
throughout,  although  it  is  possible  that  the  15  per  cent  of  the 
English  students  and  the  45  per  cent  of  the  American  students, 
who  did  not  answer  the  questionnaire,  may  have  contained  a 
large  proportion  of  those  who  were  ill.  The  American  girls 
enter  three  and  a  half  years  younger  than  the  English.  The 
older  worry  more  about  personal  and  family  matters.  In  the 
United  States  more  improve  than  deteriorate  during  college, 
while  the  reverse  seems  true  in  England.  We  do  not  know 
whether  a  higher  average  of  health  is  implied  in  the  desire  to 
go  to  college.     In  the  following  Miss  Hayes  has  shown  the 


^  Miss  Preston  describes  typical  cases  of  girls  who  ought  not  to  go  to  college. 
One  gave  up  her  leisure  for  months  to  entrance  conditions,  and  overwork  brought 
overwhelming  desire  to  systematize.  Everything  has  its  exact  place,  and  if  a  caller 
moves  it  slightly,  the  discomfort  is  intense  until  she  can  replace  it.  If  she  writes 
a  letter,  she  prefers  a  friend  present  so  that  she  can  have  courage  to  seal  it  at 
once  rather  than  look  it  over  again  and  again  to  make  sure  that  everything  is  just 
right.  If  not,  she  would  be  dissatisfied,  tear  it  up,  write  another  just  as  inac- 
curate, and  so  on.  Every  night  she  arranges  a  precise  program  for  all  the  next 
day,  and  is  miserable  if  it  can  not  be  carried  out  to  the  letter.  She  is  obliged  to 
make  a  bedtime  review  of  even  the  trivialities  of  every  day,  striving  to  recall 
every  word  she  has  heard  or  spoken.  This  began  as  a  memory  drill,  but  is  now 
an  obsession.  She  also  has  to  make  lists  of  everything  she  has  done  or  intends  to 
do,  and  hoards  these  up  for  reference  knowing  it  is  very  silly,  but  she  just  can  not 
help  it.  All  these  habits  are  stronger  just  after  a  recitation  or  a  visit.  If  she 
wakes  at  night,  she  must  go  through  some  painful  routine ;  translations  must  be 
many  times  revised,  and  even  then  she  made  poor  recitations.  She  was  at  last 
prevailed  upon  to  give  up  study  and  quite  recovered. 

Another  student  of  nervous  debility,  in  love  with  an  intimate  girl  friend  as 
morbid  and  nervous  as  she,  had  cervical  and  spinal  pressures,  twitchings  in  the 
right  arm,  indigestion,  etc.  She  stopped  study  a  year  and  was  greatly  improved. 
Another  delicate  girl  student  living  at  home  was  subject  to  strange  fears,  had  always 
to  count  the  steps  upstairs  and  feared  terrible  things  if  the  last  one  was  an  odd 
number  and  had  to  go  back  and  end  with  an  even  one.  When  away  from  home, 
she  was  always  alarmed  at  the  ringing  of  a  door-bell  or  a  knock,  fearing  ill  tidings 
from  home. 

'  Health  of  Woman  Students  in  England,  by  Alice  Hayes.  Education,  Janu- 
ary, 1 89 1. 


586 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 


relative  healthfulness  of  these  women  on  entering,  during, 
and  after  college. 


Good,  excellent  health. 

Fair. 

Poor,  bad 

DEAD. 

On  entrance 

Am. 

78.16 
74.89 

77.87 

Eng. 

68.20 
63.08 
68.02 

Am. 

1.98 
7.80 
5-" 

Eng. 

22.08 
26.15 
22.08 

Am. 

19.86 

17.31 
17.02 

Eng. 

9.72 

10.77 

9.90 

During  college 

Present  health 

From  this  it  appears  that  maiden  students  are  slightly 
healthier  than  their  married  sisters.  It  should  not  be  for- 
gotten, however,  that  the  above  numbers  are  too  few  for 
general  conclusions;  that  the  mode  of  determining  general 
healthfulness  was  unsatisfactory ;  that  perhaps  often  the  home- 
staying  sisters  bore  additional  burdens  and,  it  may  be,  added 
to  the  support  of  their  collegiate  sisters,  although  on  the 
other  hand  the  physically  feebler  may  often  have  gone  to 
college. 

Dr.  Mary  P.  Jacobi  insists  "  there  is  nothing  in  the  nature 
of  menstruation  to  imply  the  necessity  or  even  the  desirability 
of  rest  for  a  woman  whose  menstruation  is  really  normal," 
and  advises  college  girls  never  to  pursue  a  course  of  study 
that  can  not  be  kept  up  during  this  period.  Graduates,  it  is 
urged,  ought  to  have  superior  health,  and  female  colleges 
should  not  admit  invalids.  She  coincides  with  Miss  Hayes 
that  there  is  nothing  at  all  in  university  education  especially 
injurious  to  the  constitution  of  women  or  involving  a  greater 
strain  than  they  can  ordinarily  bear  without  injury,  so  that 
they  often  pass  through  college  without  its  affecting  their  health 
either  way.  Colleges  probably  tend  to  check  rather  than  favor 
hysteria.  Mental  training  disciplines  the  feeling  and  increases 
the  will  power,  and  sometimes  transforms  a  weak,  sentimental 
girl  into  an  honest,  healthy  woman.  Many  claim  to  be  better 
during  their  college  course  than  at  entrance  upon  it.  This  is 
ascribed  partly  to  change  of  climate,  but  more  to  the  influences 
of  interesting  employment,  freedom  from  petty  home  cares, 
congenial  companionship,  and  learning  how  to  take  care  of 
their  health.       Surprisingly  different  are  the  results  of  Dr. 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS  AND   THEIR  EDUCATION 


587 


Engelmann's  ^ 


study  of  4,873  cases  of  school  and  college  girls. 
He  found  irregularity  in  about  50  per  cent  and  far  more  are 
retarded.     His  table  is  as  follows : 


Number. 

Class. 

Percentage  of  Sufferers. 

Group. 

During  school 
or  college. 

Before 
entering. 

College 

100 
800 

50 
169 
105 
100 

98 
306 

'  1000 
125 

S    223 

45 

I    103 

539 
100 

95-0 

833 

74.0 

80.0 

73 -o 

81.0 

77.0 

71.4 

67.1 

64.7 

66.0 

60.0— 

57-84 

57-0 

56.0 

54.10 

53-02 

42.0 

32.0 

90.0 

71.S 
69.0 

In  business 

College 

(  Freshman 

(  Higher  classes. . 

Nurses 

60.0 
69.1 

70.5 
76.0 
66.0 

State  Norm.  School . . 

State  Norm.  School.. 

Norm.  Sch.  of  Gym.. 

Norm.   Sch.,  City 

College 

5  Less  hrs.  gym.. 

(  More  hrs.  gym. 

Freshman 

(  Junior , . 

57.4 
58.2 

60  4- 

Normal  School,  City. . 

67.0 

/  Senior 

High  School 

j  Junior 

(  Senior 

The  highest  per  cent  in  the  above  table  is  for  one  higher 
institution  of  learning.  Probably  all  discomforts  were  con- 
sidered, but  "  the  figures  are  correct,  as  this  investigation  was 
made  with  the  utmost  care  by  one  of  the  medical  officers  of  the 
institution."  The  more  exacting  the  work  or  study,  the  higher 
the  per  cent.  This  agrees  with  Kennedy,  who  found  78  per 
cent  of  sufferers  in  a  Worcester  high  school,^  and  with  Dr. 
Boismont,  who  found  'j'j  per  cent  in  Paris  in  1842.  The 
trouble  seems  worst  in  the  middle  classes  where  parents  wish 
their  girls  to  advance  beyond  their  own  standards. 

Engelmann  urges  that  "  progress  of  surgery  and  reduction 
of  mortality  have  been  considered  too  much  and  woman  and 
her  morbidity  too  little."  Prevention,  which  is  now  the  watch- 
word, must  be  based  on  a  study  of  conditions  which  interfere 


'  The  American  Girl  of  To-day.     President's  Address,  Am.  Gyn.  Soc,  Wash- 
ington, 1900. 

'  Fed.  Sem.,  vol.  iii,  June,  1896,  p.  469. 


\  \ 


588  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

with  a  healthy  performance  of  the  female  function  during  the 
great  waves  of  sexual  life.  "  Many  a  young  life  is  battered 
and  forever  crippled  in  the  breakers  of  puberty;  if  it  cross 
these  unharmed  and  is  not  dashed  to  pieces  on  the  rock  of 
childbirth,  it  may  still  ground  on  the  ever-recurring  shallows 
of  menstruation,  and,  lastly,  upon  the  final  bar  of  the  meno- 
pause ere  protection  is  found  in  the  unruffled  waters  of  the 
harbor  beyond  the  reach  of  sexual  storms."  He  holds  mental 
stimulus  to  be  the  chief  cause  of  sexual  precocity  in  girls.  He 
finds  from  the  census  of  1890  there  were  32,751  young  women 
in  American  colleges  and  341,736  in  secondary  educational 
institutions,  and  it  is  these,  he  thinks,  who  preeminently  need 
attention,  although  there  are  about  1,000,000  more  between 
fifteen  and  twenty  who  are  working  for  wages.  The  effects 
of  mental  strain  in  schoolgirls  are  most  seen  in  increased  fre- 
quency of  menstruation.  In  college  the  freshman  year  is 
marked  by  most  irregularity,  and  change  of  surroundings  al- 
most always  delays  the  courses,  often  amounting  to  amenor- 
rhea for  two  or  three  months.  Schrader  found  this  in  57  per 
cent  of  his  114  cases.  Dr.  Wood  writes  that  it  is  surprising 
how  quickly  college  life  affects  this  function.  Debility,  on  the 
other  hand,  shortens  the  intervals  and  increases  the  pain  and 
amount  of  the  flow.  Examinations,  Engelmann  thinks,  are 
"  more  deleterious  to  functional  health  than  any  other  one 
cause  in  college  life." 

On  the  basis  of  a  long  study,  Celia  D.  Mosher,  M.  D.,* 
prints  some  interesting  preliminary  conclusions  concerning 
menstruation,  that  a  rhythmic  fall  of  blood  pressure  at  defi- 
nite intervals  occurs  in  both  men  and  women.  Along  with 
this,  subjective  observation  of  the  sense  of  well-being  shows 
concomitant  variations,  the  sense  of  maximum  efficiency  of 
the  individual,  corresponding  to  the  time  when  the  pressure 
is  high,  and  lessened  efficiency  to  the  periods  of  low  pressure, 
the  latter  in  both  sexes  being  a  period  of  increased  suscepti- 
bility. If  symptoms  of  any  kind  appear,  they  should  come 
at  the  point  of  least  resistance,  or  low  pressure.  This  is  true 
of  digestive  disturbances,  catarrh,  etc.     The  author  believes 


'  Normal  Menstruation  and  Some  of  the  Factors  Modifying  it.     Johns  Hopkins 
Hospital  Bulletin,  April,  May,  June,  1901,  p.  178. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND  THEIR  EDUCATION         5^9 

that  the  tradition  that  women  must  suffer  and  be  incapacitated 
at  these  times  tends  to  increase  the  sense  of  lessened  efficiency, 
especially  in  women  without  education  and  without  absorbing 
occupations.  Much,  usually  ascribed  to  dysmenorrhea,  is 
really  a  coincident  functional  disturbance  of  other  organs, 
induced  perhaps  by  the  favoring  condition  of  lowered  gen- 
eral blood  pressure  occurring  near  the  periods. 

A  college  girl  or  graduate  confronted  with  a  questionnaire 
knows  well  that  if  she  confesses  pain  or  ill  health,  it  may  con- 
tribute to  increase  the  prejudice  against  the  cause  of  educa- 
tion which  she  has  dearly  at  heart,  and  normally  is  as  reluc- 
tant to  confess  illness  as  a  boy  is  to  confess  muscular  weak- 
ness. The  latter,  however,  can  be  tested,  while  there  is  no 
good  criterion  of  health,  which  more  perhaps  than  anything 
else  in  the  world  is  especially  dependent  on  subjective  and  un- 
controllable factors.  Every  psychologist  knows  that  pain  is 
hard  to  gauge  and  harder  yet  to  remember,  and  that  general 
euphoria  and  disphoria  are  more  matters  of  disposition,  en- 
vironment, habit  of  control,  time  of  the  month,  etc.,  than  of 
true  symptomatic  value.  Again,  confession  of  real  illness  is 
the  last  thing  a  normal  girl  will  make.  It  means  the  abandon- 
ment of  hope  and  life  prospects,  and  is  usually  concealed  even 
to  herself  as  long  as  possible.  Hence  I  attach  very  slight  value 
to  questionnaire  returns  in  this  field,  and  therefore  think  it 
more  probable  that  the  doctor's  objective  and  personal  tests 
and  opinions  are  nearer  the  truth.  If  so,  we  must  reluctantly 
conclude  that  it  is,  to  say  the  very  least,  not  yet  proven  that 
the  higher  education  of  women  is  not  injurious  to  their  health. 

But  even  if  she  is  personally  as  well  or  even  better  than 
man,  the  question  is  not  settled,  for  she  is  far  more  liable  than 
he  to  overdraw  her  reproductive  power  and  consume  in  good 
looks,  activity  of  mind  and  body,  and  other  augmentations 
of  her  individuality,  energy  meant  for  the  altruism  of  home 
and  of  posterity.  The  danger  of  this  subtle  process,  so  attract- 
ively masked  and  insidiously  disguised  from  both  the  victim 
and  her  friends,  is  probably  far  greater  and  more  common 
than  any  form  of  measurable  deterioration.  Almost  the  only 
indexes  we  have  of  this  change  are  found  in  marriage-rates 
and  natality,  and  if  we  apply  these  tests  higher  education  for 
women  must  be  more  severely  judged. 


590  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

IV.  Nubility  of  Educated  Women. — Mrs.  Howes  found 
about  one-fourth  and  Dewey  concluded  that  23  per  cent  of  the 
graduates  of  women's  colleges  marry;  21  per  cent  go  into  the 
professions;  28  per  cent  of  coeducation  girls  marry,  and  12 
per  cent  go  into  the  professions.  From  coeducational  colleges 
48  per  cent  teach  as  against  42  from  the  women's  colleges. 

The  editor  of  the  Overland  Monthly  ^  found  from  the  reg- 
ister of  the  year  1890,  including  1,078  names  of  the  New  Eng- 
land coeducational  colleges,  that  24.7  were  married  as  against 
14.8  of  the  graduates  of  the  women's  colleges.  In  New  York, 
of  the  graduates  of  the  preceding  twelve  years,  these  percent- 
ages were  25.7  and  20.6  respectively,  and  of  all  coeducational 
colleges  34.8  were  married  as  against  22.9  of  the  women's 
colleges.  If  middle-aged  women  are  excluded  and  the  survey 
limited  to  the  graduates  of  the  eight  years  preceding  1889,^ 
the  New  England  female  colleges  showed  1 1  per  cent  married, 
coeducational  colleges  26  per  cent,  the  New  York  female  col- 
leges 1 5. 1  per  cent,  and  the  Western  coeducational  colleges  36 
per  cent.  Dewey  ^  makes  26  per  cent  of  the  graduates  of 
twelve  American  collegiate  institutions  at  an  average  age  of 
twenty-seven  and  six  years  out  of  college  married,  and  74 
per  cent  single.  Dr.  Smith  '^  gathered  statistics  from  343  col- 
lege-bred and  married  women  from  thirty  colleges  and  from 
their  sisters,  cousins,  and  friends  otherwise  trained,  in  order  to 
compare  equal  social  classes.  Before  23  she  found  the  number 
of  non-college  women  married  in  proportion  to  married  grad- 
uates as  30  to  8  per  cent ;  from  23  to  32  as  64  to  83  per  cent ; 
and  over  33  as  5  to  7  per  cent.  The  age  of  most  frequent 
marriage  for  non-college  women  is  23 ;  for  college  women  25 ; 
and  the  mean  age  of  marriage  for  the  former  is  24.3  years ; 
of  the  latter,  26.3  years.  The  average  number  of  years  of 
married  life  of  college-bred  girls  is  9.6,  three  years  less  than 
their  sisters;  two  less  than  their  cousins;  and  two  and  a  half 
less  than  their  friends.     More  than  half  the  college  women 

^  A  Comparison  of  Coeducation  and  Women's  Colleges.  Overland  Mo.,  1890, 
P-  443- 

^Overland  Mo.,  May,  1889,  p.  556. 

'Pop.  Sci.  Mo.,  1886,  p.  606. 

*  Statistics  of  College  and  Non-College  Women.  Am.  Statistical  Ass'n,  June, 
1900. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         59 1 

Studied  were  teachers  and  three-fourths  had  secured  economic 
independence  before  marriage.  Seventy-seven  per  cent  of  the 
graduates  married  college  men  as  against  51  per  cent  of  the 
non-graduates. 

Miss  Shinn  ^  later  studied  the  marriage-rate  of  the  Associ- 
ation of  Collegiate  Alumnae  comprising  fifteen  leading  colleges. 
Of  1,805  enrolled  in  1895,  only  28  per  cent  were  married,  the 
rate  for  the  country  at  large  for  women  over  20  being  nearly 
80  per  cent ;  she  concluded  that  "  under  25  college  women 
rarely  marry,"  and  "  that  but  a  small  proportion  of  them  have 
married."  Of  277  of  the  latest  three  classes  but  10  were 
married;  taking  only  those  graduates  past  25,  32.7  per  cent; 
after  30,  43.7;  after  35,  49.7;  after  40,  54  per  cent  were 
married.  "  The  ultimate  probability  of  a  college  woman's 
marriage,  therefore,  seems  to  be  below  55  per  cent  as  against 
90  per  cent  for  other  women."  Taking  five-year  periods, 
most  of  them  marry  between  25  and  30.  Of  all  the  1,805 
considered,  1,134,  nearly  63  per  cent,  are  from  colleges  for 
women  alone,  and  of  these  only  25.7  were  married  against 
32.6  of  those  from  coeducational  colleges,  although  the  latter 
average  0.7  of  a  year  older  than  those  from  the  women's 
colleges.  College  women  marry  least  of  all  in  the  North 
Atlantic  States,  23.7  per  cent  as  against  37  per  cent  of  the 
graduates  of  the  Middle  States  colleges.  Many  of  these 
graduates  become  teachers,  and  for  no  station  in  life  save 
that  of  a  nun,  we  are  told,  is  marriage  so  unlikely  as  for  resi- 
dent teachers  in  a  private  girls'  school,  although  this  is  a  posi- 
tion mostly  preferred  by  graduates  from  women's  colleges, 
while  women  graduates  from  coeducational  institutions  prefer 
teaching  in  the  public  high  schools.  Miss  Abbott  ^  found  that 
of  1,022  Vassar  graduates  37.6  per  cent  taught,  and  suggested 
that  the  association  of  alumnae  may  be  recruited  largely  from 
teachers.  Her  conclusions  agree  with  those  of  Miss  Shinn, 
that  college  women  marry  late  and  in  far  less  ratio  than  others. 

Bryn  Mawr  ^  reports  that  in  January,  1900,  of  the  class 

^  Marriage-Rate  of  College  Women.     Century,  October,  1895,  p.  946. 

''  College  Women  and  Matrimony  again,  by  Frances  M.  Abbott,  M.  D.  Cen- 
tury, 1896,  p.  796. 

'  Education  of  Women,  by  M.  Carey  Thomas.  Monographs  on  Education  in 
the  U.iited    States,  1899,  p.  36. 


592 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 


of  1889,  its  oldest  class,  40.7  per  cent  were  married;  of  the 
first  six  classes  ending  with  graduation  in  1894,  30  per  cent; 
of  the  first  nine  classes,  20.9  per  cent;  and  of  the  first  eleven 
classes  ending  in  1899,  15.2  per  cent.  This  shows  the  impor- 
tance of  time  and  also  how  exceptionally  old  these  graduates 
marry.     The  same  result  is  shown  by  the  following  table : 


Percentage  of 
graduates  married. 


Vassar 

Kansas 

Minnesota 

Cornell      ) 

Syracuse    > 

Wesleyan  ) 

Nebraska 

Boston 

Wellesley  ) 

Smith         f 

Radcliffe 

Bryn  Mawr , 

Barnard 

Leland  Stanford  Junior 
Chicago 


35-1 
3^-3 
24-5 

31.0 

24-3 
22.2 

18.4 
16.5 

15-2 

10.4 

9-7 
9.4 


This  suggests  that  the  rate  of  marriage  of  college  w^omen 
is  decreasing  and  that  the  age  at  which  marriage  occurs  is 
becoming  steadily  later.  Miss  Abbott  (Forum,  vol.  xx,  p. 
378)  showed  that  of  8,956  graduates  of  16  colleges,  23  per 
cent  were  married. 

It  may  be  wrong  to  infer  that  if  a  small  percentage  of  col- 
lege women  marry,  it  is  the  college  that  diverts  them  or  that 
they  are  less  desirable  to  men.  Some  who  go  to  college  desire 
marriage  less  or  single  careers  more,  so  that  one  writer  ^  is 
surprised  that  there  is  not  less  marriage  among  girl  graduates 
and  thinks  college  education  actually  promotes  it  by  making 
many  marriageable  who  would  not  be  so  otherwise.  College 
girls  certainly  have  a  prolonged  period  of  probation  with  di- 
verted interest.  During  their  course,  according  to  another 
writer,  very  many  receive  and  reject  propositions  of  i.iuiii  ;>  . 
in  order  to  complete  their  education,  but  of  course  no  ;  tali  :.tic> 
are  available  upon  this  point.     Yet  another  says  ^  that  college 

^The  Marriage  of  Women  College  Graduates.  Anon.  Nature,  Se;  >i-  ler  ?\, 
1890. 

'  College  Women  and  Matrimony  again,  by  Frances  M.  Abbott,  M.  D.  '.  rntury, 
i8q6. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         593 

women  as  a  class  need  less  to  look  to  marriage  as  a  means  of 
support,  and  most  who  must  at  once  earn  their  living  teach. 
A  woman,  who  was  earning  $60  a  month  and  resigned  to 
marry  a  man  earning  $40,  exhibited  rare  devotion.  Whether 
mercenary  motives  are  increased  by  the  luxury  and  expensive 
tastes  and  interests  of  college;  whether,  having  tasted  the 
fruits  of  the  tree  of  knowledge,  women  are  not  less  inclined 
to  renounce  it  for  domestic  life,  can  not  be  discussed  on  a  basis 
of  facts  or  statistics. 

By  corresponding  with  class  secretaries  and  correlating 
their  data  with  those  kept  at  the  college  offices,  I  have  gath- 
ered the  latest  and  perhaps  the  fullest  data  yet  published  on 
the  marriage  and  fecundity  of  female  graduates  for  three  lead- 
ing colleges.^  If  there  remain  errors  they  are  those  of  incom- 
plete returns  and  show  rather  too  few  marriages,  births,  and 
deaths  than  too  many,  but  great  effort  has  been  taken  to  re- 
duce this  error  to  a  minimum.  If  such  a  census  includes  all 
graduates  up  to  within  a  year  or  even  two  of  its  date,  the  total 
number  of  marriages  rarely  exceeds  one-fourth,  for  those  who 
wed  are  slow  to  do  so.  The  last  ten  classes  to  graduate,  if 
taken  by  themselves,  would  show  a  yet  far  smaller  proportion 
married.  From  Vassar  there  were  323  graduates  in  the  first 
ten  classes,  i867-'76,  of  whom,  in  the  spring  of  1903,  179, 
or  55.4  per  cent,  had  married.  In  the  next  ten  classes  there 
were  378  graduates,  of  whom  192  were  married,  50.7  per  cent. 
In  the  third  ten  classes,  1887-96,  were  603  graduates,  of 
whom  169,  or  28  per  cent,  were  married.  In  Smith  College, 
during  the  first  ten  years  ending  with  the  class  of  1888,  there 
were  370  graduates,  of  whom,  in  the  spring  of  1903,  158,  or 
42.7  per  cent,  were  married.  Of  the  next  ten  classes,  includ- 
ing that  of  1898,  there  were  1,130  graduates,  of  whom  331, 
or  28.3  per  cent,  were  married.  In  Wellesley,  during  the  first 
ten  years  ending  with  the  class  of  1888,  there  were  436  grad- 
uates, of  whom,  in  the  spring  of  1903,  203,  or  46.5  per  cent, 
were  married.  In  the  next  ten  classes,  ending  with  the  class 
of  1898,  there  were  1,162  graduates,  of  whom  296,  or  25.4  per 


'  See  for  details  the  study  of  Dr.  Theodate  Smith  and  myself  on  Marriage  and 
Fecundity  of  College  Men  and  Women.     Ped.  Sem.,  September,  1903,  vol.  x,  pp. 

275-314- 

77 


594  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

cent  were  married.  From  these  data  it  appears  that  not  very 
far  from  one-half  of  the  graduates  of  all  these  colleges  who 
marry,  or  about  a  fourth  of  all,  do  so  after  they  have  been 
out  of  college  from  ten  to  fifteen  years,  at  an  age  of  at  least 
thirty,  and  that  a  large  part  of  the  other  fourth  who  marry 
do  so  as  late  as  forty.  The  results  of  this  late  age  upon  fecun- 
dity is,  as  we  shall  see  later,  about  what  might  be  inferred. 

The  tu  qiioque  retort  which  many  women  love  to  make 
to  men  has  too  much  basis,  although  the  facts  show  results 
only  about  half  as  bad.  Mr.  Deming's  admirable  figures  for 
Yale  show  21.6  per  cent  of  the  Yale  classes  from  i86i-'79  as 
unmarried,  and  the  Harvard  record  from  i870-'79  is  26.5 
per  cent.  President  Eliot's  figures  for  the  Harvard  classes 
of  i872-'77,  although  we  find  them  somewhat  unfavorably 
erroneous,  show  28  per  cent,  mostly  now  between  forty  and 
fifty  years  of  age,  unmarried.  This  proportion  has  greatly 
increased,  for  at  Yale  only  about  two  per  cent  of  the  men  of 
corresponding  age  in  the  last  century  were  unmarried.  Then, 
also,  men  married  earlier,  and  it  was  customary  for  clergymen, 
who  constituted  a  far  larger  proportion  of  graduates  than 
now,  to  marry  immediately  after  ordination,  the  average  age 
of  graduation  being  twenty-one.  Indeed,  this  was  necessary, 
for  domestic  service  was  rare,  especially  in  rural  districts,  and 
a  wife  was  necessary  to  do  the  work  of  housekeeping.  "  The 
average  age  of  marriage  for  women  was  under  twenty-one, 
many  marrying  in  the  teens,  and  several  marriages  at  the  age 
of  fourteen  are  recorded."  ^  "  Remarriage  was  almost  uni- 
versal for  both  men  and  women,  economic  conditions  rendering 
it  a  necessity."  "  Forty  per  cent  of  the  wives  of  Yale  graduates 
from  i70i-'o5  did  not  live  to  bring  up  their  children,  and  it 
took  a  second,  and  frequently  in  large  families  a  third  woman, 
to  complete  the  work.  The  problem  of  superfluous  women  did 
not  exist  in  those  days.  They  were  all  needed  to  bring  up 
another  woman's  children."  Of  the  wives  of  Harvard  grad- 
uates between  the  years  i658-'90  37.3  per  cent  died  under  the 
age  of  forty-five. 

V.  Fecundity  of  Educated  Women. — Here  the  matter  is 
worse   yet   for   educated   women.      Natality   rates   show   the 

'Miss  Smith  :    Op.  cit.,  p.  280. 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         595 

springs  of  national  growth  or  decay,  and  only  the  constant 
influx  of  foreigners  prevents  us  from  realizing  the  ominous 
forebodings  with  which  France  is  facing  the  problem  of  a 
steady  decadence  of  birth-rates,  w^iich  prompted  and  circu- 
lated such  a  book  as  Zola's  Fruitfulness.  In  a  significant 
paper  by  Dr.  Allen,^  on  the  New  England  family,  which  was 
the  germ  of  American  civilization,  and  where  for  two  hundred 
years  the  homes  were  well-nigh  models,  it  is  shown  how  the 
birth-rate  has  steadily  declined  for  half  a  century  and  that  at  a 
very  rapid  rate  until  it  is  lower  than  that  of  any  Euro- 
pean nation,  France  itself  not  excepted.  In  1875,  there  were 
359,000  families  in  Massachusetts;  of  these,  23,739  consisted 
of  only  one  person,  115,456  of  only  two,  and  140,974  of  only 
three  persons.  Dr.  Allen  estimated  that  only  one-half  of  the 
New  England  mothers  could  properly  nurse  their  offspring, 
and  that  the  number  who  could  do  so  was  constantly  decreas- 
ing. While  failure  to  do  so  might  be  often  due  to  lack  of 
wish,  it  was  usually  due  to  undeveloped  mammary  glands, 
feeble  digestion,  and  neryousness.  This  state  of  things,  he 
assures  us,  can  be  found  to  anything  like  the  same  extent  no- 
where else  and  among  no  other  nation  or  race  in  history. 
Foreign  families,  especially  if  they  acquire  property,  approach 
this  condition  a  few  years  after  they  land  on  our  shores.  The 
Jews  and  our  grandmothers  thought  barrenness  a  curse,  but 
now  the  bearing  and  rearing  of  large  families  is  felt  to  belong 
to  low  life.  Love  of  offspring  is  less  intense ;  woman's  organi- 
zation is  changing  under  new  conditions.  Housekeeping,  es- 
pecially as  a  vocation  which  used  to  be  one  of  the  most  hygi- 
enic and  ennobling  occupations  for  body  and  mind,  is  despised 
and  evaded,  and  the  influence  of  home  is  diminishing.  Modes 
of  life  are  artificial  and  too  expensive,  so  that  marriages  are 
later  as  well  as  fewer,  the  death-rate  of  infants  among  old  New 
England  families  is  increasing,  and  so  are  abortions  and  di- 
vorces. Invalids  make  poor  home-builders,  poor  husbands, 
wives,  and  worse  fathers  and  mothers.  From  1886  to  1891, 
both  inclusive,  103,733  children  were  born  in  families  where 
both  parents  were  natives;  104,884  where  both  were  foreign; 


^  The  New  England  Family,  by  Nathan  Allen,  M.  D.     New  England  Magazine, 
1882. 


596  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

39,292  in  families  where  one  parent  was  native  and  the  other 
foreign.  During  the  same  years  156,225  native-born  inhab- 
itants of  Massachusetts  and  40,716  foreign  bom  died.  The 
deaths  of  native  Americans  exceeded  the  deaths  of  the  foreign 
born  by  29,796,  which,  adding  half  the  deaths  of  unknown  or 
mixed  parentage  among  the  foreign  of  the  State,  make  the 
births  exceed  the  deaths  by  87,824.  The  foreign-born  inhabi- 
tants of  the  State,  including  less  than  one- fourth,  give  birth  to 
more  than  one-half  of  the  children.^  First  among  the  causes 
of  the  decline.  Dr.  Ellis  ^  places  physical  and  mental  inability 
to  bear  and  care  for  children,  at  the  proper  period,  and  sec- 
ondly, he  places  unwillingness  to  sacrifice  ease,  freedom,  and 
enjoyment  involved  in  parenthood,  the  disposition  to  put 
pleasure  in  place  of  duty,  the  effeminacy  of  wealth,  the  new 
woman  movement,  and  foeticide,  and  he  pleads  for  domestic 
labor  as  one  of  the  best  correctives.  Comparing  the  forty 
years  ending  1890,  the  native  marriages  average  2.3  children 
each,  while  those  of  the  foreign  born  average  7.4  each. 

Sterility  ^  is  of  all  degrees,  from  total  up  to  inability  to 
produce  a  goodly  number  of  children  who  mature  well 
through  adolescence  and  can  themselves  produce  healthy  off- 
spring. It  is  vastly  more  complex  in  woman  than  in  man, 
and,  according  to  the  averages  of  statistics  from  many  sources, 
Duncan  concludes,  is  due  to  the  wife  about  six  times  as  often 
as  to  the  husband.  In  Great  Britain,  one  of  the  most  prolific  of 
all  lands,  about  one-tenth  of  all  marriages  are  now  unfruitful. 
The  relative  sterility  of  the  one-child  system  occurs  in  Eng- 
land once  in  about  thirteen  fruitful  marriages,  and  those  with- 
out offspring  sixteen  months  after  marriage  are  beginning  to 
be  sterile,  as  also  are  those  who  do  not  at  their  best  period 
bear  a  child  every  twenty  months.  The  average  age  of  cessa- 
tion in  Great  Britain  is  thirty-eight  years,  and  a  woman  who 
begins  to  bear  children  at  the  age  of  twenty  to  twenty-five 
should  continue  for  ten  or  fifteen  years.  Fertile  marriages 
in  England  average,  in  fact,  about  six  living  children  each. 

1  Vital  Statistics  of  Massachusetts  from  1856  to  1895,  by  S.  W.  Abbott. 
^  Deterioration  of  Puritan  Stock  and  its  Causes,  by  Dr.  Ellis.  New  York,  1894. 
Published  by  the  author. 

^  Sterility  in  Woman.     Gulstonian  Lectures,  by  J.  Matthew  Duncan.     London, 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR    EDUCATION         597 

The  first  child  is  a  source  of  danger  to  the  mother,  about  one- 
fifteenth  of  whom  die,  while  only  one  in  forty-eight  die  at  the 
second  birth. 

The  chief  cause  of  all  degrees  of  unfertility  is,  according 
to  Duncan,  overnutrition,  and  this  is  true  down  through  the 
animal  and  even  in  the  plant  world.  Overfeeding  or  fat  pro- 
duction in  the  female  is  not  only  unfavorable  to  fertility,  but 
illustrates  how  undue  emphasis  laid  upon  individuation  is 
antithetical  to  generation.  The  relative  childlessness  of  heir- 
esses is  a  case  in  point.  Excessive  sexual  indulgence  and  ex- 
citement are  potent  deterrents.  Excess  of  desire  and  pleasure 
are  often  compensated  by  defect  in  reproductive  energy,  and 
so  are  too  early  marriages.  "  Women  married  under  twenty 
years  of  age  have  much  more  sterility  than  women  married 
from  twenty  to  twenty-four,  and  the  sterility  of  marriage  be- 
fore twenty  is  less  than  that  after  twenty-four,  and  from  this 
point  it  gradually  increases  with  the  age  of  marriage."  Pre- 
mature and  postmature  women,  too,  have  smaller  children. 
Sterility  is  not  a  specific  disease,  but  is  the  intricate  product 
of  causes  as  complex  as  modern  civilization.  While  the  rapid 
progress  of  gynecology  has  shed  floods  of  light  upon  it,  its 
larger  problems  are  yet  very  far  from  solution. 

Duncan  had  previously  found  ^  that  the  mortality  of  chil- 
dren was  less  if  the  mother's  age  was  twenty-one  to  twen- 
ty-five than  at  any  other  quinquad ;  that  the  age  of  least 
puerperal  mortality  was  twenty-five,  and  increased  above  and 
below ;  that  the  number  of  twins  reached  its  maximum  be- 
tween twenty-five  and  twenty-nine ;  that  children  of  mothers 
in  these  years  were  heaviest  at  birth  and  grew  tallest;  that 
the  greatest  viable  fecundity  was  at  twenty-six,  the  fathers 
being  thirty-one  and  three-tenths;  that  although  the  shortest 
interval  between  births  was  when  the  mother  was  twenty-six, 
marriage  when  she  was  below  twenty-five  was  more  fertile 
than  after,  and  that  the  quinquad  of  greatest  fecundity  was 
twenty  to  twenty-five.  In  his  Republic,  Plato  said  men  should 
bear  children  from  thirty  to  fifty-five  and  women  from  twenty 
to  forty,  while  Aristotle  thought  the  man  should  marry  at 
thirty-seven  and  the  woman  at  eighteen.     Duncan  said  that 

'Fecundity,  Fertility,  Sterility,  etc.,  1877. 


598  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

while  thirty-three  women  attain  the  age  of  eighteen,  only 
twenty-eight  men  live  to  be  thirty-seven;  that  in  nine  meas- 
urements the  womb  grew  after  twenty  (although  Hecker 
thought  the  number  of  pregnancies  was  a  factor)  and  con- 
tinued to  grow  in  length  till  near  the  end  of  the  fertile  period ; 
that  the  mortality  of  first  confinements  was  twice  that  of  all 
subsequent  ones,  and  that  mothers  died  least  often  in  second 
confinement  between  twenty  and  twenty-five.  Many  who 
marry  before  twenty  have  no  children,  but  if  only  those  who 
do  so  are  included,  the  years  from  sixteen  to  twenty  are  most 
fertile. 

According  to  the  very  careful  statistics  compiled  by  Or- 
schansky,^  the  rate  of  productivity  or  rapidity  of  births  is 
greatest  in  women  married  at  eighteen,  and  decreases  gen- 
erally afterward.  The  stature  of  both  boys  and  girls  at  birth 
is  greatest  when  the  mother's  age  is  twenty-seven  to  twenty- 
eight,  and  also  with  the  fifth  or  sixth  child  born,  as  most  pelvic 
diameters  continue  to  grow  to  this  age.  The  productive  period 
ends  earlier  with  mothers  who  begin  to  bear  children  young. 

Korosi,^  who  tabulated  data  for  71,800  married  couples, 
found  that  the  maximal  natality  of  mothers  began  between 
the  ages  of  eighteen  and  nineteen,  when  the  annual  probability 
of  birth  was  44.6  and  42.2  respectively.  This  means  that 
nearly  one  wife  out  of  two  will  give  birth  to  a  child  within  a 
year  from  marriage.  From  twenty  this  probability  declines, 
and  at  twenty-five  is  only  31.5  per  cent;  at  thirty  it  is  24;  at 
thirty-five  it  is  16;  and  at  forty,  8  per  cent.  Comparable  sta- 
tistics for  Berlin  and  Sweden,  Edinburgh,  Glasgow,  Norway, 
and  Denmark,  resembled  closely  those  of  Budapest.  With 
fathers,  the  highest  natality  is  at  twenty-five,  when  it  is  38.9 
per  cent;  at  thirty  it  is  31.7;  at  thirty-five,  2^;  and  at  forty, 
15  per  cent.  We  may  bet,  says  Korosi,  70  to  i  against  a 
child  being  born  of  a  mother  aged  forty-five,  and  7  to  i  against 
a  father  having  a  child  during  his  fortieth  year.  Bigenous 
natality,  i.  e.,  where  the  age  of  both  parents  is  considered, 
gives  results  quite  different  from  these  monogenous  tables. 


^  Etude  sur  I'her^dite.     St.  Petersburg,  1894. 

*  An  Estimate  of  the  Degrees  of  Legitimate  Natality,  etc.     Phil.  Trans,  of  the 
Royal  Soc,  B.      Part  II,  1895,  pp.  781-875. 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS  AND  THEIR   EDUCATION 


599 


By  making  the  complex  combination  necessary,  it  was  found 
that  for  every  year  between  twenty  and  forty,  mothers  ac- 
quired the  highest  natahty  possible  to  their  age  with  fathers 
under  thirty;  while  the  latter  reach  their  maximal  natality 
with  women  under  twenty,  so  that  men  between  thirty-five 
and  forty-five  should  choose  wives  between  twenty  and  twen- 
ty-five, and  those  of  forty-five  to  fifty,  wives  of  twenty-five  to 
thirty.  His  data  also  shows  the  interesting  result  that  women 
under  twenty-eight  should  choose  older,  and  those  above  twen- 
ty-eight, younger  husbands  than  themselves,  while  men  at  all 
ages  have  the  greatest  chance  of  offspring  with  wives  younger 
than  themselves.  The  most  prolific  marriages  are  when  the 
woman  is  eighteen  to  twenty  and  the  husband  twenty-four 
to  twenty-six.  In  a  separate  research  Korosi  showed  that  if 
healthy  children,  or  those  who  lived  to  mature,  be  considered, 
the  age  of  greatest  fecundity  fell  about  a  year  later.^  If  the 
father's  age  goes  up,  that  of  the  mother  declines,  but  not  quite 
in  the  same  degree,  i.  e.,  if  the  father  is  thirty-one,  the  mother 
should  be  thirty-one,  total,  62 ;  if  he  is  forty,  she  should  be 
twenty-four,  total,  64.  These  lines  plotted,  Galton  calls  iso- 
gens.^  If  these  are  based  on  sufficient  data,  we  can  calculate 
the  plus  or  minus  age  distance  of  the  husband  from  his  wife  at 
each  year  which  is  likely  to  result  in  most  children.^ 


40 
•S        35 
»^    30 
§3    25 
|§    20 
Sg    15 
SfH     10 

^         5 

^ 

■--,, 

■■ 

X 

^^ 

■^^-^ 

~ 

Mother 

s 

'~- 

r--     " 

^ 

~-.__ 

^ — ^ 

-•^ 

~-~— ______ 

'^^^ 



— J 

Age 

^ 

20-24 

25-29 

30-34 

35-39 

40-44 

45-49 

50-54 

55-59 

60-64 

The  following  table  combines  two  of  Korosi's,  based  on 
10,000  marriages,  showing  the  average  fecundity  of  both  sexes 
for  different  ages,  being  reduced  at  thirty  to  nearly  half  its 
initial  rate  at  nineteen  for  women,  and  falling  off  one-half 
for  men  from  twenty-seven  to  forty.** 


'  Ueber  den  Einfluss  des  Elterlichen  Alters  auf  die  Lebenskraft  der  Kinder. 
Jahrbuch  f.  Nat.  Oekon.  u.  Statistik.     Third  ser. ,  vol.  iv,  p.  518. 
*Proc.  Royal  Soc. ,  vol.  Iv,  p.  18  et  seq. 
*  Maurel,*  in  an  interesting  study  of  the  conditions  which  modify  masculinity. 


*  Rev.  Scientifique,  April  4,  1903. 


6oo 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 


Compiling  from  the  census  reports  a  table  regarding  the  decreas- 
ing average  in  the  size  of  families  in  the  several  sections  of  the  country 
we  have  the  following: 

AVERAGE   SIZE   OF    FAMILY 


1880 

New    England 4.8 

New   York    4.9 

Pennsylvania    5.1 

South  Atlantic  States 5.2 

Ohio  5.0 

Indiana    5.1 

Illinois  5.2 

Michigan 4.9 

Wisconsin  5.2 

Minnesota  5.2 

Iowa 5.2 

Missouri    5.4 

North  Dakota 4.3 

South  Dakota 4.3 

Nebraska     5.1 

Kansas 5.0 


1900 
4.6 


According  to  this,  New  England  does  not  show  either  the  largest 
decrease  in  ten  years  nor  the  smallest  average  size  of  families.  The 
decrease  in  New  England  is  but  two-tenths  of  one  per  cent.  In  New 
York  it  is  five-tenths  of  one  per  cent;  in  Pennsylvania,  three-tenths; 
in  Ohio,  six-tenths;  in  Indiana,  seven-tenths;  in  Illinois,  five-tenths; 
in  Michigan,  five-tenths;  in  Wisconsin,  three-tenths;  in  Iowa,  six- 
tenths;  in  Missouri,  seven-tenths;  in  Kansas,  four-tenths.  The  aver- 
age size  of  families  in  New  England  is  larger  than  in  New  York,  Ohio, 
Indiana,  and  Michigan,  and  equal  to  that  in  Iowa  and  Kansas.  But 
this  reckoning  includes  all  races,  and  has  no  value  with  regard  to  rela- 
tive size  of  the  families  of  long  establishment  in  the  country  as  com- 
pared with  those  of  later  immigration. 


finds  it  to  be  augmented  by  the  youth  of  the  parents,  especially  the  father,  when 
conception  takes  place  nearest  the  period  of  marriage,  also  by  the  complete  matur- 
ity of  the  ovum  and  perhaps  also  of  the  male  element,  and  the  vigor  of  the  parents 
The  higher  classes  develop  less  masculinity  in  general  than  the  lower.  He  also 
finds  that  the  proportion  of  male  to  female  births,  which  in  Europe  and  India  is 
greater  in  about  the  same  degree,  does  not  hold  of  the  African  races.  Reduced 
masculinity  means  real  social  deficit,  and  is,  therefore,  one  of  the  best  criteria  of  the 
vigor  of  a  class  of  the  population.  Emigration,  which  in  general  favors  natality, 
diminishes  masculinity,  while  crossing  among  the  Neo-Latin  races  and  precocious 
marriages  increase  it,  and  syphilis,  alcoholism,  and  arthritism  diminish  it.  He 
holds  that  femininity  is  a  product  of  enfeebled  fecundation,  and  that  paternity  is  a 
more  important  fact  in  sex  determination  than  maternity. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND  THEIR   EDUCATION         6oi 

R.  R.  Kuczynski  ^  shows  that  in  the  period  from  1883 
to  1897  the  general  marriage-rate  of  the  foreign-born  in  this 
country  was  three-fourths  higher  than  that  of  the  native-born. 
From  1887  to  1889  the  native-born  in  Massachusetts  have  the 
smallest  general  marriage-rate.  In  the  three  censuses  of  1885, 
1890,  and  1895,  the  proportion  of  the  married  among  the 
natives  was  less  than  one-third,  while  the  proportion  among 
the  foreign-born  exceeded  one-half.  The  native  population 
of  Massachusetts  has  a  special  birth-rate  of  6.3  births  for  one 
hundred  adult  women  in  child-bearing  age,  whereas  in  Berlin 
the  annual  rate  of  ten  for  every  hundred  women  was  proven 
to  be  not  quite  sufficient  to  keep  up  its  population,  so  that 
this  State  is  dying  at  a  rapid  pace.  The  number  of  adult 
native  men  living  in  wedlock  in  1885  to  1895  was  three-fifths, 
of  foreign-born,  two-thirds.  The  proportion  of  native  adult 
women  living  in  wedlock  was  six-thirteenths ;  of  foreign-born, 
seven-thirteenths.  In  1895  ^^^  number  of  women  who  were 
married  but  childless  was  one-fifth  among  the  natives,  and 
two-fifteenths  among  the  foreign-born.  "  The  average  num- 
ber of  children  born  to  every  foreign-born  married  woman 
was  two-thirds  higher  than  for  the  natives,  viz.,  four-sevenths 
higher  among  German  women,  six-sevenths  among  Irish, 
twice  as  high  among  French  Canadian  women."  From  1883 
to  1897  the  special  birth-rate  of  foreign-born  adult  women  was 
more  than  twice  as  high  as  for  the  natives. 

Engelmann,-  from  1,700  cases,  found  that  a  little  over 
twenty  per  cent  of  married  women  in  America  are  childless, 
although  his  definition  of  sterility  was  the  condition  of  those 
married  three  years  without  offspring.  (Simpson's  standard 
rate  of  sterility  is  eleven  per  cent.)  Thus,  he  concludes  that 
"  the  extremes  of  sterility  are  reached  in  this  country." 
Among  the  laboring  classes  in  St.  Louis  he  found  2.1 
children  per  married  couple,  in  Boston  he  found  it  1.7;  in 
Michigan,  1.8  in  recent  years,  but  for  the  twenty-five  years 
ending  in   1895,  2.1,     Mrs.  Smith  finds  that  among  college 


*  The  Fecundity  of  the  Native  and  Foreign  Bom  Population  in  Massachusetts. 
The  Quart.  Jour,  of  Economics,  November,  1901,  and  February,  1902. 

*  The  Increasing  Sterility  of  American  Women.     Jour,  of  Am.   Med.  Ass'n, 
October,  1901. 


602  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

female  graduates  the  lowest  fecundity  prevails,  1.6.  The 
relatives  of  these  girls,  who  do  not  go  to  college,  are  more 
prolific,  1.89.  In  England,  among  female  college  graduates, 
there  are  1.53  children  to  a  marriage,  while  the  average  fertil- 
ity of  English  women  in  the  Victorian  Year-Book  is  put  down 
as  4.2.  In  Engelmann's  genealogical  records  from  1600  to 
1750,  he  found  each  marriage  producing  on  the  average  at 
least  six  children,  a  number  which  at  the  beginning  of  the 
nineteenth  century  was  reduced  to  4.5.  Benjamin  Franklin 
stated  that,  one  and  all  considered,  each  married  couple  in 
this  country  produced  eight  children.  Indeed,  Malthus  uses 
the  United  States  and  Canada  as  the  basis  of  his  theory  for 
super-fecundation,  and,  according  to  his  table,  the  United 
States  leads  with  a  fecundation  of  5.2.  French  Canadians 
to-day  probably  exceed  all  others,  with  an  average  fecundity 
of  about  9.2  children  per  child-bearing  mother.  In  a  recent 
Russian  district  there  were  7.2;  in  Norway,  5.8  children  per 
family. 

Herbert  Spencer  declared  that  "  absolute  or  relative 
infertility  is  generally  produced  in  women  by  mental  labor 
carried  to  excess."  This  has  probably  been  nowhere  better 
illustrated  than  by  college  graduates.  Miss  Howes  found  that 
of  705  graduates,  196  were  married,  but  66  of  these  had  no 
children,  while  the  remaining  130  had  232  living  children,  or 
1.7+  each,  and  had  borne  31  who  had  died.  On  the  important 
topic  of  the  age  of  marriage,  she  says  nothing.  In  Mrs.  Sidg- 
wick's  census  only  10.25  per  cent  of  the  English  graduates 
and  19.5  per  cent  of  their  sisters  were  married,  and  of  these 
72.4  and  63.2  j>er  cent  respectively  had  children  and  of  these 
9  and  3 1  per  cent  were  dead.  An  anonymous  writer  ^  com- 
putes that  of  the  27.8  per  cent  of  2,000  college  women  who 
married,  66  per  cent  had  no  children.  Dewey  found  that  of 
the  married,  whom  he  studied,  37  per  cent  had  no  children, 
although  the  average  number  of  years  of  married  life  was 
6.2;  109  bore  202  children,  of  whom  12  per  cent  died,  and 
of  those  who  died  about  one-quarter  died  from  causes  con- 
nected with  parturition.  If  all  married  female  graduates  in 
this  report  were  taken  together,  there  would  be  1.2  children  to 

»  Health  and  Fertility  of  Educated  Women.     Med.  Record,  1885,  p.  407. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         603 

every  five  years  of  married  life.  If  we  exclude  those  bearing 
no  children,  there  are  two  children  to  seven  years  of  married 
life.  The  non-graduate  English  sisters  of  the  four  colleges 
Mrs.  Sidgwick  included  in  her  survey  bore  64  more  children 
than  the  same  number  of  married  graduates.  President 
Thomas,  in  her  valuable  monograph,  ignores  this  topic,  and 
there  are  no  available  statistics  on  this  subject  for  Bryn  Mawr. 

While  from  the  knowledge  at  hand  it  is  plain  that  our  race 
would  be  speedily  extinct  if  it  depended  upon  the  rate  of 
replenishment  of  the  educated  classes,  this  is  met  by  the  wide- 
spread view  expressed  long  ago  by  an  intellectually  gifted 
woman,^  that  further  human  evolution  requires  a  decline  in 
fertility.  High  nervous  development  augments  the  complete- 
ness, intensity,  and  fulness  of  individual  life,  but  weakens  the 
power  of  its  transmission.  "  Evolution  is  thus  seen  to  pro- 
vide for  the  intellectual  elevation  of  woman  by  constantly  de- 
creasing demands  upon  her  for  the  performance  of  those 
functions  which  are  purely  physical,"  When  only  an  average 
of  two  children  is  required,  the  barrier  to  woman's  intellectual 
development  will  be  slight.  And  she  even  adds  that  her  sexual 
life  is  often  in  danger  of  unfolding  at  the  expense  of  intellect, 
etc.     Is  not  the  reverse  true  of  this  class  ? 

Two  cultured  German  ladies,^  who  undertook  a  compre- 
hensive psychological  and  sociological  study,  with  the  aid  of 
an  international  committee  and  questionnaire,  have  collected 
opinions  and  data  concerning  actresses,  female  musicians, 
artists,  poets,  women  devoted  to  science,  journalism,  agita- 
tion, and  essay  writing,  from  all  of  which  they  are  led  to 
conclude  that  mental  work  on  the  part  of  women  in  any  of  the 
above  fields  does  not  interfere  with  fruitfulness  or  with 
nursing.  Culture,  they  deem  absolute  necessity,  and  its  ideal 
harmonization  with  the  life  of  woman  a  problem  practically 
solved.  The  individual  testimonies  are  numerous,  varied,  and 
interesting,  but  are  by  no  means  all  in  the  line  of  these  con- 
clusions. The  professional  women,  chiefly  considered  here, 
certainly   on   their  own   testimony  have   generally   excellent 

>  Woman  and  vSkilled  Labor,  by  Frances  E.  White,  M.  D.  Penn.  Mo.,  July, 
1875- 

*  M  utter schaft  und  geistige  Arbeit,  von  Adele  Gerhard  und  Helene  Simon. 
Berlin,  1901,  p.  333. 


604  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

health;  some  even  insist  that  pregnancy  gives  added  power 
of  work.  To  be  sure,  some  testify,  the  children  of  such 
women  lack  imagination,  moral  quality,  affection,  and  other 
powers,  not  perhaps  so  easily  obvious  to  parents  as  to  others. 
Indeed,  a  report  might  be  made  out  from  these  data  that 
would  strongly  confirm  views  almost  exactly  the  reverse  of 
the  conclusions  of  these  authors. 

My  statistics,^  gathered,  like  those  on  marriage-rate,  from 
three  colleges  by  correspondence  with  the  class  secretaries,  are 
as  follows:  The  total  number  of  children  born  to  the  55.4 
per  cent  of  Vassar  graduates  of  the  first  ten  classes  ending 
with  that  of  1876  who  married  was  365,  or  3.09  per  mother, 
or  2.03  per  married  member,  58  married  members  having 
no  children.  Of  the  next  ten  classes,  ending  with  that  of 
1886,  294  children  had  been  born  up  to  the  spring  of  1903, 
2.57  per  mother,  or  1.53  per  married  member,  78  married 
members  having  no  children.  The  28  per  cent  married  of  the 
graduates  of  the  next  ten  years,  ending  in  1896,  bore  135  chil- 
dren, or  1.58  per  mother,  or  0.79  per  married  member,  84  mar- 
ried members  having  no  children.  Of  the  Smith  graduates 
of  the  first  ten  years,  ending  with  the  class  of  1888,  had  been 
born  in  the  spring  of  1903,  315  children,  2.08  per  mother,  or 
1.99  per  married  member,  7  having  no  children,  and  26  chil- 
dren having  died.  Of  six  of  the  next  ten  classes  ending  with 
that  of  1898,  reporting,  there  were  161  children,  or  1.22  per 
mother,  or  0.77  per  married  member,  78  married  members 
having  no  children,  and  9  children  having  died.  Of  the  eight 
out  of  the  first  ten  classes  of  Wellesley,  ending  with  that  of 
1888,  reporting,  there  were  311  children,  or  2.37  per  mother, 
or  1. 8 1  per  married  member,  40  married  members  having  no 
children,  and  of  these  children  25  were  dead.  Of  five  of  the 
ten  Wellesley  classes,  ending  with  that  of  1898,  reporting, 
there  were  176  children,  or  1.67  per  mother,  or  1.04  per  mar- 
ried member,  64  married  members  having  no  children,  and  1 1 
children  having  died.     These  figures  need  no  comment. 

Turning  to  male  colleges,  we  find  that  of  the  Harvard 
classes  graduating  from   i860  to  1878,  the  average  number 


'  See  Marriage  and  Fecundity  of  College  Men  and  Women.     Ped.  Sem.,  Sep- 
tember, 1903,  vol.  X,  pp.  275-314. 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS   AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         605 

of  children  per  married  man  ranges  between  the  extreme 
of  1.83  and  2.71.  The  classes  1870  to  1879  average  1.95 
per  married  man  and  1.43  per  graduate.  Amherst  shows  a 
steady  decline  from  four  and  five  children  in  the  earlier 
decades  till,  for  the  six  classes  ending  with  that  of  1878,  the 
extremes  are  2.4,  and  2.92  per  father.  At  Wesleyan  the 
six  classes  ending  with  that  of  1870  show  a  maximum  of  2.71 
and  a  minimum  of  1.37  per  married  man.  At  Yale  the  classes 
1872  to  1878  average  1.96  per  married  man,  and  1.27  per 
graduate.  At  Bowdoin  the  classes  1871  to  1877  average  only 
1.23  per  class  member.  The  size  of  families  of  male  grad- 
uates has  greatly  declined,  those  of  six  and  more  being  once 
frequent  and  now  very  rare,  while  families  of  one,  two,  and 
three  children  only  have  increased.  This  is  due  to  many 
causes,  economic  and  other.  Engelmann  concludes  that  the 
"  male  college  graduate  does  more  toward  reproducing  the 
population  than  does  the  native  American  of  other  classes."  ^ 
But  these  data  for  native  fecundity  are  based  only  on  certain 
classes  in  two  cities  and  are  therefore  too  meager,  while  this 
standard  of  comparison  should  be  the  country.  The  delay  of 
marriage  is  often  very  marked,  and  the  increasing  number  of 
men  who  do  marry  and  have  no  children  now  ranges  all  the 
way  from  10  to  30  per  cent.  The  record  of  children  who  die 
is  too  incomplete  for  inferences  or  comparisons.  It  would 
certainly  seem  that  college  men  who  do  marry  have  little  if 
any  advantage  in  fecundity  over  college  women,  and  that  the 
higher  education  is  sterilizing  in  its  results  for  both  in  nearly 
the  same  degree.  Even  families  where  either  parent  is  a 
graduate,  especially  if  infant  mortality  is  taken  into  account, 
fall  considerably  short  of  reproducing  themselves,  while  if 
we  consider  classes  as  wholes,  w^omen  are  nearly  twice  as 
far  from  doing  so  as  men,  because  but  half  as  many  of  them 
marry.  Any  college  that  depended  on  the  children  of  its 
graduates  would  be  doomed  to  extinction,  less  than  one- 
seventh  of  the  entering  classes  of  Harvard,  e.  g.,  being  de- 
scendants of  previous  graduates.  Colleges  have  grown  and 
educated  classes  increased  till  some  professions  are  over- 
crowded, but  old  families  are  being  plowed  under  and  lead- 

^  The  cause  of  race  decline  is  not  education.     Pop.  Sci.  Monthly,  June,  1903. 


6o6  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

ers  are  recruited  from  the  class  below,  so  that  the  question  of 
race  suicide  is  a  very  different  matter,  and  the  bearing  of  these 
facts  upon  the  question  of  shortening  the  college  course  less 
direct.  Perhaps  the  inference  from  all  these  facts  is  that 
the  stage  of  apprenticeship  to  life  should  be  prolonged,  if 
graduates  represent  the  advance  guard  of  progress,  bearing 
the  chief  burden  of  the  advance  and  often  falling  in  the  front 
line  of  battle,  because  success  is  ever  harder  and  progress  ever 
more  costly.  To  give  $10,000  tastes  and  aspirations  on 
$1,000  incomes  tends  to  delay  and  perhaps  repress  the  desire 
for  a  family,  and  the  best  years  for  genesis  are  lost.  Once 
marriage  and  children  were  felt  to  be  religious,  if  not  also 
patriotic,  duties,  and  now  many,  but  not  all,  bachelors  who 
shirk  it  without  adequate  excuse  should  perhaps  be  taxed  pro- 
gressively beyond  a  certain  age.  In  the  best  periods  of  the 
best  races,  too,  there  has  been  a  wholesome  sentiment  that 
both  wedlock  and  parenthood  were  needed  for  the  full  matur- 
ity of  the  individual,  and  that  if  this  stage  of  development  was 
not  attained,  the  moral,  mental,  and  physical  nature  was  liable 
to  warp. 

(a)  Galton  has  shown  us  by  convincing  figures  that  if  a 
woman  is  not  married  before  twenty-eight  and  the  man  a  few 
years  later,  even  the  most  fertile  races  are  doomed  to  extinc- 
tion far  sooner  than  those  with  low  natality,  because  there  are 
not  enough  children  born  after  this  age  to  keep  up  the  popu- 
lation. "  Postponement  of  marriage  on  the  part  of  a  woman 
conduces  to  infertility,  as  the  reproductive  system,  if  unused, 
becomes  inoperative."  About  one-fourth  of  the  children  born 
are  of  mothers  whose  age  does  not  exceed  twenty-four,  ac- 
cording to  Coghlan,^  and  before  women  pass  their  twenty- 
eighth  year  they  give  birth  to  one-half  their  offspring.  Women 
who  marry  after  thirty  can  not  expect  more  than  two  children, 
and  after  twenty-six  not  more  than  three.  The  age  of  women 
at  marriage  is  the  chief  factor  in  determining  the  number  of 
her  children,  the  younger  the  more  numerous  the  offspring, 
and  this  rule  appears  to  hold  even  where  the  woman  marries 
at  an  immature  age.  The  proportion  of  fertile  marriages  is 
becoming  very  gradually  less  in  most  civilized  lands. 

>  Childbirth  in  New  South  Wales.     A  Study  in  Statistics.     Sydney,  1899. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR  EDUCATION         607 

(b)  Again,  unless  we  insist  on  extreme  Weismannism, 
as  few  biologists  now  do,  we  must  admit  that  children  born 
of  generations  of  cultured  ancestry  have  some  advantage, 
even  though  their  parents  do  not  live  to  see  their  birth,  over 
those  born  of  the  lowest  classes,  postnatal  environment  and 
nurture  being  the  same  in  the  two  cases.  If  this  be  so,  each 
generation  ought  to  add  a  little,  infinitesimal  though  it  be,  to 
progress  in  that  most  ancient  form  of  wealth  and  worth  which 
birth  bestows,  so  that  rotation  of  classes,  while  it  may  have 
many  advantages,  is  thus  bought  at  a  very  dear  price. 

(c)  Another  principle  involved,  suggested  by  the  statistics 
of  natality  and  by  biological  considerations,  is  that,  while 
children  born  of  parents  slightly  immature  are  liable  to  remain 
undeveloped,  or,  at  least,  have  peculiar  difficulties  in  coming 
to  full  maturity  of  powers  of  mind  and  body,  those  born  of 
parents  in  slightly  post-mature  years  tend  more  or  less  to  pre- 
cocity. The  generalization  here  important  is  that  by  youthful 
parents  heredity  is  more  confined  to  older  and  lower  qualities, 
so  that  those  who  attain  sexual  maturity  early  do  not  advance 
the  phyletic  series.  Species  and  individuals,  on  the  other 
hand,  that  attain  propagative  power  late,  make  for  progress 
of  the  stock,  because  they  have  not  only  the  wealth  of  heredity 
in  its  completeness,  but  contribute  individual  additions,  in- 
finitesimal though  they  may  be.  Very  early  marriages,  there- 
fore, tend  to  the  decay  of  culture  and  civilization,  and  all  con- 
ditions that  make  for  its  "  neotenia  "  are  retrogressive,  and 
each  generation  must  reacquire  everything  anew  because 
young  parents  transmit  nothing  not  transmitted  to  them. 
Conversely,  if  we  follow  Mehnert,^  hyperheredity  due  to  long 
delay  of  propagation  may  be  a  factor  for  accounting  for  the 
overgrowth  of  the  horns  of  certain  stags,  some  of  the  mon- 
sters of  the  geologic  past,  and  other  hypertrophied  organs  of 
individual  species  and  functions,  even  those  of  genius. 

(d)  Closely  connected  with  this  is  a  law  brought  out  with 
ominous  suggestiveness  by  child  study,  viz.,  that  only  children, 
and,  to  some  extent,  offspring  limited  to  a  pair  of  children, 
tend  to  be  feeble  and  need  special  care. 

(e)  Another  general  consideration  also  pertinent  in  this 

•  Biomechanik.     E.  Mehnert,  Jena,  1898. 


6o8  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

discussion  is,  that  the  children  of  the  rich  tend  to  be  prema- 
turely or  over-individualized,  and  those  of  the  poor  to  be 
under-individualized  by  their  postnatal  environment,  even 
where  the  age  of  parenthood  remains  the  same. 

(/)  Not  only  are  families  produced  by  parents  who  marry 
late,  small;  but  another  consideration,  often  overlooked  in 
this  discussion,  is  that  they  are  still  more  outbred  by  those 
who  marry  young,  because,  while  the  latter  have  four  or  some- 
times even  five  generations  per  century,  the  former  have  per- 
haps three  or  even  less.  This  reduces  still  more  the  ratio  of 
increase. 

(g)  Yet  another  principle  which  I  think  may  be  sug- 
gested as  following  from  the  above  is  that  if  the  children  of 
post-mature  parents  mature  early,  such  children  themselves, 
if  they  marry,  should  do  so  earlier  than  those  who  mature  late; 
hence,  if  they  marry  at  the  same  age  at  which  their  parents 
did,  they  are  biologically  and  psychologically  older  when  they 
do  so  than  were  their  parents,  so  that  the  evils  of  post-mature 
fertility  increase  in  successive  generations  even  if  the  age  of 
marriage  remains  the  same. 

(h)  One  test  of  the  complete  domestication  of  an  animal 
species  is  not  only  that  it  tends  to  grow  larger  than  its  wild 
congeners,  but  to  breed  well.  This,  too,  is  a  test  of  the  possi- 
bility of  permanent  captivity.  Now,  if  we  consider  civiliza- 
tion as  the  domestication  of  man  by  himself,  we  may  apply 
this  criterion  as  an  effective  test  of  its  soundness.  This  prin- 
ciple, too,  would  seem  to  apply  to  any  trade  or  industry,  or  to 
any  social  class,  or  to  educated  classes.  If  so,  it  follows  either 
that  education  is  per  se  bad,  when  considered  from  a  large 
racial  point,  or  else  that  a  postulate  is  laid  upon  us  to  find, 
as  the  right  way  of  education,  one  which  shall  not  tend  to 
sterility.  Otherwise,  if  higher  education  became  universal, 
posterity  would  gradually  be  eliminated  and  the  race  pro- 
gressively exterminated  by  schools  and  teachers. 

With  these  ideas  in  view  a  peculiar  pathos  attaches  to 
those  who  early  in  life  have  not  wanted  offspring,  but  do  so 
when  it  begins  to  be  a  little  too  late.  Many  such  parents  con- 
sole themselves  by  lavishing  upon  one  or  two  care  enough  for 
half  a  dozen  children.  The  result  of  this  is,  that  instead  of 
broadening  by  retarding  their  development,  their  offspring  are 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         609 

robbed  of  many  elements  of  a  proper  childhood,  pass  too  rap- 
idly over  the  developmental  stages,  and  are  hastened  on  to 
maturity  by  the  excessive  stimulus  of  too  much  adult  environ- 
ment and  influence  and  too  little  wise  neglect.  They  are  in- 
fected too  early  with  the  insights  and  sometimes  even  the 
sentiments  of  early  senescence,  and  show  all  the  mingled 
charm  and  sadness  of  precocity.  Their  life  has  the  flavor  of 
fruit  that  ripens  before  its  time.  The  buds  are  picked  open 
and  the  tree  of  knowledge  blooms  and  bears  its  fruit  too  early. 
A  larger  view  is  that  we  must  develop  such  a  system  of  higher 
education  as  shall  conserve  youth  and  increase  not  only  viabil- 
ity but  natality. 

Excessive  intellectualism  insidiously  instils  the  same  aver- 
sion to  "  brute  maternity  "  as  does  luxury,  overindulgence,  or 
excessive  devotion  to  society.  Just  as  man  must  fight  the 
battles  of  competition,  and  be  ready  to  lay  down  his  life  for 
his  country,  so  woman  needs  a  heroism  of  her  own  to  face  the 
pain,  danger,  and  work  of  bearing  and  rearing  children,  and 
whatever  lowers  the  tone  of  her  body,  nerves,  or  morale  so 
that  she  seeks  to  escape  this  function,  merits  the  same  kind  of 
opprobrium  which  society  metes  out  to  the  exempts  who  can 
not  or  who  will  not  fight  to  save  their  country  in  time  of  need. 
In  an  ideal  and  progressive  state  those  exempted  from  this 
function  would  be  at  the  bottom  among  those  least  fitted  to 
survive,  but  where  the  birth-rate  goes  down  in  proportion  to 
intelligence  and  education,  either  the  principle  of  the  survival 
of  the  best  is  false  or  else  these  classes  are  not  the  best,  or 
are  impaired  by  their  training  or  environment.  While  we 
need  not  consider  the  cranky  and  extreme  left  wing  of  this 
movement,  which  strives  to  theoretically  ignore  and  prac- 
tically escape  the  monthly  function,  or  the  several  coteries  of 
half-cultured  scientific  W'omen,  personally  known  to  the  writer, 
who  devote  time,  money,  and  effort  to  investigating  artificial 
methods  of  gestation  (which  will  probably  be  arrived  at  when 
Ludwig's  humorous  dream  of  injecting  prepared  chyme  into 
the  veins  and  dispensing  with  eating  and  the  alimentary  tract 
to  release  lower  nutritive  energy  for  higher  uses  is  realized), 
we  find  wide-spread  among  the  most  cultured  classes  the  one 
or  two  child  system  which  would  atone  for  numbers  by  lav- 
ishing wealth  and  even  care  to  safeguard  and  bring  the  few 


6 10  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

to  the  highest  possible  development.  But  only  children  are 
usually  twice  spoiled — first  by  enfeebled  heredity  at  birth,  and 
second  by  excessive  care  and  indulgence,  as  Bohannon  ^  has 
shown.  The  enfeebled  nature  of  only  children  often  needs 
exceptional  incubating  all  through  childhood  and  youth,  but 
with  the  decline  of  reproductive  vigor  not  only  the  wise  neg- 
lect but  the  sound  motherly  good  sense  in  treatment  is  prone 
also  to  lapse  toward  the  senile  and  grandmotherly  overfoster- 
ing,  so  that  partial  sterility  always  involves  the  danger  of 
perverted  motherly  instincts.  From  a  biological  point  of  view, 
there  is  an  unutterable  depth  of  pathos  in  the  almost  morbid 
oversolicitude  of  the  invalid  and  highly  educated  mother  for 
an  only  child  to  whom  she  has  transmitted  her  enfeebled  exist- 
ence, and  among  the  decadent  families  of  New  England  this 
spectacle  is  not  infrequent. 

As  Augustine  said,  the  soul  is  made  for  God  and  is  not 
happy  till  it  finds  rest  in  him,  so  woman's  body  and  soul  are 
made  for  maternity  and  she  can  never  find  true  repose  for 
either  without  it.  The  more  we  know  of  the  contents  of  the 
young  woman's  mind  the  more  clearly  we  see  that  everything 
conscious  and  unconscious  in  it  points  to  this  as  the  true  goal 
of  the  way  of  life.  Even  if  she  does  not  realize  it,  her  whole 
nature  demands  first  of  all  children  to  love,  who  depend  on 
her  for  care,  and  perhaps  a  little  less,  a  man  whom  she  heartily 
respects  and  trusts  to  strengthen  and  perhaps  protect  her  in 
discharging  this  function.  This  alone  can  complete  her  being, 
and  without  it  her  sphere,  however  she  shape  it,  is  but  a  hemi- 
sphere; she  is  a  little  detraqiie,  and  her  destiny  is  more  or  less 
disarticulated  from  her  inmost  and  deepest  nature.  All  ripe, 
healthful,  and  womanly  women  desire  this,  and  if  they  attain 
true  self-knowledge  confess  it  to  themselves,  however  loath 
they  may  be  to  do  so  to  others,  and  some  who  attain  it  too 
late  wear  their  lives  out  in  regret.  Nothing  can  ever 
quite  take  its  place,  without  it  they  are  never  completely 
happy,  and  every  other  satisfaction  is  a  little  vicarious. 
To  see  this  is  simple  common  sense  and  to  admit  it  only  com- 
mon honesty.  In  an  ideal  society,  with  ideal  men  in  it, 
woman's  education  should  focus  on  motherhood  and  wifehood, 

'The  Only  Child  in  a  Family.     Fed.  Sem.,  April,  1898,  vol.  v,  pp.  475-496. 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS  AND   THEIR  EDUCATION         6ll 

and  seek  in  every  way  to  magnify  these  functions  and  to  invest 
them  with  honor. 

But  the  world  is  not  right,  and  this  career  is  not  always 
optimal.  Man  is  not  always  manly,  but  prone  to  be  selfish  and 
even  sensuous,  and  so  woman  must  strive  to  make  the  best  of 
the  second  best  and  follow  the  principle  of  cypres,  which 
English  law  admits  for  wills  when  it  is  impossible  to  carry 
them  out  exactly  according  to  the  testator's  intent.  This  by 
no  means  signifies  that  every  woman  who  takes  to  other 
absorbing  pursuits  has  been  disappointed.  Happily  for  her, 
perhaps  she  often  does  not  know  her  true  rights  but  miscon- 
strues them.  She  often  loses  a  little  light-heartedness,  but 
is  not  consciously,  or  it  may  be  even  unconsciously,  wearing 
off  heartache.  She  feels  a  little  lack  of  purpose.  She  had 
tasted  adoration  and  felt  her  womanhood  a  noble  thing,  and 
in  its  place  comes  a  little  distrust,  her  self-respect  is  not 
quite  so  invincible,  and  she  catches  herself  at  self-justifica- 
tion that  she  is  unwed.  Her  yesterdays  seem  a  little  dusty 
and  her  to-morrows  a  trifle  faded.  She  craves  something  dif- 
ferent and  afar,  and  drags  her  anchor  and  perhaps  slips  adrift. 
Her  joy  in  the  many  substitutes  provided  for  her  true  happi- 
ness is  nervously  intense,  yet  she  is  harder  to  please  and  feels 
a  trifle  at  odds  with  the  world.  As  the  years  pass  she  perhaps 
grows  fastidious  and  lavishes  care  upon  herself,  her  regimen 
and  toilet,  and  becomes,  what  I  believe  there  is  justification 
for  calling,  overcleanly  in  her  person  and  all  its  surroundings 
in  a  way  that  suggests  misophobia.  She  craves  the  costly;  if 
unoccupied,  grows  inactive,  luxurious,  capricious,  and  freaky 
even  in  appetite,  or  gives  herself  up  to  Vanity  Fair  and  de- 
velops a  peculiar  Americanized  type,  or  else,  in  store  or  ofiice, 
goes  a  trifle  off  in  dress  or  form.  Her  disposition  sags  from 
its  wonted  buoyancy  and  the  haze  of  ill  health  slowly  gathers 
in  her  horizon.  Her  opinion  of  men  is  less  favorable,  and 
she  perhaps  at  last  falls  a  conscious  prey  to  the  gospel  of  the 
feminists,  and  learns  that  for  ages  woman  was  a  drudge  and 
man  a  brute  whom  women  should  now  rise  and  subdue  or 
at  least  insist  for  herself  on  all  his  rights  and  positions. 

Fortunately  few  and  now  ever  fewer  reach  this  extreme. 
Among  the  greatest  achievements  of  our  race,  I  esteem  the 
work  of  woman,  largely  in  the  last  generation  or  two,  in  work- 


6l2  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

ing  out  manifold  new  careers  for  herself,  wherein  those  whom 
men  exclude  from  it  can  rebuild  so  fair  a  substitute  for  their 
original  Eden.  So  happy  can  the  unwed  now  be  in  self-support- 
ing vocations  of  charity,  teaching,  art,  literature,  religious  and 
social  vocations,  and  lighter  manual  callings  requiring  skill, 
fidelity,  taste,  in  many  of  which  lines  she  naturally  excels 
man,  that  she  finds  not  only  consolation  but  content  and  joy. 
Here  she  is  making  the  best  possible  original  solution  of  her 
great  problems,  imposed  on  her  by  existing  conditions,  while 
many  declared  she  could  never  do  so,  and  no  lover  of  his  kind 
can  fail  to  bid  her  so  hearty  a  godspeed  in  all  these  endeavors. 
Those  who  see  most  clearly  that  bad  conditions  have  forced 
her  to  compromise  with  her  ideals,  most  fervently  trust  that 
her  success  in  so  doing  may  never  make  them  forgotten. 

VI.  Education. — The  long  battle  of  woman  and  her  friends 
for  equal  educational  and  other  opportunities  is  essentially 
won  all  along  the  line.  Her  academic  achievements  have 
forced  conservative  minds  to  admit  that  her  intellect  is  not 
inferior  to  that  of  man.  The  old  cloistral  seclusion  and  exclu- 
sion is  forever  gone  and  new  ideals  are  arising.  It  has  been 
a  noble  movement  and  is  a  necessary  first  stage  of  woman's 
emancipation.  The  caricatured  maidens  "  as  beautiful  as  an 
angel  but  as  silly  as  a  goose,"  who  come  from  the  kitchen 
to  the  husband's  study  to  ask  how  much  is  two  times  two, 
and  are  told  it  is  four  for  a  man  and  three  for  a  woman,  and 
go  back  with  a  happy  "  Thank  you,  my  dear  " ;  those  who  love 
to  be  called  baby,  and  appeal  to  instincts  half  parental  in  their 
lovers  and  husbands ;  those  who  find  all  the  sphere  they  desire 
in  a  doll's  house,  like  Nora's,  and  are  content  to  be  men's  pets ; 
whose  ideal  is  the  clinging  vine,  and  who  take  no  interest  in 
the  field  where  their  husbands  struggle,  will  perhaps  soon  sur- 
vive only  as  a  diminishing  remainder.  Marriages  do  still 
occur  where  woman's  ignorance  and  helplessness  seem  to  be 
the  chief  charm  to  men,  and  may  be  happy,  but  such  cases  are 
no  farther  from  the  present  ideal  and  tendency  on  the  one 
hand  than  on  the  other  are  those  which  consist  in  intellectual 
partnerships,  where  there  is  no  segregation  of  interests  but 
which  are  devoted  throughout  to  joint  work  or  enjoyment. 

A    typical    contemporary    writer  ^     thinks    the    question 

'  David  Starr  Jordan:  The  Higher  Education  of  Women.    Pop.  Sci.  Mo.,  Dec,  1902. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR  EDUCATION         613 

Avhether  a  girl  shall  receive  a  college  education  is  very  like  the 
same  question  for  boys.  Even  if  the  four  K's,  Kirche,  Kinder, 
Kuchen,  and  Kleider,  are  her  vocation,  college  may  help  her. 
The  best  training  for  a  young  woman  is  not  the  old  college 
course  that  has  proven  unfit  for  young  men.  Most  college  men 
look  forward  to  a  professional  training  as  few  women  do.  The 
latter  have  often  greater  sympathy,  readiness  of  memory,  pa- 
tience with  technic,  skill  in  literature  and  language,  but  lack 
originality,  are  not  attracted  by  unsolved  problems,  are  less 
motor-minded;  but  their  training  is  just  as  serious  and  im- 
portant as  that  of  men.  The  best  results  are  where  the  sexes 
are  brought  closer  together,  because  their  separation  generally 
emphasizes  for  girls  the  technical  training  for  the  profession  of 
womanhood.  With  girls,  literature  and  language  take  preced- 
ence over  science;  expression  stands  higher  than  action;  the 
scholarship  may  be  superior,  but  is  not  effective ;  the  educated 
woman  "  is  likely  to  master  technic  rather  than  art ;  method, 
rather  than  substance.  She  may  know  a  good  deal,  but  she 
can  do  nothing."  In  most  separate  colleges  for  women,  old 
traditions  are  more  prevalent  than  in  colleges  for  men.  In  the 
annex  system,  she  does  not  get  the  best  of  the  institution.  By 
the  coeducation  method,  "  young  men  are  more  earnest,  better 
in  manners  and  morals,  and  in  all  ways  more  civilized  than 
under  monastic  conditions.  The  women  do  more  work  in  a 
more  natural  way,  with  better  perspective  and  with  saner  in- 
centives than  when  isolated  from  the  influence  of  the  society  of 
men.  There  is  less  silliness  and  folly  where  a  man  is  not  a 
novelty.  In  coeducational  institutions  of  high  standards, 
frivolous  conduct  or  scandals  of  any  form  are  rarely  known. 
The  responsibility  for  decorum  is  thrown  from  the  school  to 
the  woman,  and  the  woman  rises  to  the  responsibility."  The 
character  of  college  work  has  not  been  lowered  but  raised  by 
coeducation,  despite  the  fact  that  most  of  the  new,  small, 
weak  colleges  are  coeducational.  Social  strain,  Jordan  thinks, 
is  easily  regulated,  and  the  dormitory  system  is  on  the  whole 
best,  because  the  college  atmosphere  is  highly  prized.  The 
reasons  for  the  present  reaction  against  coeducation  are  as- 
cribed partly  to  the  dislike  of  the  idle  boy  to  have  girls  excel 
him  and  see  his  failures,  or  because  rowdyish  tendencies  are 
checked  by  the  presence  of  women.     Some  think  that  girls  do 


6 14  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

not  help  athletics;  that  men  count  for  most  because  they  are 
more  apt  to  be  heard  from  later;  but  the  most  serious  new 
argument  is  the  fear  that  woman's  standards  and  amateurish- 
ness will  take  the  place  of  specialization.  Women  take  up 
higher  education  because  they  like  it;  men  because  their 
careers  depend  upon  it.  Hence  their  studies  are  more  objec- 
tive and  face  the  world  as  it  is.  In  college  the  women  do  as 
well  as  men,  but  not  in  the  university.  The  half-educated 
woman  as  a  social  factor  has  produced  many  soft  lecture 
courses  and  cheap  books.  This  is  an  argument  for  the  higher 
education  of  the  sex.  Finally,  Jordan  insists  that  coeducation 
leads  to  marriage,  and  he  believes  that  its  best  basis  is  common 
interest  and  intellectual  friendship. 

From  the  available  data  it  seems,  however,  that  the  more 
scholastic  the  education  of  women,  the  fewer  children  and  the 
harder,  more  dangerous,  and  more  dreaded  is  parturition,  and 
the  less  the  ability  to  nurse  children.  Not  intelligence  but  edu- 
cation by  present  man-made  ways  is  inversely  as  fecundity. 
The  sooner  and  the  more  clearly  this  is  recognized  as  a  uni- 
versal rule,  not,  of  course,  without  many  notable  and  much 
vaunted  exceptions,  the  better  for  our  civilization.  For  one,  I 
plead  with  no  whit  less  earnestness  and  conviction  than  any 
of  the  feminists,  and  indeed  with  more  fervor  because  on 
nearly  all  their  grounds  and  also  on  others,  for  the  higher 
education  of  women,  and  would  welcome  them  to  every  oppor- 
tunity available  to  men  if  they  can  not  do  better;  but  I  would 
open  to  their  election  another  education,  which  every  compe- 
tent judge  would  pronounce  more  favorable  to  motherhood, 
under  the  influence  of  female  principals  who  do  not  publicly 
say  that  it  is  "  not  desirable "  that  women  students  should 
study  motherhood,  because  they  do  not  know  whether  they 
will  marry;  who  encourage  them  to  elect  "  no  special  subjects 
because  they  are  women,"  and  who  think  infant  psychology 
"  foolish." 

Various  interesting  experiments  in  coeducation  are  now 
being  made  in  England.^  Some  are  whole-hearted  and  en- 
courage the  girls  to  do  almost  everything  that  the  boys  do  in 

*  Coeducation.    A  series  of  essays  by  various  authors,  edited  by  Alice  Woods. 
With  an  introduction  by  M.  E.  Sadler.     London,  1903,  p.  148  et  seq. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND  THEIR  EDUCATION         6i5 

both  study  and  play.  There  are  girl  prefects,  cricket  teams 
are  formed  sometimes  of  both  sexes,  but  often  the  sexes 
matched  against  each  other,  one  play-yard,  a  dual  staff  of 
teachers,  and  friendships  between  the  boys  and  girls  are  not 
tabooed,  etc.  In  other  schools  the  sexes  meet  perhaps  in  reci- 
tation only,  have  separate  rooms  for  study,  entrances,  play- 
grounds, and  their  relations  are  otherwise  restricted.  The 
opinion  of  English  writers  generally  favors  coeducation  up  to 
about  the  beginning  of  the  teens,  and  from  there  on  views  are 
more  divided.  It  is  admitted  that,  if  there  is  a  very  great  pre- 
ponderance of  either  sex  over  the  other,  the  latter  is  likely  to 
lose  its  characteristic  qualities,  and  something  of  this  occurs 
where  the  average  age  of  one  sex  is  distinctly  greater  than  that 
of  the  other.  On  the  other  hand,  several  urge  that,  where  age 
and  numbers  are  equal,  each  sex  is  more  inclined  to  develop 
the  best  qualities  peculiar  to  itself  in  the  presence  of  the  other. 
Some  girls  are  no  doubt  far  fitter  for  boys'  studies  and 
men's  careers  than  others.  Coeducation,  too,  generally  means 
far  more  assimilation  of  girls'  to  boys'  ways  and  work  than 
conversely.  Many  people  believe  that  girls  either  gain  or  are 
more  affected  by  coeducation,  especially  in  the  upper  grades, 
than  boys.  It  is  interesting,  however,  to  observe  the  differ- 
ences that  still  persist.  Certain  games,  like  football  and  box- 
ing, girls  can  not  play ;  they  do  not  fight ;  they  are  not  flogged 
or  caned  as  English  boys  are  when  their  bad  marks  foot  up 
beyond  a  certain  aggregate;  girls  are  more  prone  to  cliques; 
their  punishments  must  be  in  appeals  to  school  sentiment,  to 
which  they  are  exceedingly  sensitive ;  it  is  hard  for  them  to 
bear  defeat  in  games  with  the  same  dignity  and  unruffled 
temper  as  boys;  it  is  harder  for  them  to  accept  the  school 
standards  of  honor  that  condemn  the  tell-tale  as  a  sneak,  al- 
though they  soon  learn  this.  They  may  be  a  little  in  danger 
of  being  roughened  by  boyish  ways  and  especially  by  the  crude 
and  unique  language,  almost  a  dialect  in  itself,  prevalent 
among  schoolboys.  Girls  are  far  more  prone  to  overdo ;  boys 
are  persistingly  lazy  and  idle.  Girls  are  content  to  sit  and 
have  the  suljject-matter  pumped  into  them  by  recitations,  etc., 
and  to  merely  accept,  while  boys  are  more  inspired  by  being 
told  to  do  things  and  make  tests  and  experiments.  In  this, 
girls  are  often  quite  at  sea.     One  writer  speaks  of  a  certain 


6i6  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

feminine  obliquity,  but  hastens  to  say  that  girls  in  these 
schools  soon  accept  its  code  of  honor.  It  is  urged,  too,  that 
in  singing  classes  the  voices  of  each  sex  are  better  in  quality 
for  the  presence  of  the  other.  In  many  topics  of  all  kinds 
boys  and  girls  are  interested  in  different  aspects  of  the  same 
theme,  and  therefore  the  work  is  broadened.  In  manual 
training  girls  excel  in  all  artistic  work;  boys,  in  carpentry. 
Girls  can  be  made  not  only  less  noxiously  sentimental  and 
impulsive,  but  their  conduct  tends  to  become  more  thoughtful ; 
they  can  be  made  to  feel  responsibility  for  bestowing  their 
praise  aright  and  thus  influencing  the  tone  of  the  school. 
Calamitous  as  it  would  be  for  the  education  of  boys  beyond 
a  certain  age  to  be  entrusted  entirely  or  chiefly  to  women,  it 
would  be  less  so  for  that  of  girls  to  be  given  entirely  to  men. 
Perhaps  the  great  women  teachers,  whose  life  and  work  have 
made  them  a  power  with  girls  comparable  to  that  of  Arnold 
and  Thring  with  boys,  are  dying  out.  Very  likely  economic 
motives  are  too  dominant  for  this  problem  to  be  settled  on  its 
merits  only.  Finally,  several  writers  mention  the  increased 
healthfulness  of  moral  tone.  The  vices  that  infest  boys' 
schools,  which  Arnold  thought  a  quantity  constantly  changing 
with  every  class,  are  diminished.  Healthful  thoughts  of  sex, 
less  subterranean  and  base  imaginings  on  the  one  hand,  and 
less  gushy  sentimentality  on  the  other,  are  favored.  For 
either  sex  to  be  a  copy  of  the  other  is  to  be  weakened,  and 
each  comes  normally  to  respect  more  and  to  prefer  their 
own  sex. 

Not  to  pursue  this  subject  further  here,  it  is  probable  that 
many  of  the  causes  for  the  facts  set  forth  are  very  different 
and  some  of  them  almost  diametrically  opposite  in  the  two 
sexes.  Hard  as  it  is  per  se,  it  is  after  all  a  comparatively  easy 
matter  to  educate  boys.  They  are  less  peculiarly  responsive 
in  mental  tone  to  the  physical  and  psychic  environment,  tend 
more  strongly  and  early  to  special  interests,  and  react  more 
vigorously  against  the  obnoxious  elements  of  their  surround- 
ings. This  is  truest  of  the  higher  education,  and  more  so  in 
proportion  as  the  tendencies  of  the  age  are  toward  special  and 
vocational  training.  Woman,  as  we  saw,  in  every  fiber  of  her 
soul  and  body  is  a  more  generic  creature  than  man,  nearer  to 
the  race,  and  demands  more  and  more  with  advancing  age  an 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         617 

education  that  is  essentially  liberal  and  humanistic.  This  is 
progressively  hard  when  the  sexes  differentiate  in  the  higher 
grades.  Moreover,  nature  decrees  that  with  advancing  civi- 
lization the  sexes  shall  not  approximate,  but  differentiate,  and 
we  shall  probably  be  obliged  to  carry  sex  distinctions,  at  least 
of  method,  into  many  if  not  most  of  the  topics  of  the  higher 
education.  Now  that  woman  has  by  general  consent  attained 
the  right  to  the  best  that  man  has,  she  must  seek  a  training 
that  fits  her  own  nature  as  well  or  better.  So  long  as  she 
strives  to  be  manlike  she  will  be  inferior  and  a  pinchbeck  imi- 
tation, but  she  must  develop  a  new  sphere  that  shall  be  like 
the  rich  field  of  the  cloth  of  gold  for  the  best  instincts  of  her 
nature. 

Divergence  is  most  marked  and  sudden  in  the  pubescent 
period — in  the  early  teens.  At  this  age,  by  almost  world- 
wide consent,  boys  and  girls  separate  for  a  time,  and  lead 
their  lives  during  this  most  critical  period  more  or  less  apart, 
at  least  for  a  few  years,  until  the  ferment  of  mind  and  body 
which  results  in  maturity  of  functions  then  born  and  culminat- 
ing in  nubility,  has  done  its  work.  The  family  and  the  home 
abundantly  recognize  this  tendency.  At  twelve  or  fourteen, 
brothers  and  sisters  develop  a  life  more  independent  of  each 
other  than  before.  Their  home  occupations  differ  as  do  their 
plays,  games,  tastes.  History,  anthropology,  and  sociology, 
as  well  as  home  life,  abundantly  illustrate  this.  This  is  normal 
and  biological.  What  our  schools  and  other  institutions  should 
do,  is  not  to  obliterate  these  differences  to  make  boys  more 
manly  and  girls  more  womanly.  We  should  respect  the  law 
of  sexual  differences,  and  not  forget  that  motherhood  is  a  very 
different  thing  from  fatherhood.  Neither  sex  should  copy  nor 
set  patterns  to  the  other,  but  all  parts  should  be  played  har- 
moniously and  clearly  in  the  great  sex  symphony. 

I  have  here  less  to  say  against  coeducation  in  college,  still 
less  in  university  grades  after  the  maturity  which  comes  at 
eighteen  or  twenty  has  been  achieved,  but  it  is  high  time  to 
ask  ourselves  whether  the  theory  and  practise  of  identical  co- 
education, especially  in  the  high  school,  which  has  lately  been 
carried  to  a  greater  extreme  in  this  country  than  the  rest  of 
the  world  recognizes,  has  not  brought  certain  grave  dangers, 
and  whether  it  does  not  interfere  with  the  natural  differentia- 


6l8  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

tions  seen  everywhere  else.  I  recognize,  of  course,  the  great 
argument  of  economy.  Indeed,  we  should  save  money  and 
effort  could  we  unite  churches  of  not  too  diverse  creeds.  We 
could  thus  give  better  preaching,  music,  improve  the  edifice, 
etc.  I  am  by  no  means  ready  to  advocate  the  radical  abolition 
of  coeducation,  but  we  can  already  sum  up  in  a  rough,  brief 
way  our  account  of  profit  and  loss  with  it.  On  the  one  hand, 
no  doubt  each  sex  develops  some  of  its  own  best  qualities  best 
in  the  presence  of  the  other,  but  the  question  still  remains,  how 
much,  when,  and  in  what  way,  identical  coeducation  secures 
this  end? 

Girls  and  boys  are  often  interested  in  different  aspects  of 
the  same  topic,  and  this  may  have  a  tendency  to  broaden  the 
view-point  of  both  and  bring  it  into  sympathy  with  that  of  the 
other,  but  the  question  still  remains  whether  one  be  not  too 
much  attracted  to  the  sphere  of  the  other,  especially  girls  to 
that  of  boys.  No  doubt  some  girls  become  a  little  less  gushy, 
their  conduct  more  thoughtful,  and  their  sense  of  responsibility 
greater,  for  one  of  woman's  great  functions,  which  is  that  of 
bestowing  praise  aright,  is  increased.  There  is  also  much 
evidence  that  certain  boys'  vices  are  mitigated ;  they  are  made 
more  urbane  and  their  thoughts  of  sex  made  more  healthful. 
In  some  respects  boys  are  stimulated  to  good  scholarship  by 
girls,  who  in  many  schools  and  topics  excel  them.  We  should 
ask,  however,  what  is  nature's  way  at  this  stage  of  life? 
Whether  boys,  in  order  to  be  well  virified  later,  ought  not  to 
be  so  boisterous  and  even  rough  as  to  be  at  times  unfit  com- 
panions for  girls;  or  whether,  on  the  other  hand,  girls  to  be 
best  matured  ought  not  to  have  their  sentimental  periods  of 
instability,  especially  when  we  venture  to  raise  the  question, 
whether  for  a  girl  in  the  early  teens,  when  her  health  for  her 
whole  life  depends  upon  normalizing  the  lunar  month,  there 
is  not  something  unhygienic,  unnatural,  not  to  say  a  little 
monstrous,  in  school  associations  with  boys  when  she  must 
suppress  and  conceal  her  feelings  and  instinctive  promptings 
at  those  times  which  suggest  withdrawing,  to  let  nature  do  its 
beautiful  work  of  inflorescence.  It  is  a  sacred  time  of  rever- 
ent exemption  from  the  hard  struggle  of  existence  in  the 
world  and  from  mental  effort  in  the  school.  Medical  special- 
ists, many  of  the  best  of  whom  now  insist  that  through  this 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND  THEIR   EDUCATION         619 

period  she  should  be,  as  it  were,  "  turned  out  to  grass,"  or 
should  lie  fallow,  so  far  as  intellectual  efforts  go,  one-fourth 
the  time,  no  doubt  often  go  too  far,  but  their  unanimous  voice 
should  not  entirely  be  disregarded. 

It  is  not  this,  however,  that  I  have  chiefly  in  mind  here, 
but  the  effects  of  too  familiar  relations  and,  especially,  of 
the  identical  work,  treatment,  and  environment  of  the  modern 
school. 

We  have  now  at  least  eight  good  and  independent  statis- 
tical studies  which  show  that  the  ideals  of  boys  from  ten  years 
on  are  almost  always  those  of  their  own  sex,  while  girls'  ideals 
are  increasingly  of  the  opposite  sex,  or  also  those  of  men. 
That  the  ideals  of  pubescent  girls  are  not  found  in  the  great 
and  noble  women  of  the  world  or  in  their  literature,  but  more 
and  more  in  men,  suggests  a  divorce  between  the  ideals 
adopted  and  the  line  of  life  best  suited  to  the  interests  of  the 
race.  We  are  not  furnished  in  our  public  schools  with  ade- 
quate womanly  ideals  in  history  or  literature.  The  new  love 
of  freedom  which  women  have  lately  felt  inclines  girls  to 
abandon  the  home  for  the  office.  "  It  surely  can  hardly  be 
called  an  ideal  education  for  women  that  permits  eighteen 
out  of  one  hundred  college  girls  to  state  boldly  that  they  would 
rather  be  men  than  women."  More  than  one-half  of  the 
schoolgirls  in  these  censuses  choose  male  ideals,  as  if  those 
of  femininity  are  disintegrating.  A  recent  writer,^  in  view 
of  this  fact,  states  that  "  unless  there  is  a  change  of  trend,  we 
shall  soon  have  a  female  sex  without  a  female  character."  In 
the  progressive  numerical  feminization  of  our  schools  most 
teachers,  perhaps  naturally  and  necessarily,  have  more  or  less 
masculine  ideals,  and  this  does  not  encourage  the  development 
of  those  that  constitute  the  glory  of  womanhood.  "  At  every 
age  from  eight  to  sixteen  girls  named  from  three  to  twenty 
more  ideals  than  boys."  "  These  facts  indicate  a  condition  of 
diffused  interests  and  lack  of  clear-cut  purposes  and  a  need 
of  integration." 

When  we  turn  to  boys  the  case  is  different.  In  most  pub- 
lic high  schools  girls  preponderate,  especially  in  the  upper 

^  The  Evolution  of  Ideals.  W.  G.  Chambers,  Ped.  Sem.,  March,  1903,  vol.  x, 
p.  loi  ej  seq.  Also,  B,  Warner:  The  Young  Woman,  &c.,  New  York,  1903, 
pp.  218. 


620  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

classes,  and  in  many  of  them  the  boys  that  remain  are  prac- 
tically in  a  girls'  school,  sometimes  taught  chiefly,  if  not  solely, 
by  women  teachers  at  an  age  when  strong  men  should  be  in 
control  more  than  at  any  other  period  of  life.  Boys  need  a 
different  discipline  and  moral  regimen  and  atmosphere.  They 
also  need  a  different  method  of  work.  Girls  excel  them  in 
learning  and  memorization,  accepting  studies  upon  suggestion 
or  authority,  but  are  often  quite  at  sea  when  set  to  make  tests 
and  experiments  that  give  individuality  and  a  chance  for  self- 
expression,  which  is  one  of  the  best  things  in  boyhood.  Girls 
preponderate  in  our  overgrown  high  school  Latin  and  algebra, 
because  custom  and  tradition  and,  perhaps,  advice  incline  them 
to  it.  They  preponderate  in  English  and  history  classes  more 
often,  let  us  hope,  from  inner  inclination.  The  boy  sooner 
grows  restless  in  a  curriculum  where  form  takes  precedence 
over  content.  He  revolts  at  much  method  with  meager  mat- 
ter. He  craves  utility,  and  when  all  these  instincts  are  denied, 
without  knowing  what  is  the  matter,  he  drops  out  of  school, 
when  with  robust  tone  and  with  a  truly  boy  life,  such  as  pre- 
vails at  Harrow,  Eton,  and  Rugby,  he  would  have  fought  it 
through  and  have  done  w'ell.  This  feminization  of  the  school 
spirit,  discipline,  and  personnel  is  bad  for  boys.  Of  course,  on 
the  whole,  perhaps,  they  are  made  more  gentlemanly,  at  ease, 
their  manners  improved,  and  all  this  to  a  woman  teacher  seems 
excellent,  but  something  is  the  matter  with  the  boy  in  early 
teens  who  can  be  truly  called  **  a  perfect  gentleman."  That 
should  come  later,  when  the  brute  and  animal  element  have 
had  opportunity  to  work  themselves  off  in  a  healthful  normal 
way.  They  still  have  football  to  themselves,  and  are  the 
majority  perhaps  in  chemistry,  and  sometimes  in  physics,  but 
there  is  danger  of  a  settled  eviration.  The  segregation,  which 
even  some  of  our  schools  are  now  attempting,  is  always  in 
some  degree  necessary  for  full  and  complete  development. 
Just  as  the  boys'  language  is  apt  to  creep  into  that  of  the  girl, 
so  girls'  interests,  ways,  standards  and  tastes,  which  are  crude 
at  this  age,  sometimes  attract  boys  out  of  their  orbit.  While 
some  differences  are  emphasized  by  contact,  others  are  compro- 
mised. Boys  tend  to  grow  content  with  mechanical,  memor- 
ized work,  and  excelling  on  the  lines  of  girls'  qualities,  fail  to 
develop  those  of  their  own.    There  is  a  little  charm  and  bloom 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR  EDUCATION         621 

rubbed  off  the  ideal  of  girlhood  by  close  contact,  and  boyhood 
seems  less  ideal  to  girls  at  close  range.  In  place  of  the  mystic 
attraction  of  the  other  sex  that  has  inspired  so  much  that  is 
best  in  the  world,  familiar  camaraderie  brings  a  little  disen- 
chantment. The  impulse  to  be  at  one's  best  in  the  presence 
of  the  other  sex  grows  lax  and  sex  tension  remits,  and  each 
comes  to  feel  itself  seen  through,  so  that  there  is  less  motive 
to  indulge  in  the  ideal  conduct  which  such  motives  inspire, 
because  the  call  for  it  is  incessant.  This  disillusioning  weak- 
ens the  motivation  to  marriage  sometimes  on  both  sides,  when 
girls  grow  careless  in  their  dress  and  too  negligent  in  their 
manners,  one  of  the  best  schools  of  woman's  morals,  and  when 
boys  lose  all  restraints  which  the  presence  of  girls  usually  en- 
forces, there  is  a  subtle  deterioration.  Thus,  I  believe,  al- 
though of  course  it  is  impossible  to  prove,  that  this  is  one  of 
the  factors  of  a  decreasing  percentage  of  marriage  among  edu- 
cated young  men  and  women. 

At  eighteen  or  twenty  the  girl  normally  reaches  a  stage  of 
first  maturity  when  her  ideas  of  life  are  amazingly  keen  and 
true;  when,  if  her  body  is  developed,  she  can  endure  a  great 
deal ;  when  she  is  nearest,  perhaps,  the  ideal  of  feminine  beauty 
and  perfection.  Of  this  we  saw  illustrations  in  Chapter  VIII. 
In  our  environment,  however,  there  is  a  little  danger  that  this 
age  once  well  past  there  will  slowly  arise  a  slight  sense  of 
aimlessness  or  lassitude,  unrest,  uneasiness,  as  if  one  were 
almost  unconsciouly  feeling  along  the  wall  for  a  door  to  which 
the  key  was  not  at  hand.  Thus  some  lose  their  bloom  and, 
yielding  to  the  great  danger  of  young  womanhood,  slowly 
lapse  to  an  anxious  state  of  expectancy,  or  they  desire  some- 
thing not  within  their  reach,  and  so  the  diathesis  of  restless- 
ness slowly  supervenes.  The  best  thing  about  college  life  for 
girls  is,  perhaps,  that  it  postpones  this  incipient  disappoint- 
ment, but  it  is  a  little  pathetic  to  me  to  read,  as  I  have  lately 
done,  the  class  letters  of  hundreds  of  girl  graduates,  out  of 
college  one,  two,  or  three  years,  turning  a  little  to  art,  music, 
travel,  teaching,  charity  work,  one  after  the  other,  or  trying 
to  find  something  to  which  they  can  devote  themselves,  some 
cause,  movement,  occupation,  where  their  capacity  for  altru- 
ism and  self-sacrifice  can  find  a  field.  The  tension  is  almost 
imperceptible,  perhaps  quite  unconscious.     It  is  everywhere 


622  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

overborne  by  a  keen  interest  in  life,  by  a  desire  to  know  the 
world  at  first  hand,  while  susceptibilities  are  at  their  height. 
The  apple  of  intelligence  has  been  plucked  at  perhaps  a  little 
too  great  cost  of  health.  The  purely  mental  has  not  been  quite 
sufficiently  kept  back.  The  girl  wishes  to  know  a  good  deal 
more  of  the  world  and  perfect  her  own  personality,  and  would 
not  marry,  although  every  cell  of  her  body  and  every  uncon- 
scious impulse  points  to  just  that  end.  Soon,  it  may  be  in 
five  or  ten  years  or  more,  the  complexion  of  ill  health  is  seen 
in  these  notes,  or  else  life  has  been  adjusted  to  independence 
and  self-support.  Many  of  these  bachelor  women  are  mag- 
nificent in  mind  and  body,  but  they  lack  wifehood  and  yet  more 
— motherhood. 

In  fine,  we  should  use  these  facts  as  a  stimulus  to  ask  more 
searchingly  the  question  whether  the  present  system  of  higher 
education  for  both  sexes  is  not  lacking  in  some  very  essential 
elements,  and  if  so  what  these  are.  Indeed,  considering  the 
facts  that  in  our  social  system  man  makes  the  advances  and 
that  woman  is  by  nature  more  prone  than  man  to  domesticity 
and  parenthood,  it  is  not  impossible  that  men's  colleges  do 
more  to  unfit  for  these  than  do  those  for  women.  One  cause 
may  be  moral.  Ethics  used  to  be  taught  as  a  practical  power 
for  life  and  reen forced  by  religious  motives.  Now  it  is  theo- 
retical and  speculative  and  too  often  led  captive  by  metaphys- 
ical and  epistemological  speculations.  Sometimes  girls  work 
or  worry  more  over  studies  and  ideals  than  is  good  for  their 
constitution,  and  boys  grow  idle  and  indifferent,  and  this  pro- 
verbially tends  to  bad  habits.  Perhaps  fitting  for  college  has 
been  too  hard  at  the  critical  age  of  about  eighteen,  and  require- 
ments of  honest,  persevering  work  during  college  years  too 
little  enforced,  or  grown  irksome  by  physiological  reaction  of 
lassitude  from  the  strain  of  fitting  and  entering.  Again,  girls 
mature  earlier  than  boys,  and  the  latter  who  have  been  edu- 
cated with  them  tend  to  certain  elements  of  maturity  and  com- 
pleteness too  early  in  life,  and  their  growth  period  is  shortened 
or  its  momentum  lessened  by  an  atmosphere  of  femininity. 
Something  is  clearly  wrong,  and  more  so  here  than  we  have 
at  present  any  reason  to  think  is  the  case  among  the  academic 
male  or  female  youth  of  other  lands.  To  see  and  admit  that 
there  is  an  evil  very  real,  deep,  exceedingly  difficult  and  com- 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR  EDUCATION         623 

plex  in  its  causes,  but  grave  and  demanding  a  careful  recon- 
sideration of  current  educational  ideas  and  practises,  is  the 
first  step,  and  this  every  thoughtful  and  well-informed  mind,  I 
believe,  must  now  take. 

It  is  utterly  impossible  without  injury  to  hold  girls  to  the 
same  standards  of  conduct,  regularity,  severe  moral  accounta- 
bility, and  strenuous  mental  work  that  boys  need.  The  priv- 
ileges and  immunities  of  her  sex  are  inveterate,  and  with  these 
the  American  girl  in  the  middle  teens  fairly  tingles  with  a 
new-born  consciousness.  Already  she  occasionally  asserts  her- 
self in  the  public  high  school  against  a  male  teacher  or  prin- 
cipal who  seeks  to  enforce  discipline  by  methods  boys  respect 
in  a  way  that  suggests  that  the  time  is  at  hand  when  popu- 
larity with  her  sex  will  be  as  necessary  in  a  successful  teacher 
as  it  is  in  the  pulpit.  In  these  interesting  cases  where  girl 
sentiment  has  made  itself  felt  in  school  it  has  generally  carried 
parents,  committeemen,  the  press,  and  public  sentiment  before 
it,  and  has  already  made  a  precious  little  list  of  martyrs  whom, 
were  I  an  educational  pope,  I  would  promptly  canonize.  The 
progressive  feminization  of  secondary  education  works  its 
subtle  demoralization  on  the  male  teachers  who  remain. 
Public  sentiment  would  sustain  them  in  many  in  loco  parentis 
exactions  with  boys  which  it  disallows  in  mixed  classes.  It  is 
hard,  too,  for  male  principals  of  schools  with  only  female 
teachers  not  to  suffer  some  deterioration  in  the  moral  tone 
of  their  virility  and  to  lose  in  the  power  to  cope  successfully 
with  men.  Not  only  is  this  often  confessed  and  deplored,  but 
the  incessant  compromises  the  best  male  teachers  of  mixed 
classes  must  make  with  their  pedagogic  convictions  in  both 
teaching  and  discipline  make  the  profession  less  attractive  to 
manly  men  of  large  caliber  and  of  sound  fiber.  Again,  the 
recent  rapid  increase  of  girls,  the  percentage  of  which  to  popu- 
lation in  high  schools  has  in  many  communities  doubled  in 
but  little  more  than  a  decade,  almost  necessarily  involves  a 
decline  in  the  average  quality  of  girls,  perhaps  as  much  greater 
for  them  as  for  boys  as  their  increase  has  been  greater.  When 
but  few  were  found  in  these  institutions  they  were  usually 
picked  girls  with  superior  tastes  and  ability,  but  now  the  aver- 
age girl  of  the  rank  and  file  is,  despite  advanced  standards  of 
admission,  of  an  order  natively  lower.     From  this  deteriora- 


624  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

tion  both  boys  and  teachers  suffer,  even  though  the  greatest 
good  for  the  greatest  number  may  be  enhanced.  Once  more  it 
is  generally  admitted  that  girls  in  good  boarding-schools,  where 
evenings,  food,  and  regimen  are  controlled,  are  in  better  health 
than  day  pupils  with  social,  church,  and  domestic  duties  and 
perhaps  worries  to  which  boys  are  less  subject.  This  is  the 
nascent  stage  of  periodicity  to  the  slow  normalization  of 
which,  during  these  few  critical  years,  everything  that  inter- 
feres should  yield.  Some  kind  of  tacit  recognition  of  this  is 
indispensable,  but  in  mixed  classes  every  form  of  such  con- 
cession is  baffling  and  demoralizing  to  boys. 

The  women  who  really  achieve  the  higher  culture  should 
make  it  their  "  cause  "  or  "  mission  "  to  work  out  the  new 
humanistic  or  liberal  education  which  the  old  college  claimed 
to  stand  for  and  which  now  needs  radical  reconstruction  to 
meet  the  demands  of  modern  life.  In  science  they  should  aim 
to  restore  the  humanistic  elements  of  its  history,  biography, 
its  popular  features  at  their  best,  and  its  applications  in  all 
the  more  non-technical  fields,  as  described  in  Chapter  XII,  and 
feel  responsibility  not  to  let  the  moral,  religious,  and  poetic 
aspects  of  nature  be  lost  in  utilities.  Woman  should  be  true 
to  her  generic  nature  and  take  her  stand  against  all  premature 
specialization,  and  when  the  Zeitgeist  insists  on  an  ad  hoc 
training  for  occupative  pursuits  without  waiting  for  broad 
foundations  to  be  laid,  she  should  resist  all  these  influences 
that  make  for  psychological  precocity.  Das  Ewig-Weibliche 
is  no  iridescent  fiction  but  a  very  definable  reality,  and  means 
perennial  youth.  It  means  that  woman  at  her  best  never  out- 
grows adolescence  as  man  does,  but  lingers  in,  magnifies  and 
glorifies  this  culminating  stage  of  life  with  its  all-sided  inter- 
ests, its  convertibility  of  emotions,  its  enthusiasm,  and  zest  for 
all  that  is  good,  beautiful,  true,  and  heroic.  This  constitutes 
her  freshness  and  charm,  even  in  age,  and  makes  her  by  nature 
more  humanistic  than  man,  more  sympathetic  and  apprecia- 
tive. It  is  not  chiefly  the  70.000  superfluous  American  women 
of  the  last  census,  but  representatives  of  everv^  class  and  age 
in  the  four  thousand  women's  clubs  of  this  country  that  now 
find  some  leisure  for  general  culture  in  all  fields,  and  in  which 
most  of  them  no  doubt  surpass  their  husbands.  Those  who 
still  say  that  men  do  not  like  women  to  be  their  mental  su- 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         625 

periors  and  that  no  man  was  ever  won  by  the  attraction  of 
intellect,  on  the  one  hand,  and  those  who  urge  that  women 
really  want  husbands  to  be  their  intellectual  superiors,  both 
misapprehend.  The  male  in  all  the  orders  of  life  is  the  agent 
of  variation  and  tends  by  nature  to  expertness  and  specializa- 
tion, without  which  his  individuality  is  incomplete.  In  his 
chosen  line  he  would  lead  and  be  authoritative  and  rarely  seeks 
partnership  in  it  in  marriage.  This  is  no  subjection,  but 
woman  instinctively  respects  and  even  reveres,  and  perhaps 
educated  woman  is  coming  to  demand,  it  in  the  man  of  her 
whole-hearted  choice.  This  granted,  man  was  never  more 
plastic  to  woman's  great  work  of  creating  in  him  all  the  wide 
range  of  secondary  sex  qualities  which  constitute  his  essential 
manhood.  In  all  this  the  pedagogic  fathers  we  teach  in  the 
history  of  education  are  most  of  them  about  as  luminous  and 
obsolete  as  is  patristics  for  the  religious  teacher,  or  as  methods 
of  other  countries  are  coming  to  be  in  solving  our  own  pecul- 
iar pedagogic  problems.  The  relation  of  the  academically 
trained  sexes  is  faintly  typified  by  that  of  the  ideal  college  to 
the  ideal  university,  professional  or  technical  school.  This  is 
the  harmony  of  counterparts  and  constitutes  the  best  basis  of 
psychic  amphimixis.  For  the  reinstallation  of  the  humanistic 
college  the  time  has  come  when  cultivated  woman  ought  to 
come  forward  and  render  vital  aid.  If  she  does  so  and  helps 
to  evolve  a  high  school  and  an  A.  B.  course  that  is  truly  liberal, 
it  will  not  only  fit  her  nature  and  needs  far  better  than  any- 
thing now  existing,  but  young  men  at  the  humanistic  stage  of 
their  ow^n  education  will  seek  to  profit  by  it,  and  she  will  thus 
repay  her  debt  to  man  in  the  past  by  aiding  him  to  de-univer- 
sitize  the  college  and  to  rescue  secondary  education  from  its 
gravest  dangers. 

But  even  should  all  this  be  done,  coeducation  would  by  no 
means  be  thus  justified.  If  adolescent  boys  normally  pass 
through  a  generalized  or  even  feminized  stage  of  psychic  de- 
velopment in  which  they  are  peculiarly  plastic  to  the  guidance 
of  older  women  who  have  such  rare  insight  into  their 
nature,  such  infinite  sympathy  and  patience  with  all  the  symp- 
toms of  their  storm  and  stress  metamorphosis,  when  they  seek 
everything  by  turns  and  nothing  long,  and  if  young  men  will 
forever  afterward  understand  woman's  nature  better  for  living 


626  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

out  more  fully  this  stage  of  their  lives  and  will  fail  to  do  so 
if  it  is  abridged  or  dwarfed,  it  by  no  means  follows  that  inti- 
mate daily  and  class-room  association  with  girls  of  their  own 
age  is  necessary  or  best.  The  danger  of  this  is  that  the  boy's 
instinct  to  assert  his  own  manhood  will  thus  be  made  prema- 
ture and  excessive,  that  he  will  react  against  general  culture 
in  the  capacity  for  which  girls,  who  are  older  than  boys  at 
the  same  age,  naturally  excel  them.  Companionship  and  com- 
parisons incline  him  to  take  premature  refuge  in  some  one 
talent  that  emphasizes  his  psycho-sexual  difference  too  soon. 
Again,  he  is  farther  from  nubile  maturity  than  the  girl  class- 
mate of  his  own  age,  and  coeducation  and  marriage  between 
them  are  prone  to  violate  the  important  physiological  law  of 
disparity  that  requires  the  husband  to  be  some  years  the  wife's 
senior,  both  in  their  own  interests  as  maturity  begins  to  de- 
cline to  age  and  in  those  of  their  offspring.  Thus  the  young 
man  with  his  years  of  restraint  and  probation  ahead,  and  his 
inflammable  desires,  is  best  removed  from  the  half-conscious 
cerebrations  about  wedlock,  inevitably  more  insistent  with  con- 
stant girl  companionship.  If  he  resists  this  during  all  the 
years  of  his  apprenticeship,  he  grows  more  immune  and  inhib- 
itive  of  it  when  its  proper  hour  arrives,  and  perhaps  becomes 
in  soul  a  bachelor  before  his  time.  In  this  side  of  his  nature 
he  is  forever  incommensurate  with  and  unintelligible  to 
woman,  be  she  even  teacher,  sister,  or  mother.  Better  some 
risk  of  gross  thoughts  and  even  acts,  to  which  phylogeny  and 
recapitulation  so  strongly  incline  him,  than  this  subtle  evira- 
tion. But  if  the  boy  is  unduly  repelled  from  the  sphere  of 
girls'  interests,  the  girl  is  in  some  danger  of  being  unduly 
drawn  to  his,  and,  as  we  saw  above,  of  forgetting  some  of  the 
ideals  of  her  own  sex.  Riper  in  mind  and  body  than  her  male 
classmate,  and  often  excelling  him  in  the  capacity  of  acquisi- 
tion, nearer  the  age  of  her  full  maturity  than  he  to  his,  he 
seems  a  little  too  crude  and  callow  to  fulfil  the  ideals  of  man- 
hood normal  to  her  age  which  point  to  older  and  riper  men. 
In  all  that  makes  sexual  attraction  best,  a  classmate  of  her 
own  age  is  too  undeveloped,  and  so  she  often  suffers  mute 
disenchantment,  and  even  if  engagement  be  dreamed  of,  it 
would  be  on  her  part  with  unconscious  reservations  if  not  with 
some  conscious  renunciation  of  ideals.    Thus  the  boy  is  correct 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         627 

in  feeling  himself  understood  and  seen  through  by  his  girl 
classmates  to  a  degree  that  is  sometimes  quite  distasteful  to 
him,  while  the  girl  finds  herself  misunderstood  by  and  disap- 
pointed in  men.  Boys  arrive  at  the  humanistic  stage  of  cul- 
ture later  than  girls  and  pass  it  sooner,  and  to  find  them 
already  there  and  with  their  greater  aptitude  excelling  him, 
is  not  an  inviting  situation,  and  so  he  is  tempted  to  abridge 
or  cut  it  out  and  to  hasten  on  and  be  mature  and  professional 
before  his  time,  for  thus  he  gravitates  toward  his  normal  rela- 
tion to  her  sex  of  expert  mastership  on  some  bread-  or  fame- 
winning  line.  Of  course,  these  influences  are  not  patent,  de- 
monstrable by  experiment,  or  measurable  by  statistics,  but  I 
have  come  to  believe  that,  like  many  other  facts  and  laws,  they 
have  a  reality  and  a  dominance  that  is  all-pervasive  and  in- 
eluctable, and  that  they  will  ultimately  prevail  over  economic 
motives  and  traditions. 

To  be  a  true  woman  means  to  be  yet  more  mother  than 
wife.  The  madonna  conception  expresses  man's  highest  com- 
prehension of  woman's  real  nature.  Sexual  relations  are  brief, 
but  love  and  care  of  offspring  are  long.  The  elimination  of 
maternity  is  one  of  the  great  calamities,  if  not  diseases,  of  our 
age.  Marholm  ^  points  out  at  length  how  art  again  to-day 
gives  woman  a  waspish  waist  with  no  abdomen,  as  if  to  care- 
fully score  away  every  trace  of  her  mission;  usually  with  no 
child  in  her  arms  or  even  in  sight ;  a  mere  figurine,  calculated 
perhaps  to  entice,  but  not  to  bear;  incidentally  degrading  the 
artist  who  depicts  her  to  a  fashion-plate  painter,  perhaps  with 
suggestions  of  the  arts  of  toilet,  cosmetics,  and  coquetry,  as  if 
to  promote  decadent  reaction  to  decadent  stimuli.  As  in  the 
Munchausen  tale,  the  wolf  slowly  ate  the  running  nag  from 
behind  until  he  found  himself  in  the  harness,  so  in  the  dis- 
oriented woman  the  mistress,  virtuous  and  otherwise,  is  slowly 
supplanting  the  mother.  Please  she  must,  even  though  she 
can  not  admire,  and  can  so  easily  despise  men  who  can  not 
lead  her,  although  she  become  thereby  lax  and  vapid. 

The  more  exhausted  men  become,  whether  by  overwork, 
unnatural  city  life,  alcohol,  recrudescent  polygamic  inclina- 
tions,  exclusive  devotion  to   greed  and  pelf;   whether  they 

*  The  Psychology  of  Woman.     London,  1899. 


628  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

become  weak,  stooping,  blear-eyed,  bald-headed,  bow-legged, 
thin-shanked,  or  gross,  coarse,  barbaric,  and  bestial,  the  more 
they  lose  the  power  to  lead  woman  or  to  arouse  her  nature, 
which  is  essentially  passive.  Thus  her  perversions  are  his 
fault.  Man,  before  he  lost  the  soil  and  piety,  was  not  only 
her  protector  and  provider,  but  her  priest.  He  not  only  sup- 
ported and  defended,  but  inspired  the  souls  of  women,  so  ad- 
mirably calculated  to  receive  and  elaborate  suggestions,  but 
not  to  originate  them.  In  their  inmost  soul  even  young  girls 
often  experience  disenchantment,  find  men  little  and  no  he- 
roes, and  so  cease  to  revere  and  begin  to  think  stupidly  of 
them  as  they  think  coarsely  of  her.  Sometimes  the  girlish  con- 
ceptions of  men  are  too  romantic  and  exalted;  often  the  in- 
timacy of  school  and  college  wear  off  a  charm,  while  man  must 
not  forget  that  to-day  he  too  often  fails  to  realize  the  just  and 
legitimate  expectations  and  ideals  of  women.  If  women  con- 
fide themselves,  body  and  soul,  less  to  him  than  he  desires,  it 
is  not  she,  but  he,  who  is  often  chiefly  to  blame.  Indeed,  in 
some  psychic  respects  it  seems  as  if  in  human  society  the  proc- 
esses of  subordinating. the  male  to  the  female,  carried  so  far 
in  some  of  the  animal  species,  had  already  begun.  If  he  is 
not  worshiped  as  formerly,  it  is  because  he  is  less  worshipful 
or  more  effeminate,  less  vigorous  and  less  able  to  excite  and 
retain  the  great  love  of  true,  not  to  say  great,  women.  Where 
marriage  and  maternity  are  of  less  supreme  interest  to  an  in- 
creasing number  of  women,  there  are  various  results,  the  chief 
of  which  are  as  follows : 

1.  Women  grow  dollish;  sink  more  or  less  consciously  to 
man's  level ;  gratify  his  desires  and  even  his  selfish  caprices, 
but  exact  in  return  luxury  and  display,  growing  vain  as  he 
grows  sordid ;  thus,  while  submitting,  conquering,  and  tyran- 
nizing over  him,  content  with  present  worldly  pleasure,  un- 
mindful of  the  past,  the  future,  or  the  above.  This  may  react 
to  intersexual  antagonism  until  man  comes  to  hate  woman  as 
a  witch,  or,  as  in  the  days  of  celibacy,  consider  sex  a  wile  of 
the  devil.  Along  these  lines  even  the  stage  is  beginning  to 
represent  the  tragedies  of  life. 

2.  The  disappointed  woman  in  whom  something  is  dying 
comes  to  assert  her  own  ego  and  more  or  less  consciously  to 
make  it  an  end,  aiming  to  possess  and  realize  herself  fully 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         629 

rather  than  to  transmit.  Despairing  of  herself  as  a  woman,  she 
asserts  her  lower  rights  in  the  place  of  her  one  great  right  to 
be  loved.  The  desire  for  love  may  be  transmuted  into  the 
desire  for  knowledge,  or  outer  achievement  become  a  suc- 
cedaneum  for  inner  content.  Failing  to  respect  herself  as  a 
productive  organism,  she  gives  vent  to  personal  ambitions; 
seeks  independence;  comes  to  know  very  plainly  what  she 
wants;  perhaps  becomes  intellectually  emancipated,  and  sub- 
stitutes science  for  religion,  or  the  doctor  for  the  priest,  with 
the  all-sided  impressionability  characteristic  of  her  sex  which, 
when  cultivated,  is  so  like  an  awakened  child.  She  perhaps 
even  affects  mannish  ways,  unconsciously  copying  from  those 
not  most  manly,  or  comes  to  feel  that  she  has  been  robbed  of 
something ;  competes  with  men,  but  sometimes  where  they  are 
most  sordid,  brutish,  and  strongest;  always  expecting,  but 
never  finding,  she  turns  successively  to  art,  science,  literature, 
and  reforms;  craves  especially  work  that  she  can  not  do;  and 
seeks  stimuli  for  feelings  which  have  never  found  their  legiti- 
mate expression. 

3.  Another  type,  truer  to  woman's  nature,  subordinates 
self;  goes  beyond  personal  happiness;  adopts  the  motto  of  self- 
immolation;  enters  a  life  of  service,  denial,  and  perhaps  morti- 
fication, like  the  Countess  Schimmelmann ;  and  perhaps  be- 
comes a  devotee,  a  saint,  and,  if  need  be,  a  martyr,  but  all  with 
modesty,  humility,  and  with  a  shrinking  from  publicity. 

In  our  civilization,  I  believe  that  bright  girls  of  good  en- 
vironment of  eighteen  or  nineteen,  or  even  seventeen,  have 
already  reached  the  above-mentioned  peculiar  stage  of  first 
maturity,  when  they  see  the  world  at  first  hand,  when  the 
senses  are  at  their  very  best,  their  susceptibilities  and  their  in- 
sights the  keenest,  tension  at  its  highest,  plasticity  and  all-sided 
interests  most  developed,  and  their  whole  psychic  soil  richest 
and  rankest  and  sprouting  everywhere  with  the  tender  shoots 
of  everything  both  good  and  bad.  Some  such — Stella  Klive, 
Mary  MacLane,  Hilma  Strandberg,  Marie  Bashkirtseff — have 
been  veritable  spies  upon  woman's  nature;  have  revealed  the 
characterlessness  normal  to  the  prenubile  period  in  which 
everything  is  kept  tentative  and  plastic,  and  where  life  seems 
to  have  least  unity,  aim,  or  purpose.  By  and  by  perhaps  they 
will  see  in  all  their  scrappy  past,  if  not  order  and  coherence, 


630  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

a  justification,  and  then  alone  will  they  realize  that  life  is  gov- 
erned by  motives  deeper  than  those  which  are  conscious  or 
even  personal.  This  is  the  age  when,  if  ever,  no  girl  should 
be  compelled.  It  is  the  experiences  of  this  age,  never  entirely 
obliterated  in  women,  that  enables  them  to  take  adolescent  boys 
seriously,  as  men  can  rarely  do,  in  whom  these  experiences  are 
more  limited  in  range  though  no  less  intense.  It  is  this  stage 
in  woman  which  is  most  unintelligible  to  man  and  even  un- 
realized to  herself.  It  is  the  echoes  from  it  that  make  vast 
numbers  of  mothers  pursue  the  various  branches  of  culture, 
often  half  secretly,  to  maintain  their  position  with  their  college 
sons  and  daughters,  with  their  husbands,  or  with  society. 

But  in  a  very  few  years,  I  believe  even  in  the  early  twenties 
with  American  girls,  along  with  rapidly  increasing  develop- 
ment of  capacity  there  is  also  observable  the  beginnings  of  loss 
and  deterioration.  Unless  marriage  comes  there  is  lassitude, 
subtle  symptoms  of  invalidism,  the  germs  of  a  rather  aimless 
dissatisfaction  with  life,  a  little  less  interest,  curiosity,  and 
courage,  certain  forms  of  self-pampering,  the  resolution  to  be 
happy,  though  at  too  great  cost;  and  thus  the  clear  air  of 
morning  begins  to  haze  over  and  unconsciously  she  begins  to 
grope.  By  thirty,  she  is  perhaps  goaded  into  more  or  less 
sourness;  has  developed  more  petty  self-indulgences;  has  come 
to  feel  a  right  to  happiness  almost  as  passionately  as  the  men 
of  the  French  Revolution  and  as  the  women  in  their  late 
movement  for  enfranchisement  felt  for  liberty.  Very  likely 
she  has  turned  to  other  women  and  entered  into  innocent  Pla- 
tonic pairing-off  relations  with  some  one.  There  is  a  little  more 
affectation,  playing  a  role,  and  interest  in  dress  and  appearance 
is  either  less  or  more  specialized  and  definite.  Perhaps  she  has 
already  begun  to  be  a  seeker  who  will  perhaps  find,  lose,  and 
seek  again.  Her  temper  is  modified ;  there  is  a  slight  stagna- 
tion of  soul ;  a  craving  for  work  or  travel ;  a  love  of  children 
with  flitting  thoughts  of  adopting  one,  or  else  aversion  to  them ; 
an  analysis  of  psychic  processes  until  they  are  weakened  and 
insight  becomes  too  clear ;  a  sense  of  responsibility  without  an 
object;  a  slight  general  malaise  and  a  sense  that  society  is  a 
false  "  margarine  "  affair;  revolt  against  those  that  insist  that 
in  her  child  the  real  value  of  a  woman  is  revealed.  There  are 
alternations  between  excessive  self-respect  which  demands 
something  almost  like  adoration  of  the  other  sex  and  self- 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND  THEIR   EDUCATION         631 

distrust,  with,  it  may  be,  many  dreameries  about  forbidden 
subjects  and  about  the  relations  of  the  sexes  generally. 

A  new  danger,  the  greatest  in  the  history  of  her  sex,  now 
impends,  viz.,  arrest,  complacency,  and  a  sense  of  finality  in 
the  most  perilous  first  stage  of  higher  education  for  girls, 
when,  after  all,  little  has  actually  yet  been  won  save  only  the 
right  and  opportunity  to  begin  reconstructions,  so  that  now 
for  the  first  time  in  history  methods  and  matter  could  be  rad- 
ically transformed  to  fit  the  nature  and  needs  of  girls.  Now 
most  female  faculties,  trustees,  and  students  are  content  to  ape 
the  newest  departures  in  some  one  or  more  male  institutions 
as  far  as  their  means  or  obvious  limitations  make  possible  with 
a  servility  which  is  often  abject  and  with  rarely  ever  a  thought 
of  any  adjustment,  save  the  most  superficial,  to  sex.  It  is  the 
easiest,  and  therefore  the  most  common,  view  typically  ex- 
pressed by  the  female  head  of  a  very  successful  institution,^ 
who  was  "  early  convinced  in  my  teaching  experience  that  the 
methods  for  mental  development  for  boys  and  girls  applied 
equally  without  regard  to  sex,  and  I  have  carried  the  same 
thought  when  I  began  to  develop  the  physical,  and  filled  my 
gymnasium  with  the  ordinary  appliances  used  in  men's  gym- 
nasia." There  is  no  sex  in  mind  or  in  science,  it  is  said,  but 
it  might  as  well  be  urged  that  there  is  no  age  and  hence  that 
all  methods  adapted  to  teaching  at  different  stages  of  develop- 
ment may  be  ignored.  That  woman  can  do  many  things  as 
well  as  man  does  not  prove  that  she  ought  to  do  the  same 
things,  or  that  man-made  ways  are  the  best  for  her.  Mrs. 
Alice  Freeman  Palmer  ^  was  right  in  saying  that  woman's 
education  has  all  the  perplexities  of  that  of  man,  and  many 
more,  still  more  difficult  and  intricate,  of  its  own. 

Hence,  we  must  conclude  that,  while  women's  colleges 
have  to  a  great  extent  solved  the  problem  of  special  technical 
training,  they  have  done  as  yet  very  little  to  solve  the  larger 
one  of  the  proper  education  of  woman.  To  assume  that  the 
latter  question  is  settled,  as  is  so  often  done,  is  disastrous.  I 
have  forced  myself  to  go  through  many  elaborate  reports  of 

^  Physical  Development  of  Women  and  Children,  by  Miss  M.  E.  Allen.  Am. 
Ass'n  for  Phys.  Ed.,  April,  i8go. 

*  Forum,  September,  1891.  See  also  Bunge  :  Die  zunehmende  Unfahigkeit  der 
Frauen  ihre  Kinder  zu  stillen.  Miinchen,  1903,  32  S.  Also  President  Harper's 
Decemial  Report,  p.  XCIV.,  etseq. 


632  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

meetings  where  female  education  was  discussed  by  those  sup- 
posed to  be  competent,  but  as  a  rule,  not  without  rare,  striking 
exceptions,  these  proceedings  are  smitten  with  the  same  sterile 
and  complacent  artificiality  that  was  so  long  the  curse  of 
woman's  life.  I  deem  it  almost  reprehensible  that,  save  a  few 
general  statistics,  the  women's  colleges  have  not  only  made 
no  study  themselves  of  the  larger  problems  that  impend,  but 
have  often  maintained  a  repellent  attitude  toward  others  who 
wished  to  do  so.  No  one  that  I  know  of  connected  with  any 
of  these  institutions,  where  the  richest  material  is  going  to 
waste,  is  making  any  serious  and  competent  research  on  lines 
calculated  to  bring  out  the  psycho-physiological  differences  be- 
tween the  sexes,  and  those  in  authority  are  either  conservative 
by  constitution  or  else  intimidated  because  public  opinion  is 
still  liable  to  panics  if  discussion  here  becomes  scientific  and 
fundamental,  and  so  tend  to  keep  prudery  and  the  old  habit 
of  ignoring  everything  that  pertains  to  sex  in  countenance. 

Again,  while  I  sympathize  profoundly  with  the  claim  of 
woman  for  every  opportunity  which  she  can  fill,  and  yield  to 
none  in  appreciation  of  her  ability,  I  insist  that  the  cardinal 
defect  in  the  woman's  college  is  that  it  is  based  upon  the 
assumption,  implied  and  often  expressed,  if  not  almost  uni- 
versally acknowledged,  that  girls  should  primarily  be  trained 
to  independence  and  self-support,  and  that  matrimony  and 
motherhood,  if  it  come,  will  take  care  of  itself,  or,  as  some  even 
urge,  is  thus  best  provided  for.  If  these  colleges  are  as  the 
above  statistics  indicate,  chiefly  devoted  to  the  training  of 
those  who  do  not  marry,  or  if  they  are  to  educate  for  celibacy, 
this  is  right.  These  institutions  may  perhaps  come  to  be  train- 
ing stations  of  a  new-old  type,  the  agamic  or  even  agenic 
woman,  be  she  aunt,  maid — old  or  young — nun,  school-teacher, 
or  bachelor  woman.  I  recognize  the  very  great  debt  the  world 
owes  to  members  of  this  very  diverse  class  in  the  past.  Some 
of  them  have  illustrated  the  very  highest  ideals  of  self-sacri- 
fice, service,  and  devotion  in  giving  to  mankind  what  was 
meant  for  husband  and  children.  Some  of  them  belong  to  the 
class  of  superfluous  women,  and  others  illustrate  the  noblest 
type  of  altruism  and  have  impoverished  the  heredity  of  the 
world  to  its  loss,  as  did  the  monks,  who  Leslie  Stephens  thinks 
contributed  to  bring  about  the  Dark  Ages,  because  they  were 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND   THEIR   EDUCATION  633 

the  best  and  most  highly  selected  men  of  their  age  and,  by 
withdrawing  from  the  function  of  heredity  and  leaving  no  pos- 
terity, caused  Europe  to  degenerate.  Modern  ideas  and  train- 
ing are  now  doing  this,  whether  for  racial  weal  or  woe  can  not 
yet  be  determined,  for  many  whom  nature  designed  for  model 
mothers. 

The  bachelor  woman  is  an  interesting  illustration  of  Spen- 
cer's law  of  the  inverse  relation  of  individuation  and  genesis. 
The  completely  developed  individual  is  always  a  terminal  rep- 
resentative in  her  line  of  descent.  She  has  taken  up  and  util- 
ized in  her  own  life  all  that  was  meant  for  her  descendants, 
and  has  so  overdrawn  her  account  with  heredity  that,  like 
every  perfectly  and  completely  developed  individual,  she  is 
also  completely  sterile.  This  is  the  very  apotheosis  of  selfish- 
ness from  the  standpoint  of  every  biological  ethics.  While 
the  complete  man  can  do  and  sometimes  does  this,  woman  has 
a  far  greater  and  very  peculiar  power  of  overdrawing  her 
reserves.  First  she  loses  mammary  function,  so  that  should 
she  undertake  maternity  its  functions  are  incompletely  per- 
formed because  she  can  not  nurse,  and  this  implies  defective 
motherhood  and  leaves  love  of  the  child  itself  defective  and 
maimed,  for  the  mother  who  has  never  nursed  can  not  love 
or  be  loved  aright  by  her  child.  It  crops  out  again  in  the 
abnormal  or  especially  incomplete  development  of  her  off- 
spring, in  the  critical  years  of  adolescence,  although  they  may 
have  been  healthful  before,  and  a  less  degree  of  it  perhaps 
is  seen  in  the  diminishing  families  of  cultivated  mothers  in 
the  one-child  system.  These  women  are  the  intellectual  equals 
and  often  the  superiors  of  the  men  they  meet ;  they  are  very 
attractive  as  companions,  like  Miss  Mehr,  the  university  stu- 
dent, in  Hauptmann's  Lonely  Lives,  who  alienated  the  young 
husband  from  his  noble  wife :  they  enjoy  all  the  keen  pleasures 
of  intellectual  activity ;  their  very  look,  step,  and  bearing  is 
free;  their  mentality  makes  them  good  fellows  and  compan- 
ionable in  all  the  broad  intellectual  spheres ;  to  converse  with 
them  is  as  charming  and  attractive  for  the  best  men  as  was 
Socrates's  discourse  with  the  accomplished  hetaera ;  they  are  at 
home  with  the  racket  and  on  the  golf  links ;  they  are  splendid 
friends;  their  minds,  in  all  their  widening  areas  of  contact,  are 
as  attractive  as  their  bodies ;  and  the  world  owes  much  and  is 


634  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

likely  to  owe  far  more  to  high  Platonic  friendships  of  this  kind. 
These  women  are  often  in  every  way  magnificent,  only  they 
are  not  mothers,  and  sometimes  have  very  little  wifehood  in 
them,  and  to  attempt  to  marry  them  to  develop  these  functions 
is  one  of  the  unique  and  too  frequent  tragedies  of  modern 
life  and  literature.  Some,  though  by  no  means  all,  of  them 
are  functionally  castrated ;  some  actively  deplore  the  necessity 
of  child-bearing,  and  perhaps  are  parturition  phobiacs,  and 
abhor  the  limitations  of  married  life;  they  are  incensed  when- 
ever attention  is  called  to  the  functions  peculiar  to  their  sex, 
and  the  careful  consideration  of  problems  of  the  monthly  rest 
are  thought  "  not  fit  for  cultivated  women." 

The  slow  evolution  of  this  type  is  probably  inevitable  as 
civilization  advances,  and  their  training  is  a  noble  function. 
Already  it  has  produced  minds  of  the  greatest  acumen  who 
have  made  very  valuable  contributions  to  science,  and  far  more 
is  to  be  expected  of  them  in  the  future.  Indeed,  it  may  be 
their  noble  function  to  lead  their  sex  out  into  the  higher,  larger 
life,  and  the  deeper  sense  of  its  true  position  and  function,  for 
which  I  plead.  Hitherto  woman  has  not  been  able  to  solve  her 
own  problems.  While  she  has  been  more  religious  than  man, 
there  have  been  few  great  women  preachers;  while  she  has 
excelled  in  teaching  young  children,  there  have  been  few  Pes- 
talozzis,  or  even  Froebels;  while  her  invalidism  is  a  complex 
problem,  she  has  turned  to  man  in  her  diseases.  This  is  due 
to  the  very  intuitiveness  and  naivete  of  her  nature.  But  now 
that  her  world  is  so  rapidly  widening,  she  is  in  danger  of 
losing  her  cue.  She  must  be  studied  objectively  and  labo- 
riously as  we  study  children,  and  partly  by  men,  because  their 
sex  must  of  necessity  always  remain  objective  and  incommen- 
surate with  regard  to  woman,  and  therefore  more  or  less  the- 
oretical. Again,  in  these  days  of  intense  new  interest  in  feel- 
ings, emotions,  and  sentiments,  when  many  a  psychologist  now 
envies  and,  like  Schleiermacher,  devoutly  wishes  he  could  be- 
come a  woman,  he  can  never  really  understand  das  Ezvig- 
Weibliche,  one  of  the  two  supreme  oracles  of  guidance  in  life, 
because  he  is  a  man,  and  here  the  cultivated  woman  must  ex- 
plore the  nature  of  her  sex  as  man  can  not  and  become  its 
mouthpiece.  In  many  of  the  new  fields  opening  in  biology 
since  Darwin,  in  embryology,  botany,  the  study  of  children, 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         635 

animals,  savages  (teste  Miss  Fletcher),  sociological  investi- 
gation, to  say  nothing  of  all  the  vast  body  of  work  that  re- 
quires painstaking  detail,  perseverance,  and  conscience,  woman 
has  superior  ability,  or  her  very  sex  gives  her  peculiar  advan- 
tages where  she  is  to  lead  and  achieve  great  things  in  en- 
larging the  kingdom  of  man.  Perhaps,  too,  the  present  train- 
ing of  women  may  in  the  end  develop  those  who  shall  one  day 
attain  a  true  self-knowledge  and  lead  in  the  next  step  of  de- 
vising a  scheme  that  shall  fit  woman's  nature  and  needs. 

For  the  slow  evolution  of  such  a  scheme,  we  must  first  of 
all  distinctly  and  ostensively  invert  the  present  maxim,  and 
educate  primarily  and  chiefly  for  motherhood,  assuming  that  if 
that  does  not  come  single  life  can  best  take  care  of  itself,  be- 
cause it  is  less  intricate  and  lower  and  its  needs  far  more  easily 
met.  While  girls  may  be  trained  with  boys,  coeducation 
should  cease  at  the  dawn  of  adolescence,  at  least  for  a  season. 
Great  daily  intimacy  between  the  sexes  in  high  school,  if  not 
in  college,  tends  to  rub  off  the  bloom  and  delicacy  which  can 
develop  in  each,  and  girls  suffer  in  this  respect,  let  us  repeat, 
far  more  than  boys.  The  familiar  camaraderie  that  ignores 
sex  should  be  left  to  the  agenic  class.  To  the  care  of  their  in- 
stitutions we  leave  with  pious  and  reiverent  hands  the  ideals 
inspired  by  characters  like  Hypatia,  Madame  de  Stael,  the 
Misses  Cobb,  Martineau,  Fuller,  Bronte,  by  George  Eliot, 
George  Sand,  and  Mrs.  Browning,  and  while  accepting  and 
profiting  by  what  they  have  done,  and  acknowledging  every 
claim  for  their  abilities  and  achievements,  prospective  mothers 
must  not  be  allowed  to  forget  a  still  larger  class  of  ideal 
women,  both  in  history  and  literature,  from  the  Holy  Mother 
to  Beatrice  Clotilda  de  Vaux,  and  all  those  who  have  inspired 
men  to  great  deeds,  and  the  choice  and  far  richer  anthology 
of  noble  mothers. 

We  must  premise,  too,  that  she  must  not  be  petted  or 
pampered  with  regimen  or  diet  unsuited  to  her  needs ;  left 
to  find  out  as  best  she  can,  from  surreptitious  or  unworthy 
sources,  what  she  most  of  all  needs  to  know;  must  recognize 
that  our  present  civilization  is  hard  on  woman  and  that  she 
is  not  yet  adjusted  to  her  social  environment;  that  as  she  was 
of  old  accused  of  having  given  man  the  apple  of  knowledge 
of  good  and  evil,  so  he  now  is  liable  to  a  perhaps  no  less 


636  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

serious  indictment  of  having  given  her  the  apple  of  intellec- 
tuahsm  and  encouraged  her  to  assume  his  standards  at  the 
expense  of  health.  We  must  recognize  that  riches  are  prob- 
ably harder  on  her,  on  the  whole,  than  poverty,  and  that  poor 
parents  should  not  labor  too  hard  to  exempt  her  from  its 
wholesome  discipline.  The  expectancy  of  change  so  stamped 
upon  her  sex  by  heredity  as  she  advances  into  maturity  must 
not  be  perverted  into  uneasiness,  or  her  soul  sown  with  the 
tares  of  ambition  or  fired  by  intersexual  competition  and 
driven  on,  to  quote  Dr.  R.  T.  Edes,  "  by  a  tireless  sort  of 
energy  which  is  a  compound  of  conscience,  ambition,  and  de- 
sire to  please,  plus  a  peculiar  female  obstinacy."  If  she  is 
bright,  she  must  not  be  overworked  in  the  school  factory, 
studying  in  a  way  which  parodies  Hood's  Song  of  the  Shirt; 
and  if  dull  or  feeble,  she  should  not  be  worried  by  precep- 
tresses like  an  eminent  lady  principal,^  who  thinks  girls'  weak- 
ness is  usually  imaginary  or  laziness,  and  that  doctors  are  to 
blame  for  suggesting  illness  and  for  intimating  that  men  will 
have  to  choose  between  a  healthy  animal  and  an  educated  in- 
valid for  a  wife. 

Without  specifying  here  details  or  curricula,  the  ideals  that 
should  be  striven  toward  in  the  intermediate  and  collegiate 
education  of  adolescent  girls  with  the  proper  presupposition 
of  motherhood,  and  which  are  already  just  as  practicable  as 
Abbotsholme  or  L'Ecole  des  Roches,  may  be  rudely  indicated 
somewhat  as  follows. 

First,  the  ideal  institution  for  the  training  of  girls  from 
twelve  or  thirteen  on  into  the  twenties,  when  the  period  most 
favorable  to  motherhood  begins,  should  be  in  the  country  in 
the  midst  of  hills,  the  climbing  of  which  is  the  best  stimulus 
for  heart  and  lungs,  and  tends  to  mental  elevation  and  breadth 
of  view.  There  should  be  water  for  boating,  bathing,  and 
skating,  aquaria  and  aquatic  life ;  gardens  both  for  kitchen 
vegetables  and  horticulture;  forests  for  their  seclusion  and 
religious  awe;  good  roads,  walks,  and  paths  that  tempt  to 
walking  and  wheeling;  playgrounds  and  space  for  golf  and 
tennis,  with  large  covered  but  unheated  space  favorable  for 
recreations  in  weather  really  too  bad  for  out-of-door  life  and 

^  Forum,  1891,  p.  4. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         637 

for  those  indisposed;  and  plenty  of  nooks  that  permit  each  to 
be  alone  with  nature,  for  this  develops  inwardness,  poise,  and 
character,  yet  not  too  great  remoteness  from  the  city  for  a 
wise  utilization  of  its  advantages  at  intervals.  All  that  can 
be  called  environment  is  even  more  important  for  girls  than 
boys,  significant  as  it  is  for  the  latter. 

The  first  aim,  which  should  dominate  every  item,  peda- 
gogic method  and  matter,  should  be  health — a  momentous 
word  that  looms  up  beside  holiness,  to  which  it  is  etymolog- 
ically  akin.  The  new  hygiene  of  the  last  few  years  should  be 
supreme  and  make  these  academic  areas  sacred  to  the  cult  of 
the  goddess  Hygeia.  Only  those  who  realize  what  advances 
have  been  made  in  health  culture  and  know  something  of  its 
vast  new  literature  can  realize  all  that  this  means.  The  health 
of  woman  is,  as  we  have  seen,  if  possible  even  more  important 
for  the  welfare  of  the  race  than  that  of  man,  and  the  influence 
of  her  body  upon  her  mind  is,  in  a  sense,  greater,  so  that  its 
needs  should  be  supreme  and  primary.  Foods  should  favor 
the  completest  digestion,  so  that  metabolism  be  on  the  highest 
plane.  The  dietary  should  be  abundant,  plain,  and  varied,  and 
cooked  with  all  the  refinements  possible  in  the  modern  cook- 
ing-school, which  should  be  one  of  its  departments,  with  lim- 
ited use  of  rich  foods  or  desserts  and  stimulating  drinks,  but 
with  wholesome  proximity  to  dairy  and  farm.  Nutrition  is 
the  first  law  of  health  and  happiness,  the  prime  condition  and 
creator  of  euphoria,  and  the  appetite  should  be,  as  it  always  is 
if  unperverted,  like  a  kind  of  somatic  conscience  steadfastly 
pointing  toward  the  true  pole  of  needs. 

Sleep  should  be  regular,  with  a  fixed  retiring  hour  and 
curfew,  on  plain  beds  in  rooms  of  scrupulous  neatness  re- 
served chiefly  for  it  with  every  precaution  for  quiet,  and, 
if  possible,  with  windows  more  or  less  open  the  year  round, 
and,  like  other  rooms,  never  overheated.  Bathing  in  modera- 
tion, and  especially  dress  and  toilet  should  be  almost  raised  to 
fine  arts  and  objects  of  constant  suggestion.  Each  student 
should  have  three  rooms,  for  bath,  sleep,  and  study,  respect- 
ively, and  be  responsible  for  their  care,  with  every  encourage- 
ment for  expressing  individual  tastes,  but  with  an  all-domi- 
nant idea  of  simplicity,  convenience,  refinement,  and  elegance, 
without  luxury.     Girls  need  to  go  away  from  home  a  good 


638  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

part  of  every  year  to  escape  the  indiscretion  and  often  the 
coddling  of  parents  and  to  learn  self-reliance,  and  a  family 
dormitory  system  with  but  few,  twelve  to  twenty,  in  each 
building,  to  escape  nervous  wear  and  distraction,  to  secure 
intimacy  and  acquaintance  with  one  or  more  matrons  or 
teachers  and  to  ensure  the  most  pedagogic  dietetics,  is  sug- 
gested. 

Exercise  comes  after  regimen,  of  which  it  is  a  special  form, 
Swedish  gymnastics  should  be  abandoned  or  reduced  to  a  min- 
imum of  best  points,  because  it  is  too  severe  and  lays  too  little 
stress  upon  the  rhythm  element  in  forbidding  music.  Out-of- 
door  walks  and  games  should  have  precedence  over  all  else. 
The  principle  sometimes  advocated,  that  methods  of  physical 
training  should  apply  to  both  boys  and  girls  without  regard  to 
sex,  and  with  all  the  ordinary  appliances  found  in  the  men's 
gymnasia  introduced,  should  be  reversed  and  every  possible 
adjustment  made  to  sex.  Free  plays  and  games  should  always 
have  precedence  over  indoor  or  uniform  commando  exercises. 
Boating  and  basket-ball  should  be  allowed,  but  with  the  com- 
petition element  sedulously  reduced,  and  with  dancing  of  many 
kinds  and  forms  the  most  prominent  of  indoor  exercises.  The 
dance  cadences  the  soul;  the  stately  minuet  gives  poise;  the 
figure  dances  train  the  mind;  and  pantomime  and  dramatic 
features  should  be  introduced  and  even  specialties,  if  there  are 
strong  individual  predispositions.  The  history  of  the  dance, 
which  has  often  been  a  mode  of  worship,  a  school  of  morals, 
and  which  is  the  root  of  the  best  that  is  in  the  drama,  the  best 
of  all  exercises  and  that  could  be  again  the  heart  of  our  whole 
educational  system,  should  be  exploited,  and  the  dancing 
school  and  class  rescued  from  its  present  degradation.  No 
girl  is  educated  who  can  not  dance,  although  she  need  not 
know  the  ballroom  in  its  modern  form.^ 

Manners,  a  word  too  often  relegated  to  the  past  as  savor- 
ing of  the  primness  of  the  ancient  dame  school  or  female 
seminary,  are  really  minor  or  sometimes  major  morals.  They 
can  express  everything  in  the  whole  range  of  the  impulsive 
or  emotional  life.  Now  that  we  understand  the  primacy  of 
movement  over  feeling,  we  can  appreciate  what  a  school  of 

'  See  vol.  i,  p.  213  et  seq. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         639 

bearing  and  repose  in  daily  converse  with  others  means.  I 
would  revive  some  of  the  ancient  casuistry  of  details,  but  less 
the  rules  of  the  drawing-room,  call  and  party,  although  these 
should  not  be  neglected,  than  the  deeper  expressions  of  true 
ladyhood  seen  in  an  exquisite,  tender  and  unselfish  regard  for 
the  feelings  of  others.  The  ideal  of  compelling  every  one 
whom  they  meet  to  like  them  is  a  noble  one,  and  the  control  of 
every  automatism  is  not  only  a  part  of  good  breeding,  but 
nervous  health. 

Regularity  should  be  another  all-pervading  norm.  In  the 
main,  even  though  he  may  have  "  played  his  sex  symphony 
too  harshly,"  E.  H.  Clarke  was  right.  Periodicity,  perhaps  the 
deepest  law  of  the  cosmos,  celebrates  its  highest  triumphs  in 
woman's  life.  For  years  everything  must  give  way  to  its 
thorough  and  settled  establishment.  In  the  monthly  Sabbaths 
of  rest,  the  ideal  school  should  revert  to  the  meaning  of  the 
word  leisure.  The  paradise  of  stated  rest  should  be  revisited, 
idleness  be  actively  cultivated ;  reverie,  in  which  the  soul,  which 
needs  these  seasons  of  withdrawal  for  its  own  development, 
expatiates  over  the  whole  life  of  the  race,  should  be  provided 
for  and  encouraged  in  every  legitimate  way,  for  in  rest  the 
whole  momentum  of  heredity  is  felt  in  ways  most  favorable 
to  full  and  complete  development.  Then  woman  should 
realize  that  to  he  is  greater  than  to  do;  should  step  reverently 
aside  from  her  daily  routine  and  let  Lord  Nature  work.  In 
this  time  of  sensitiveness  and  perturbation,  when  anemia  and 
chlorosis  are  so  peculiarly  immanent  to  her  sex,  remission  of 
toil  should  not  only  be  permitted,  but  required;  and  yet  the 
greatest  individual  liberty  should  be  allowed  to  adjust  itself 
to  the  vast  diversities  of  individual  constitutional  needs.  (See 
Chapter  VII  on  this  point.)  The  cottage  home,  which  should 
take  the  place  of  the  dormitory,  should  always  have  special 
interest  and  attractions  for  these  seasons. 

There  should  always  be  some  personal  instruction  at  these 
seasons  during  earlier  adolescent  years.  I  have  glanced  over 
nearly  a  score  of  books  and  pamphlets  that  are  especially 
written  for  girls;  while  all  are  well  meant  and  far  better  than 
the  ordinary  modes  by  which  girls  acquire  knowledge  of  their 
own  nature  if  left  to  themselves,  they  are,  like  books  for  boys, 
far  too  prolix,  and  most  are  too  scientific  and  plain  and  direct. 


640  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Moreover,  no  two  girls  need  just  the  same  instruction,  and  to 
leave  it  to  reading  is  too  indirect  and  causes  the  mind  to  dwell 
on  it  for  too  long  periods.  Best  of  all  is  individual  instruction 
at  the  time,  concise,  practical,  and  never,  especially  in  the  early 
years,  without  a  certain  mystic  and  religious  tone  which  should 
pervade  all  and  make  everything  sacred.  This  should  not  be 
given  by  male  physicians — and  indeed  most  female  doctors 
would  make  it  too  professional,  and  the  maiden  teacher  must 
forever  lack  reverence  for  it — but  it  should  come  from  one 
whose  soul  and  body  are  full  of  wifehood  and  motherhood  and 
who  is  old  enough  to  know  and  is  not  without  the  necessary 
technical  knowledge. 

Another  principle  should  be  to  broaden  by  retarding;  to 
keep  the  purely  mental  back  and  by  every  method  to  bring 
the  intuitions  to  the  front;  appeals  to  tact  and  taste  should 
be  incessant ;  a  purely  intellectual  man  is  no  doubt  biologically 
a  deformity,  but  a  purely  intellectual  woman  is  far  more  so. 
Bookishness  is  probably  a  bad  sign  in  a  girl ;  it  suggests  arti- 
ficiality, pedantry,  the  lugging  of  dead  knowledge.  Mere 
learning  is  not  the  ideal,  and  prodigies  of  scholarship  are  al- 
ways morbid.  The  rule  should  be  to  keep  nothing  that  is  not 
to  become  practical ;  to  open  no  brain  tracts  which  are  not  to  be 
highways  for  the  daily  traffic  of  thought  and  conduct ;  not  to 
overburden  the  soul  with  the  impedimenta  of  libraries  and 
records  of  what  is  afar  off  in  time  or  zest,  and  always  to  follow 
truly  the  guidance  of  normal  and  spontaneous  interests  wisely 
interpreted. 

Religion  will  always  hold  as  prominent  a  place  in  woman's 
life  as  politics  does  in  man's,  and  adolescence  is  still  more  its 
seedtime  with  girls  than  with  boys.  Its  roots  are  the  senti- 
ment of  awe  and  reverence,  and  it  is  the  great  agent  in  the 
world  for  transforming  life  from  its  earlier  selfish  to  its  only 
really  mature  form  of  altruism.  The  tales  of  the  heroes  of 
virtue,  duty,  devotion,  and  self-sacrifice  from  the  Old  Testa- 
ment come  naturally  first;  then  perhaps  the  prophets  para- 
phrased as  in  the  pedagogic  triumph  of  Kent  and  Saunders's 
little  series ;  and  when  adolescence  is  at  its  height  then  the 
chief  stress  of  religious  instruction  should  be  laid  upon  Jesus's 
life  and  work.  (See  this  topic  in  Chapter  XV.)  He  should 
be  taught  first  humanly,  and  only  later  when  the  limitations 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         641 

of  manhood  seem  exhausted  should  his  deity  be  adduced  as  a 
welcome  surplusage.  The  supernatural  is  a  reflex  of  the 
heart ;  each'  sustains  and  neither  can  exist  without  the  other. 
If  the  transcendent  and  supernal  had  no  objective  existence, 
we  should  have  to  invent  and  teach  them,  or  dwarf  the  life 
of  feeling  and  sentiment.  Whatever  else  religion  is,  there- 
fore, it  is  the  supremest  poetry  of  the  soul,  reflecting  like 
nothing  else  all  that  is  deepest,  most  generic  and  racial  in  it. 
Theology  should  be  reduced  to  a  minimum,  but  nothing  denied 
where  wanted.  Paul  and  his  works  and  ways  should  be  for 
the  most  part  deferred  until  after  eighteen.  The  juvenile  as 
well  as  the  cyclone  revivalist  should  be  very  carefully  ex- 
cluded, and  yet  in  every  springtime,  when  nature  is  recreated, 
service  and  teaching  should  gently  encourage  the  revival  and 
even  the  regeneration  of  all  the  religious  instincts.  The  mis- 
sion recruiter  should  be  allowed  to  do  his  work  outside  these 
halls,  and  everything  in  the  way  of  infection  and  all  that 
brings  religion  into  conflict  with  good  taste  and  good  sense 
should  be  excluded,  while  esthetics  should  supplement,  reen- 
force,  and  go  hand  in  hand  with  piety.  Religion  is  in  its 
infancy,  and  woman,  who  has  sustained  it  in  the  past,  must 
be  the  chief  agent  in  its  further  and  higher  development.  Or- 
thodoxies and  all  narrowness  should  forever  give  place  to  cor- 
dial hospitality  toward  every  serious  view,  which  should  be 
met  by  the  method  of  greater  sympathy  rather  than  that  of 
criticism. 

Nature  in  her  many  phases  should,  of  course,  make  up  a 
large  part  of  the  entire  curriculum  (see  Chapter  XII),  but 
here  again  the  methods  of  the  sexes  should  differ  somewhat 
after  puberty.  The  poetic  and  mythic  factors  and  some 
glimpses  of  the  history  of  science  should  be  given  more  promi- 
nence: the  field  naturalist  rather  than  the  laboratory  man  of 
technic  should  be  the  ideal  especially  at  first ;  nature  should  be 
taught  as  God's  first  revelation,  as  an  Old  Testament  related 
to  the  Bible  as  a  primordial  dispensation  to  a  later  and  clearer 
and  more  special  one.  Reverence  and  love  should  be  the 
motive  powers,  and  no  aspect  should  be  studied  without  be- 
ginning and  culminating  in  interests  akin  to  devotion.  Math- 
ematics should  be  taught  only  in  its  rudiments,  and  those  with 
special  talents  or  tastes  for  it  should  go  to  agamic  schools. 

80 


642  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Chemistry,  too,  although  not  excluded,  should  have  a  subordi- 
nate place.  The  average  girl  has  little  love  of  sozzling  and 
mussing  with  the  elements,  and  cooking  involves  problems  in 
organic  chemistry  too  complex  to  be  understood  very  pro- 
foundly, but  the  rudiments  of  household  chemistry  should  be 
taught.  Physics,  too,  should  be  kept  to  elementary  stages. 
Meteorology  should  have  a  larger,  and  geology  and  astronomy 
increasingly  larger  places,  and  are  especially  valuable  because, 
and  largely  in  proportion  as,  they  are  taught  out  of  doors,  but 
the  general  principles  and  the  untechnical  and  practical  as- 
pects should  be  kept  in  the  foreground.  With  botany  more 
serious  work  should  be  done.  Plant-lore  and  the  poetic  aspect, 
as  in  astronomy,  should  have  attention  throughout,  while  Latin 
nomenclature  and  microscopic  technic  should  come  late  if  at 
all,  and  vulgar  names  should  have  precedence  over  Latin  ter- 
minology. Flowers,  gardening,  and  excursions  should  never 
be  wanting.  Economic  and  even  medical  aspects  should  ap- 
pear, and  prominent  and  early  should  come  the  whole  matter  of 
self  cross-fertilization  and  that  by  insects.  The  moral  value  of 
this  subject  will  never  be  fully  understood  till  we  have  what 
might  almost  be  called  a  woman's  botany,  constructed  on  lines 
different  from  any  of  the  text-books  I  have  glanced  at.  Here 
much  knowledge  interesting  in  itself  can  be  early  taught,  which 
will  spring  up  into  a  world  of  serviceable  insights  as  adoles- 
cence develops  and  the  great  law  of  sex  unfolds. 

Zoology  should  always  be  taught  with  plenty  of  pets, 
menagerie  resources,  and  with  aquaria,  aviaries,  apiaries, 
formicaries,  etc.,  as  adjuncts.  It  should  start  in  the  environ- 
ment like  everything  else.  Bird  and  animal  lore,  books,  and 
pictures  should  abound  in  the  early  stages,  and  the  very  pro- 
lific chapter  of  instincts  should  have  ample  illustration,  while 
the  morphological  nomenclature  and  details  of  structure 
should  be  less  essential.  Woman  has  domesticated  nearly  all 
the  animals,  and  is  so  superior  to  man  in  insight  into  their 
modes  of  life  and  psychoses  that  many  of  them  are  almost 
exemplifications  of  moral  qualities  to  her  even  more  than  to 
man.  The  peacock  is  an  embodied  expression  of  pride,  the 
pig  of  filth,  the  fox  of  cunning,  the  serpent  of  subtle  danger, 
the  eagle  of  sublimity,  the  goose  of  stupidity,  and  so  on 
through  all  the  range  of  human  qualities,  as  we  have  seen. 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS  AND  THEIR  EDUCATION         H3 

At  bottom,  however,  the  study  of  animal  life  is  coming  to  be 
more  and  more  a  problem  of  heredity,  and  its  problems  should 
have  dominant  position  and  to  them  the  other  matter  should 
grade  up. 

This  shades  over  into  and  prepares  for  the  study  of  the 
primitive  man  and  child  so  closely  related  to  each  other.  The 
myth,  custom,  belief,  domestic  practises  of  savages,  vegetative 
and  animal  traits  in  infancy  and  childhood,  the  development  of 
which  is  a  priceless  boon  for  the  higher  education  of  women, 
open  of  themselves  a  great  field  of  human  interest  where 
she  needs  to  know  the  great  results,  the  striking  details,  the 
salient  illustrations,  the  basal  principles  rather  than  to  be 
entangled  in  the  details  of  anthropometry,  craniometry,  phi- 
lology, etc. 

All  this  lays  the  basis  for  a  larger  study  of  modern  man, 
history  with  the  biographical  element  very  prominent  through- 
out, with  plenty  of  stories  of  heroes  of  virtue,  acts  of  valor, 
tales  of  saintly  lives  and  the  personal  element  more  prominent, 
and  specialization  in  the  study  of  dynasties,  wars,  authorities, 
and  controversies  relegated  to  a  very  subordinate  place.  Soci- 
ology, undeveloped,  rudimentary,  and  in  some  places  suspected 
as  it  is,  should  have  in  the  curriculum  of  her  higher  education 
a  place  above  political  economy.  The  stories  of  the  great  re- 
forms, and  accounts  of  the  constitution  of  society,  of  the 
home,  church,  state,  and  school,  and  philanthropies  and  ideals, 
should  come  to  the  fore. 

Art  in  all  its  forms  should  be  opened  at  least  in  a  propae- 
deutic way  and  individual  tastes  amply  and  judiciously  fed, 
but  there  should  be  no  special  training  in  music  without  some 
taste  and  gift,  and  the  aim  should  be  to  develop  critical  and 
discriminative  appreciation  and  the  good  taste  that  sees  the 
vast  superiority  of  all  that  is  good  and  classic  over  what  is 
cheap  and  fustian. 

In  literature,  myth,  poetry,  and  drama  should  perhaps  lead, 
and  the  knowledge  of  the  great  authors  in  the  vernacular  fos- 
tered. Greek,  Hebrew,  and  perhaps  Latin  languages  should 
be  entirely  excluded,  not  but  what  they  are  of  great  value  and 
have  their  place,  but  because  a  smattering  knowledge  is  bought 
at  too  high  a  price  of  ignorance  of  more  valuable  things. 
German,  French,  and  Italian  should  be  allowed  and  provided 


644  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

for  by  native  teachers  and  by  conversational  methods  if  de- 
sired, and  in  their  proper  season. 

In  the  studies  of  the  soul  of  man,  generally  called  the  phil- 
osophic branches,  metaphysics  and  epistemology  should  have 
the  smallest,  and  logic  the  next  least  place.  Psychology  should 
be  taught  on  the  genetic  basis  of  animals  and  children,  and 
one  of  its  tap-roots  should  be  developed  from  the  love  of  in- 
fancy'and  youth,  than  which  nothing  in  all  the  world  is  more 
worthy.  If  a  woman  Descartes  ever  arises,  she  will  put  life 
before  theory,  and  her  watchword  will  be  not  cogito,  ergo  sum, 
but  siun,  ergo  cogito.  The  psychology  of  sentiments  and  feel- 
ings and  intuitions  will  take  precedence  of  that  of  pure  intel- 
lect ;  ethics  will  be  taught  on  the  basis  of  the  whole  series  of 
practical  duties  and  problems,  and  the  theories  of  the  ulti- 
mate nature  of  right  or  the  constitution  of  conscience  will  have 
small  place. 

Domesticity  will  be  taught  by  example  in  some  ideal  home 
building  by  a  kind  of  laboratory  method.  A  nursery  with  all 
carefully  selected  appliances  and  adjuncts,  a  dining-room,  a 
kitchen,  bedroom,  closets,  cellars,  outhouses,  building,  its 
material,  the  grounds,  lawn,  shrubbery,  hothouse,  library,  and 
all  the  other  adjuncts  of  the  hearth  will  be  both  exemplified 
and  taught.  A  general  course  in  pedagogy,  especially  its  his- 
tory and  ideals,  another  in  child  study,  and  finally  a  course  in 
maternity  the  last  year  taught  broadly,  and  not  without  prac- 
tical details  of  nursing,  should  be  comprehensive  and  cul- 
minating. In  its  largest  sense  education  might  be  the  heart  of 
all  the  higher  training  of  young  women. 

Applied  knowledge  will  thus  be  brought  to  a  focus  in  a 
department  of  teaching  as  one  of  the  specialties  of  motherhood 
and  not  as  a  vocation  apart.  The  training  should  aim  to  de- 
velop power  of  maternity  in  soul  as  well  as  in  body,  so  that 
home  influence  may  extend  on  and  up  through  the  plastic  years 
of  pubescence,  and  future  generations  shall  not  rebel  against 
these  influences  until  they  have  wrought  their  perfect  work. 

The  methods  throughout  should  be  objective,  with  copious 
illustrations  by  way  of  object-lessons,  apparatus,  charts,  pic- 
tures, diagrams,  and  lectures,  far  less  book  work  and  recita- 
tion, only  a  limited  amount  of  room  study,  the  function  of 
examination  reduced  to  a  minimum,  and  everything  as  sug- 


ADOLESCENT   GIRLS   AND   THEIR   EDUCATION         645 

gestive  and  germinal  as  possible.  Hints  that  are  not  followed 
up;  information  not  elaborated  into  a  thin  pedagogic  sillabub 
or  froth ;  seed  that  is  sown  on  the  waters  with  no  thought  of 
reaping;  faith  in  a  God  who  does  not  pay  at  the  end  of  each 
week,  month,  or  year,  but  who  always  pays  abundantly  some 
time;  training  which  does  not  develop  hypertrophied  memory- 
pouches  that  carry,  or  creative  powers  that  discover  and  pro- 
duce— these  are  lines  on  which  such  an  institution  should  de- 
velop. Specialization  has  its  place,  but  it  always  hurts  a 
woman's  soul  more  than  a  man's,  should  always  come  later, 
and  if  there  is  special  capacity  it  should  be  trained  elsewhere. 
Unconscious  education  is  a  power  of  which  we  have  yet  to 
learn  the  full  ranges. 

In  most  groups  in  this  series  of  ideal  departments  there 
should  be  at  least  one  healthful,  wise,  large-souled,  honorable, 
married  and  attractive  man,  and,  if  possible,  several  of  them. 
His  very  presence  in  an  institution  for  young  women  gives 
poise,  polarizes  the  soul,  and  gives  wholesome  but  long-cir- 
cuited tension  at  root  no  doubt  sexual,  but  all  unconsciously  so. 
This  mentor  should  not  be  more  father  than  brother,  though 
he  should  combine  the  best  of  each,  but  should  add  another 
element.  He  need  not  be  a  doctor,  clergyman,  or  even  a  great 
scholar,  but  should  be  accessible  for  confidential  conferences 
even  though  intimate.  He  should  know  the  soul  of  the  adoles- 
cent girl  and  how  to  prescribe ;  he  should  be  wise  and  fruitful 
in  advice,  but  especially  should  be  to  all  a  source  of  con- 
tagion and  inspiration  for  poise  and  courage  even  though 
religious  or  medical  problems  be  involved.  But  even  if  he 
lack  all  these  latter  qualities,  though  he  be  so  poised  that  im- 
pulsive girls  can  turn  their  hearts  inside  out  in  his  presence 
and  perhaps  even  weep  on  his  shoulder,  the  presence  of  such  a 
being,  though  a  complete  realization  of  this  ideal  could  be  only 
remotely  approximated,  would  be  the  center  of  an  atmosphere 
most  wiiolesomely  tonic. 

In  these  all  too  meager  outlines  I  have  sketched  a  human- 
istic and  liberal  education  and  have  refrained  from  all  details 
and  special  curriculization.  Many  of  the  above  features  I 
believe  would  be  as  helpful  for  boys  as  girls,  but  woman  has 
here  an  opportunity  to  resume  her  exalted  and  supreme  posi- 
tion, to  be  the  first  in  this  higher  field,  to  lead  man  and  pay 


/ 


646  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

her  debt  to  his  educational  institutions,  by  resuming  her 
crown.  The  ideal  institutions,  however,  for  the  two  will 
always  be  radically  and  probably  always  increasingly  di- 
vergent. 

As  a  psychologist,  penetrated  with  the  growing  sense  of 
the  predominance  of  the  heart  over  the  mere  intellect,  I  be- 
lieve myself  not  alone  in  desiring  to  make  a  tender  declaration 
of  being  more  and  more  passionately  in  love  with  woman  as 
I  conceive  she  came  from  the  hand  of  God.  I  keenly  envy 
my  Catholic  friends  their  Maryolatry.  Who  ever  asked  if  the 
holy  mother,  whom  the  wise  men  adored,  knew  the  astronomy 
of  the  Chaldees  or  had  studied  Egyptian  or  Babylonian,  or 
even  whether  she  knew  how  to  read  or  write  her  own  tongue, 
and  who  has  ever  thought  of  caring?  We  can  not  conceive 
that  she  bemoaned  any  limitations  of  her  sex,  but  she  has  been 
an  object  of  adoration  all  these  centuries  because  she  glorified 
womanhood  by  being  more  generic,  nearer  the  race,  and  richer 
in  love,  pity,  unselfish  devotion  and  intuition  than  man.  The 
glorified  madonna  ideal  shows  us  how  much  more  whole  and 
holy  it  is  to  be  a  woman  than  to  be  artist,  orator,  professor, 
or  expert,  and  suggests  to  our  own  sex  that  to  be  a  man  is 
larger  than  to  be  gentleman,  philosopher,  general,  president, 
or  millionaire. 

But  with  all  this  love  and  hunger  in  my  heart,  I  can  not 
help  sharing  in  the  growing  fear  that  modem  woman,  at  least 
in  more  ways  and  places  than  one,  is  in  danger  of  declining 
from  her  orbit;  that  she  is  coming  to  lack  just  confidence  and 
pride  in  her  sex  as  such,  and  is  just  now  in  danger  of  lapsing 
to  mannish  ways,  methods,  and  ideals,  until  her  original  di- 
vinity may  become  obscured.  But  if  our  worship  at  her  shrine 
is  with  a  love  and  adoration  a  little  qualified  and  unsteady, 
we  have  a  fixed  and  abiding  faith  without  which  we  should 
have  no  resource  against  pessimism  for  the  future  of  our  race, 
that  she  will  ere  long  evolve  a  sphere  of  life  and  even  educa- 
tion which  fits  her  needs  as  well  as,  if  not  better  than,  those 
of  man  fit  his. 

Meanwhile,  if  the  eternally  womanly  seems  somewhat  less 
divine,  we  can  turn  with  unabated  faith  to  the  eternally  child- 
like, the  best  of  which  in  each  are  so  closely  related.     The 


ADOLESCENT  GIRLS  AND  THEIR  EDUCATION         647 

oracles  of  infancy  and  childhood  will  never  fail.  Distracted 
as  we  are  in  the  maze  of  new  sciences,  skills,  ideals,  knowl- 
edges that  we  can  not  fully  coordinate  by  our  logic  or  cur- 
riculize  by  our  pedagogy;  confused  between  the  claims  of 
old  and  new  methods;  needing  desperately  for  survival  as  a 
nation  and  a  race  some  clue  to  thrid  the  mazes  of  the  manifold 
modern  cultures,  we  have  now  at  least  one  source  to  which 
we  can  turn — we  have  found  the  only  magnet  in  all  the  uni- 
verse that  points  steadfastly  to  the  undiscovered  pole  of  human 
destiny.  We  know  what  can  and  will  ultimately  coordinate 
in  the  generic,  which  is  larger  than  the  logical  order,  all  that 
is  worth  knowing,  teaching,  or  doing  by  the  best  methods,  that 
will  save  us  from  misfits  and  the  waste  ineffable  of  premature 
and  belated  knowledge,  and  that  is  in  the  interests  and  line  of 
normal  development  in  the  child  in  our  midst  that  must  hence- 
forth ever  lead  us ;  which  epitomizes  in  its  development  all  the 
stages,  human  and  prehuman;  that  is  the  proper  object  of  all 
that  strange  new  love  of  everything  that  is  naive,  spontaneous, 
and  unsophisticated  in  human  nature.  The  heart  and  soul  of 
growing  childhood  is  the  criterion  by  which  we  judge  the 
larger  heart  and  soul  of  mature  w^omanhood,  and  these  are 
ultimately  the  only  guide  into  the  heart  of  the  new  education 
which  is  to  be,  when  the  school  becomes  what  Melanchthon 
said  it  must  be — a  true  workshop  of  the  Holy  Ghost — and 
what  the  new  psychology,  when  it  rises  to  the  heights  of 
prophecy,  foresees  as  the  true  paradise  of  restored  intuitive 
human  nature. 


g,,p,.  Office,  CouvtHous. 


CHAPTER    XVIII 

ETHNIC  PSYCHOLOGY  AND  PEDAGOGY,  OR  ADOLESCENT  RACES 
AND  THEIR  TREATMENT 

Present  status  of  one-third  of  the  race — Analogies  with  Homeric  society — New 
cosmic  consciousness — Value  of  primitive  stirps.  I.  Extirpation  of  wild  ani- 
mals, past  and  present,  compared  to  that  of  primitive  people — Conceit  of  civili- 
zation— Beothuks,  Tasmanians,  Australians,  Maori,  Samoyeds,  II.  Hawai- 
ians  and  their  history  and  present  state.  III.  Filipinos — Opinions  and  policy. 
IV.  Africa — Effects  of  contact  with  higher  races — The  Belgian  policy — The 
English  course — Traits  and  tribal  organization  of  representation — Tribes — 
Slavery — The  negro  in  America — Educational  methods.  V.  American  abo- 
rigines—  Eskimos,  Patagonians,  Aztecs,  Huichols,  Peruvians,  Nicaraguans, 
Canadian  tribes  and  those  of  the  United  States — History — Spanish  laws — 
Views  of  various  writers — Duncan  and  the  Metlakahtlans — Indian  education — 
Indian  ethnologists  and  their  work.  VI.  India — Benefits  and  evils  of  British 
rule  from  official  records — Incommensurability  of  Orient  and  Occident — Eura- 
sians— Leitner's  educational  experiment — Fielding  Hall  and  the  Burmese — 
The  Straits  Settlement — Colonial  policies  past  and  present — Effects  of  the 
world's  now  being  all  known  and  partitioned — What  is  savagery  ? — Ascending 
and  decadent  races — Curricula  of  race  pedagogy  and  hygiene — Points  of  fric- 
tion between  higher  and  lower  races — Race  improvement  by  stirpiculture — 
Value  and  need  of  the  higher  anthropology  for  education  and  as  the  basis  of 
dealing  with  undeveloped  people.  VII.  Missionaries — History  and  present 
state  of  mission  work — Criticisms  of  attitude  and  methods — Education  of  mis- 
sionaries— Their  work  in  China  and  India — The  true  ideal,  aim,  and  method 
of  propagating  Christianity — Need  of  study  and  care  of  lower  races  as  we 
study  childhood  and  youth — They  may  succeed  us  in  wielding  the  resources  of 
the  world. 

No  study  of  adolescence  can  be  complete  without  some 
study  of  nearly  one-third  of  the  human  race,  occupying  two- 
fifths  of  the  land  surface  of  the  globe,  now  included  in  the 
one  hundred  and  thirty-six  colonies  and  dependencies  of  the 
world,  that  are  in  a  relation  of  greater  or  less  subjection  to 
a  few  civilized  nations.  Nearly  all  habitable  lands  are  now 
discovered  and  their  peoples  known  and  partitioned  among 
the  powers.  This  process  has  gone  on  with  amazing  rapidity 
since  the  great  competitive  scramble  for  land  which  began  in 
648 


ADOLESCENT   RACES   AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       649 

1897.  Christianity  and  mission  enterprise  have  long  dreamed 
of  universal  dominion,  and  now  business  and  trade,  coinage, 
weights  and  measures,  postal  system,  fashions  and  educa- 
tional methods  are  taking  on  cosmic  dimensions.  Back  of 
politics,  and  even  of  history,  are  looming  up  far  greater 
ethnological  and  genetic  problems,  which  give  a  vastly 
deepened  background  and  an  enlarged  horizon  to  history,  all 
of  which  is  but  news  of  the  day  compared  with  the  past  ages 
through  which  heredity  has  been  doing  its  silent  work.  All 
this  summons  us  to  larger  views,  and  marks  the  present  and 
near  future  as  by  far  the  greatest  of  all  the  historic  periods 
and  opens  the  most  magnificent  opportunities  ever  presented 
to  education  and  to  a  new  constructive  statesmanship.  Ideally 
the  two  are  one  and  inseparable.  As  we  are  gradually  putting 
the  child-world  into  schools  of  the  latest  type,  so  the  primitive 
men  and  women  of  the  world  are  coaxed  or  constrained  to 
take  up  the  burden  of  the  white  man's  civilization,  and  those 
who  can  not  or  will  not  are  following  to  extinction  the  larger 
wild  animals  about  them  that  resist  domestication. 

Most  savages  in  most  respects  are  children,  or,  because  of 
sexual  maturity,  more  properly,  adolescents  of  adult  size. 
Even  stirps  generally  agreed  to  be  decadent  often  exemplify 
the  symptom  of  dementia  prcBcox  (Chapter  VII)  magnified 
to  macrobiotic  dimensions.  Their  faults  and  their  virtues  are 
those  of  childhood  and  youth.  They  need  the  same  careful 
and  painstaking  study,  lavish  care,  and  adjustment  to  their 
nature  and  needs.  The  inexorable  laws  of  forcing,  precocity, 
severity,  and  overwork,  produce  similar  results  for  both. 
Primitive  peoples  have  the  same  right  to  linger  in  the  para- 
dise of  childhood.  To  war  upon  them  is  to  war  on  children. 
To  commercialize  and  oppress  them  with  work  is  child  labor 
on  a  large  scale.  Without  them  our  earthly  home  would  be 
left  indeed  desolate.  They  live  a  life  of  feeling,  emotion,  and 
impulse,  and  scores  of  testimonials  from  those  who  know 
them  intimately,  and  who  have  no  predilection  for  Rousseau- 
like views,  are  to  the  effect  that  to  know  a  typical  savage  is  to 
love  him.  The  individual  is  always  merged  in  the  tribe,  and 
only  the  chief,  and  often  not  even  he,  can  give  pledges  or 
make  bargains.  Their  condition  is  very  much  like  that  which 
Homer  describes,  in  which  law,  literature,  religion,  science, 


650  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

ethics,  art,  and  all  the  other  elements  of  culture  are  not 
specialized,  but  implicit  in  the  daily  life  and  mind  of  each 
individual.  If  unspoiled  by  contact  with  the  advanced  wave 
of  civilization,  which  is  too  often  its  refuse,  and  in  which 
their  best  is  too  often  unequally  matched  against  our  worst, 
they  are  mostly  virtuous,  simple,  confiding,  affectionate,  and 
peaceful  among  themselves,  curious,  light-hearted,  amazingly 
religious  and  healthful,  with  bodies  in  nearly  every  function 
superior  to  ours  and  frequently  models  for  the  artist,  and 
the  faults  we  see  are  usually  those  we  have  made.  Even  the 
sixty  troglodyte  skulls  that  Horsley  measured  showed  great 
development,  and  demonstrated  that  the  art  of  trephining  was 
well  understood  and  practised.  The  best  of  the  lower  races 
represent  that  most  precious  thing  in  the  world — stocks  and 
breeds  of  men  of  new  types  and  varieties,  full  of  new  promise 
and  potency  for  our  race,  because  heredity  so  outweighs  civi- 
lization and  schooling.  Such  were  the  Germans  who  in  the 
days  of  Tacitus  just  escaped  Roman  imperialism;  the  in- 
habitants of  England  in  the  days  of  Roman  occupation,  and 
even  in  the  time  of  Alfred  the  Great ;  and  the  Japanese  in  1840, 
when  the  powers  would  have  divided  their  land  among  them- 
selves could  they  have  agreed  on  terms  and  shares,  and  thus 
robbed  the  world  of  modern  Japan. 

I.  Extinctions. — For  years  the  great  auk,  now  known  to 
be  the  key  to  many  biological  problems,  was  killed  by  ship- 
loads, but  in  1844  became  extinct,  only  seventy-two  specimens 
existing  to-day  in  all  the  museums  of  the  world.  Every  few 
years  we  have  lists  of  species  and  varieties  of  animal  life 
newly  exterminated.  In  the  Smithsonian  Museum  hangs  a 
copy  of  the  painting  by  J.  H.  Moser,  called  The  Still  Hunt. 
It  is  of  a  man  hidden  and  secure  on  a  high  rock,  shooting 
buffalo,  and  beneath  it  is  inscribed,  "  This  illustrates  the 
method  by  which  the  great  Southern  bison  herd  of  about  five 
million  animals  was  almost  utterly  exterminated  in  five  years 
(187 1 -'75),  and  the  Northern  herd  totally  destroyed  in  1881- 
'83."  The  wild  ass,  zebu,  giraffe,  ostrich,  seals,  all  the  higher 
apes — chimpanzee,  gibbon,  orang,  and  gorilla — gnus,  elands, 
mountain  zebras,  and  many  other  forms,  have  a  rapidly  nar- 
rowing habitat,  or  are  in  danger  of  extinction  for  hides, 
plumes,  ivory,  and  often  for  the  sole  pleasure  of  killing.     For 


ADOLESCENCE   ARTS  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       651 

South  Africa  it  was  found  necessary  for  the  seven  great 
nations  most  concerned,  to  form,  in  May,  1900,  a  pact  against 
exterminations.  Second  only  to  commercial  motives  is  the 
hunting  passion,  which  in  prehistoric  times  exterminated  the 
mammoth,  Irish  elk,  cave  bear,  woolly  rhinoceros,  etc.,  in  the 
long,  hot  struggle  by  which  man  became  the  lord  of  the 
animal  creation.  His  war  for  survival  against  the  creatures 
next  below  him  in  the  scale  of  being  has  been  so  successful 
that  he  has  wiped  out  his  own  phylogenetic  line  of  ascent,  and 
separated  himself  from  his  animal  forebears  by  many  a  missing 
link  which  science  can  not  yet  recover.  The  fact  that  he  can 
not  trace  his  line  of  descent  is  a  ghastly  monument  to  the 
relentlessness  with  which  he  has  waged  this  war  of  extermi- 
nation. Man  is  the  only  known  creature  that  has  destroyed 
his  own  pedigree.  Only  the  few  score  of  animals  which 
primitive  woman  domesticated  for  food  or  service  can  thrive 
beside  him,  and  his  clubrooms  and  dwellings  are  still  deco- 
rated with  the  products  of  his  head-hunting  prowess  against 
creatures  whom  Schelling  called  our  older  brothers,  and  whom 
all  totem-worshiping  savages  revere  as  the  fathers  of  all 
their  life  and  light.  Even  laws  against  illegitimate  methods 
and  wholesale  and  useless  destruction,  which  have  multiplied 
so  fast  in  all  civilized  lands  in  the  last  few  years,  are  hard 
to  enforce.  Colonel  Farrington  states  that  about  five  thou- 
sand hunters  each  year  pursue  moose  and  deer  in  Maine 
alone,  and  that  close  time  and  protection  laws  are  a  farce. 

Now  all  this  is  in  many  respects  paralleled  by  the  relation 
between  civilized  and  savage  man.  Never,  perhaps,  were 
lower  races  being  extirpated  as  weeds  in  the  human  garden, 
both  by  conscious  and  organic  processes,  so  rapidly  as  to-day. 
In  many  minds  this  is  inevitable  and  not  without  justifica- 
tion. Pity  and  sympathy,  says  Nietzsche,  are  now  a  disease, 
and  we  are  summoned  to  rise  above  morals  and  clear  the 
world's  stage  for  the  survival  of  those  who  are  fittest  because 
strongest.  The  supreme  good,  says  Guyau,  is  diffusum  sui. 
The  world  will  soon  be  overcrowded,  and  we  must  begin  to 
take  selective  agencies  into  our  own  hands.  Primitive  races 
are  either  hopelessly  decadent  and  moribund,  or  at  best  have 
demonstrated  their  inability  to  domesticate  or  civilize  them- 
selves.    History  shows,  too,  that  each  of  the  great  races  has 


652  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

developed  upon  a  basis  of  a  lower  one,  and  our  own  progress 
has  been  so  amazing  that  in  it  we  read  our  title  clear  to 
dominion.  If  they  linger,  they  must  take  up  our  burden  of 
culture  and  work.  This  sentiment  has  found  several  remark- 
able expressions  in  Europe  within  the  last  few  years,  both 
by  soldiers  and  thinkers.  Let  us  pause  to  glance  at  a  few 
illustrations  of  complete  and  impending  exterminations. 

The  aborigines  of  Newfoundland,  and  especially  the  Beothuk  tribe, 
afford  an  illustration  of  the  utter  extinction  of  an  ethnic  stock  of 
unknown  origin  and  affinities,  which  some  think  a  branch  of  the 
Algonkins  or  that  they  had  Eskimo  blood,  who  perhaps  descended 
from  the  cavemen  of  Europe.  They  are  doubtless  the  same  people, 
maintaining  their  organizations  unchanged  from  the  time  of  the  voyage 
of  Cabot,  who  first  saw  them.'  The  Government,  says  Mr.  Hatton, 
considered  that  loyalty  to  England  made  it  imperative  to  depopulate 
Newfoundland,  and  down  to  about  one  hundred  years  ago  the  subtle 
policy  of  the  fishing  admirals  was  to  destroy  all  houses,  suppress  colo- 
nization, and  make  all  this  great  island  a  fishing  station.  This  condi- 
tion, added  to  the  fact  that  the  whites  regarded  the  natives  as  vermin, 
whom  their  fierce  neighbors,  the  Micmacs,  helped  to  exterminate,  re- 
duced a  population  estimated  at  thousands  to  a  single  female,  named 
Mary  Marsh,  captured  in  1819,  whose  vocabulary  was  carefully  re- 
corded, and  with  whose  death  in  1828  the  race  ceased  to  exist.  Like 
other  lost  tribes,  they  have  had  no  historian  and  even  no  Ossian,  and 
are  without  any  representation  in  literature.  They  were  first  disposed 
to  be  friendly,  and  had  they  been  met  in  the  spirit  of  William  Penn, 
there  is  every  indication  that  they  would  have  welcomed  all  the  factors 
of  civilization  which  they  could  have  understood  and  entered  upon  a 
line  of  development.  But  they  were  shot  like  beasts  by  ruthless  hunts- 
men, who  kept  on  their  gun-stocks  tallies  of  the  "  heads  "  of  Indians 
they  had  killed.  The  settlers  neither  knew  nor  did  missionary  work, 
because  any  degree  of  civilization  would  render  the  natives  more  for- 
midable. The  pathos  of  this  case  is  to  many  greatly  heightened  by  the 
fact  that  the  entire  race  died  without  having  heard  of  Christianity,  and 
that  no  Beothuk  blood  runs  in  anybody's  veins,  but  all  cries  to  us 
from  the  ground. 

In  1642,  Tasman,  a  Dutch  sailor,  discovered  Van  Diemen's  Land, 
since  called  Tasmania,  the  aborigines  of  which  thought  themselves 
alone  in  the  world.  Tasman  himself  never  saw  them,  and  a  French- 
man, Marion,  in  1772  was  the  first  to  communicate  with  them.  They 
were  very  abject  savages,  for  the  most  part  utterly  naked,  rarely 
making   more   than   wattled   huts   or  sleeping   under   trees,    nomadic, 

'  Hatton  and  Harvey :  Newfoundland.  G.  W.  Patterson :  Red  Indians  of 
Newfoundland.     Proc.  Roy.  Soc.  of  Canada,  1891. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       653 

ignorant  of  metals,  with  pointed  wooden  spears  and  whirling  sticks 
for  weapons,  never  cultivating  the  land  cr  domesticating  any  animal, 
producing  fire  by  friction,  etc.;  but  they  were  bright,  with  a  highly 
developed  language,  with  abundant  food  provided  by  the  kangaroo, 
fowls,  and  many  forms  of  plant  life.  They  were  monogamic,  their 
women  almost  absolutely  chaste  and  almost  as  supreme  in  domestic 
as  men  were  in  extra-domestic  affairs.  Like  so  many  savages,  they 
were  great  mimics;  loved  practical  jokes;  took  such  pleasure  in  killing 
beyond  their  needs  as  to  almost  exterminate  some  useful  animals; 
burned  half-breed  babies ;  were  prone  to  attack  departing  guests,  as  if 
flight  incited  them;  their  women  both  climbed  and  swam  better  than 
the  men.  They  held  large  gatherings  and  chanted  at  the  full  moon 
with  a  kind  of  incantation.  The  greatest  bully  was  their  chief; 
they  greased  their  bodies  for  war ;  their  women  tried  to  spare  the  lives 
of  captives ;  they  could  eat  and  drink  enormously  upon  occasion,  and 
moved  from  place  to  place  to  avoid  their  offal.  The  French  authors, 
to  whom  we  owe  the  fullest  and  earliest  accounts  of  this  extraordinary 
people,  were  not,  like  many  Anglo-Saxons,  disposed  to  believe  the 
worst  about  aborigines,  but  rather  the  best.  The  young  girls  are 
described  as  affectionate,  with  interesting  and  often  "  spirituel  "  physi- 
ognomies, gifted  with  coquetry  and  attractions  which  quite  carried 
away  some  of  the  early  writers.' 

The  disposition  of  this  very  interesting  people  was  entirely  amica- 
ble, and  I  can  find  no  credible  cases  of  hostility  begun  by  them  until 
they  were  provoked  by  a  long  series  of  wrongs  and  outrages.  It  was 
their  custom  to  assemble  in  large  numbers  to  take  kangaroo  and  also 
for  their  corroborees.  These  gatherings  were  often  mistaken  by  the 
earliest  white  residents  for  hostile  demonstrations  and  were  fired  upon. 
In  1810  this  people,  too  independent  to  be  conquered  or  enslaved,  had 
become  thoroughly  aroused  and  hostile.  Their  resentment  had  been 
greatly  increased  by  the  general  practise  of  robbing  them  of  their 
children.  To  this  provocation,  jealousy  due  to  the  misuse  of  women 
by  the  sailors,  adventurers,  and  even  convicts ;  the  degradation  caused 
by  intoxicants  and  the  diseases  of  civilization;  the  aggressions  of  land- 
grabbers — all  fanned  the  flames  of  the  first  black  war,  which  is  the 
old,  old  tale  of  provocation  and  revenge.  The  destruction  of  the 
Guanches  on  the  Canary  Isles  by  the  Spaniards ;  the  extermination 
policy  of  Napoleon  against  the  Zulus ;  Las  Casas  in  his  destruction  of 
the  Indies,  every  line  of  which  is  said  to  be  written  in  blood — all  this 
was  paralleled  if  not  exceeded  here.  To  the  avarice  and  cruelty  of 
the  white  man,  blasting  this  simple  life,  had  been  added  the  outrages 
of  the  penal  convicts  who  were  released  in  1806,  in  a  season  of  famine, 
to  hunt  kangaroo.  Brutal  white  stock-keepers  and  others  shot  abo- 
rigines almost  on  sight.  Soon  bands  or  parties  were  organized,  osten- 
sibly at  first  for  defense,  then  avowedly  for  carrying  out  the  role  of 

^  James  Bonwick  :  The  Lost  Tasmanian  Race.  London,  1884.  H.  Ling- Roth: 
Tasmanians.     West :   History  of  Tasmania. 


654  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

punishing  the  death  of  every  white  by  that  of  ten  blacks,  and  scores 
of  atrocious  cruelties  and  many  utterly  nameless  outrages  not  only  on 
men,  but  on  women  and  children,  are  chronicled  in  detail.  Like  all 
weak  people,  however  brave,  the  Tasmanians  depended  on  guile  and 
strategy  rather  than  on  meeting  their  foes  in  open  field.  Their  only 
weapons  were  sharp  sticks  with  fire-heated  points  and  waddies.  Bor- 
derers, bushrangers,  cattle  stealers,  and  prisoners,  who  abound  on  the 
outskirts  of  civilization,  were  the  points  of  contact  between  the  two 
races. 

At  last  a  line  of  demarcation  was  laid  down  across  which  the 
natives  were  not  to  be  allowed.  Beyond  this  line,  banished  from  their 
summer  homes  and  the  graves  of  their  fathers  and  the  richer  hunting 
fields,  they  were  on  no  account  to  trespass.  All  who  did  not  keep 
bounds  were  to  be  captured  and  brought  in  at  five  pounds  a  head.  So 
hard  pressed  were  the  natives  that  they  often  relentlessly  slew  their 
young  children  that  their  cries  might  not  betray  their  whereabouts, 
that  they  might  not  delay  forced  marches  or  fall  into  the  hands  of 
their  enemies.  Not  a  single  white  woman  was  ever  known  to  have 
been  abused  by  any  native.  Gradually  they  were  driven  into  a  corner 
by  a  cordon  and  many  were  captured.  Three  thousand  white  men  in 
one  hundred  and  nineteen  squads,  each  with  its  leader,  were  con- 
tinuously engaged  in  line  operations.  Many  philanthropists  objected 
with  the  utmost  vehemence  to  this  policy,  and  an  intelligent  brick- 
layer, G.  A.  Robinson,  undertook  a  policy  of  conciliation.  Quick  to 
recognize  a  friend,  the  natives  hung  about  his  workshop,  and  he  was 
finally  given  a  very  small  salary  by  the  Government  to  devote  his 
entire  time  to  mitigating  the  bitterness  of  the  natives'  hostility. 
He  went  from  place  to  place,  interviewed  and  expostulated  with 
representatives  of  the  different  tribes,  and  had  many  hair-breadth 
escapes.  In  1832  many  captive  and  other  volunteer  aborigines  were 
transported  to  Flinder's  Island.  This  colony  grew  under  Robin- 
son's directorship,  and  in  1835  the  very  last  of  the  Tasmanians  were 
brought  in.  These  denizens  of  the  thicket  and  forest,  with  no  mari- 
time tastes  and  with  only  the  hated  waters  on  every  side,  pined  in 
their  rocky  prison.  They  would  sit  all  day  gazing  across  the  sea  to 
their  native  hills.  Home-sickness,  the  lack  of  activity  here,  where 
everything  was  provided  for  them,  caused  them  to  die  off  rapidly — 
their  enemies  said,  in  the  sulks  or  from  sheer  spite.  The  missionary 
and  teacher  now  had  free  access  to  them ;  they  were  protected  from 
strong  drink ;  married  in  due  European  form ;  and  glowing  accounts 
were  printed  of  their  progress  in  letters,  religion,  and  industry.  Their 
sudden  development  here  was  compared  to  that  of  Athens  under  Peri- 
cles, and  everything  pointed  toward  another  miracle  of  civilization, 
which,  it  was  prophesied,  would  soon  be  realized  here  but  for  the  "  only 
drawback  of  the  great  mortality  among  them."  Good  catechists  taught 
them  fluent  answers  to  the  points  of  Bible  history  and  orthodox  the- 
ology. Of  the  two  hundred  captured  in  1835,  there  were  only  one 
hundred  survivors.     In  1847  ^he  forty-four  survivors  were  removed 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       655 

from  Flinder's  Island  to  Oyster  Cove.  Here  they  continued  to  learn 
gardening,  the  value  of  money,  cleanliness,  and  cloth-making,  but 
diminished  rapidly  in  numbers.  They  were  more  exposed  to  the  "  bad 
white  fellows,"  who  here  stole  their  clothes  and  made  them  drink. 
The  survivors  became  discouraged  because  no  one  cared  for  them. 
From  Bacon  and  Puffendorff  downward,  it  had  been  asserted  that 
cannibals  were  beyond  law  and  could  be  legally  slain,  and  English 
law  asserts  that  native  hunting  tribes  have  no  right  nor  title  to  the 
land  on  which  they  dwell  if  they  refuse  to  till  it.  The  forcing  system 
with  natives  completely  in  the  power  of  their  instructors  produced 
several  limp  prodigies,  but  self-respect  and  hope  were  gone.  One 
pupil  who  took  prizes  at  Sydney  College,  spoke  good  Latin  and  be- 
haved like  a  gentleman,  returned  to  the  bush,  socially  ostracized,  and 
wished  he  had  never  been  taken  from  it.  It  was  a  pseudo  civilization, 
and  the  cry  to  rescue  the  remnant  came  too  late.  William  Lanny,  a 
magnificent  physical  specimen,  descended  from  a  chief,  became  a 
whaler.  He  was  young  and  handsome,  proud  of  the  gold  band  around 
his  cap,  but,  worn  out  with  dissipation,  died  at  the  age  of  thirty-four  in 
1869.  He  was  the  last  male.  The  scandal  attending  his  funeral  and 
the  disappearance  of  his  head  from  the  hospital  are  suggestive.  The 
last  Tasmanian  woman,  Truganina,  or  Lalla  Rookh,  died  in  1876,  and 
in  her  a  race  unique,  and  with  perhaps  great  possibilities  of  develop- 
ment, was  utterly  wiped  out. 

The  inhabitants  of  Oceanica,  says  Keane,  have  no  future  but  in 
heaven.  Missionaries  are  hastening  and  tell  us  they  will  soon  be 
Christianized,  and  anthropologists  add  that  a  little  later  all  will  be 
dead.  Three  captains  confessed  to  Dr.  Paton  that  they  had  repeatedly 
landed  measles  patients  at  different  points  "  to  sweep  these  creatures 
away  and  let  the  white  man  occupy  the  soil."  Darwin  thought  some 
mysterious  influence  at  work  and  that  human  varieties  exterminate 
each  other  as  do  different  animal  species.  The  weaker  sink  before 
the  stronger,  just  as  the  older  and  far  more  interesting  Polynesians, 
with  their  wealth  of  tradition,  sank  before  the  Malays. 

The  Australians  are  among  the  most  interesting  of  primitive  people, 
but  they  are  fast  dying  out,  and  the  twenty-eight  remaining  will  soon 
follow  the  Adelaide,  Burra,  Rupus,  and  other  extinct  tribes.  Lum- 
holtz '  says  "  the  same  fate  as  that  which  overtook  their  brothers  in 
Tasmania  is  in  store  for  the  natives  of  Australia.  They  are  without 
a  future,  without  a  home,  without  a  hope — a  doomed  race.  After  a 
few  generations,  his  race  will  have  disappeared  from  the  face  of  the 
earth."  He  declares  that  once  or  twice  colonists  offered  to  shoot 
blacks  for  him  so  that  he  could  get  their  skulls.  "  On  the  borders  of 
civilization  men  would  think  as  little  of  shooting  a  black  man  as  a  dog. 
The  law  imposes  death  by  hanging  as  the  penalty  for  killing  a  black 
man,  but  people  live  so  far  apart  in  these  uncivilized  regions  that  a 
white  man  may  in  fact  do  what  he  pleases  with  the  blacks."     "  In 

'  Among  Cannibals.     Four  Years'  Travel  in  Australia.     London,  1889, 


656  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

North  Queensland  I  often  heard  this  remark :  The  only  treatment 
proper  for  the  blacks  is  to  shoot  them  all.  They  are  unwilling  to 
work,  I  have  heard  colonists  say,  and  hence  they  are  unfit  to 
live."  "  There  are  instances  where  young  men  have  employed  the 
Sunday  in  hunting  blacks  not  only  for  some  definite  purpose,  but  also 
for  the  sake  of  the  sport.  The  blacks  have  also  been  killed  with 
poison."  "  A  farmer  whom  I  met  at  Lower  Herbert  boasted  that  he 
had  cremated  some  blacks  that  he  had  shot."  "  The  murder  of  in- 
fants increases,  syphilitic  diseases  become  common,  and  the  women 
having  become  prostitutes  cease  to  bear  children."  The  natives  are 
by  no  means  immoral  by  themselves,  and  the  "  young  black  women  had 
originally  a  certain  amount  of  modesty,"  but  the  frontier  white  man 
is  rather  brutal,  and  as  soon  as  he  comes  "  immorality  knows  no 
bounds  and  the  black  race  hasten  on  to  the  inevitable  ruin  awaiting 
them."  "  Sometimes  the  most  brutal  settlers  even  make  use  of  the 
revolver  to  compel  the  natives  to  surrender  their  women.  Sometimes 
they  even  kill  the  black  man  if  he  makes  resistance."  Matthew  says :  ^ 
"  It  seems  probable  that  in  Victoria  and  New  South  Wales,  at  least, 
there  will  not  be  a  single  pure  aborigine  surviving  fifty  years  hence." 

New  Zealand  is  the  Switzerland  of  the  southern  hemi- 
sphere and  the  most  advanced  social  democracy  on  earth.^ 
P.  W.  Reeves  tells  us  that  the  native  Maori,  once  numbering 
about  one  hundred  and  fifty  thousand,  will  soon  be  as  extinct 
as  their  own  moa.  "  Partial  civilization  has  blighted  their 
natural  life,"  says  E.  Hodder,^  "  while  with  one  hand  his 
English  brother  has  ennobled  the  Maori,  with  the  other  he  has 
destroyed ;  his  Christianity  has  striven  to  say,  *  Arise  and  go 
to  the  Father,'  civilization  has  actually  said,  *  Succumb  and 
go  to  the  devil.'  "  Macaulay's  prophecy  of  the  native  viewing 
the  ruins  of  London  from  the  bridge  will  be  unfulfilled.  J. 
Grattan  Grey  *  gives  a  vivid  picture  of  the  court  where  they 
can  deed  away  their  land,  stimulated  thereto  by  licensed  liquor- 
houses  near  by,  which  reap  a  golden  harvest.  The  work  of 
W.  Colenso  and  Rusden  and  others  have  given  their  char- 
acter, myths,  and  customs  a  pathetic  charm. 


'  Eagle-Hawk  and  Crow.     London,  1899,  p.  288. 

*  H.  D.  Lloyd  :   Newest  England.     New  York,  1900. 
»  The  Long  White  Cloud.     Ao  Tea  Toa,  1898,  p.  30. 

*  See  also  The  Maori  at  Home,  1901.  Also  in  this  connection,  H.  Mager: 
Le  Monde  Polynesian.  1902;  Swettenham ;  The  Real  Malay,  London,  1900 ; 
Codrington:  The  Melanesians,  Oxford,  1891  ;  W.  W.  Skeat :  Malay  Magic,  Lon- 
don, 1900. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       657 

Dr.  A.  Jacoby  ^  described  the  Samoyeds  of  a  generation 
or  two  ago  as  among  the  most  fortunate  and  interesting  of 
primitive  people,  and  thinks  they  would  still  be  so  could  the 
Russian  laws  concerning  them  be  carried  out.  They  migrated 
hundreds  of  miles  over  the  steppes  each  year,  some  families 
possessing  two  or  three  thousand  reindeer  to  which  new  set- 
tlers brought  anthrax,  and  robbed  them  of  the  rich  pasturage 
they  must  have  in  the  fall,  and  sapped  the  roots  of  their 
strange  religious  idealism,  so  elaborately  developed  in  the 
meditations  of  the  long  arctic  nights.  The  contempt  of  the 
new  settlers  is  their  death  sentence,  and  they  will  not  long 
survive,  save  a  remnant  in  the  Greenland  of  Denmark,  which 
best  knows  how  to  treat  the  northern  races.  Nisbet  describes, 
like  the  others  I  name,  not  as  a  partizan  or  even  historian,  but 
merely  as  an  anthropologist,  the  Papuans  of  New  Guinea — 
their  government  almost  identical  with  that  of  the  old  Scotch 
clan,  their  courtesy,  affability.  Spartan  simplicity,  admirable 
bodies — but  the  twilight  of  their  race  is  already  well  ad- 
vanced. The  same  story  is  told  by  Keate  of  the  Pelew  Island- 
ers :  by  Gautier  of  the  Hovas.  the  best  of  the  native  races 
in  Madagascar,  which  Wallace  thought  Lemuria,  the  original 
home  of  the  human  race;  and  of  the  Todas  of  India,  whom 
some  call  proto-Aryans,  with  remarkable  physical  develop- 
ment, and  now  reduced  to  a  few  hundred  individuals. 

II.  The  Haivaiian  Islands  have  lessons  of  unique  psycho- 
genetic  as  well  as  pedagogic  interest  for  us. 

No  navigator  was  ever  welcomed  as  was  Captain  Cook  in  1778, 
and  "  no  greater  opportunity  than  his  was  ever  offered  to  a  civilized 
man  to  impress  better  ideas  upon  a  savage  people."  *  Cook  "  was  treat- 
ed as  a  god,  as  the  long-Iooked-for  Lono  who  had  departed  generations 
ago  and  was  waited  for  with  a  sort  of  Messianic  instinct.  While  the 
natives,  true  to  their  Spartan  training,  stole  whatever  they  could  lay 
their  hands  on,  they  withheld  nothing  from  him,  for  his  ships  were 
loaded  with  their  gifts.  They  turned  on  him  only  when  he  stole  their 
chief:  they  killed  him  because,  when  they  struck  him  with  a  stone,  he 
gave  a  cry  of  pain.  '  Gods  do  not  cry,'  they  said,  and  stabbed  him 
in  the  neck.     His  visit  was  the  seedtime  of  the  fatal  disease  that  has 


'  Ueber  das  F.rldschen  der  Naturvolker  des  hohen  Nordes.     Archiv  f.  Anthro- 
pologic, vol.  xxiii,  1895,  p.  I  et  seq . 

2  Lessons  from  the  Hawaiian  Islands,  by  S.  C.  Armstrong. 

81 


658  THE   PSYCHOLOGY.  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

diminished  the  population  from  his  estimate  of  400,000  (probably  far 
too  large)  to  about  43,000  in  1883,"  and  39,504  in  1896.  Long  after 
his  death  ships  avoided  the  islands  from  fear,  but  firearms  and  far 
more  deadly  fire-water  were  in  demand,  and  trade  gradually  pressed 
in  and  made  for  peace.  Vancouver  in  1793  refused  to  sell  liquor  or 
guns ;  landed  the  first  cattle,  sheep,  poultry ;  gave  new  seeds,  settled 
quarrels,  and  saw  in  the  same  prince  that  Cook  thought  a  brutal  savage 
an  enlightened  sovereign.  "  The  golden  age  of  Polynesian  barbarism 
was  undoubtedly  from  1800  till  the  death  in  1820  of  Kamehameha  I, 
whose  equal  as  a  warrior  or  ruler  has  never  appeared  in  the  annals 
of  Oceanica."  He  was  a  conqueror  and  a  wise  colonizer ;  forbade  the 
premature  cutting  of  sandalwood,  a  point  of  great  importance  here; 
prohibited  drink;  broke  up  taboo;  and  his  heathen  subjects  were  far 
more  amenable  to  Christianity  than  the  outcasts  of  civilization.  He 
uprooted  idolatry  so  that  his  subjects  presented  the  rare  spectacle  of 
a  race  with  great  ability  without  a  religion.  The  results  of  pursuing 
labor,  which  began  in  1820,  were  slight  until  1837,  when  the  emotional 
natives  broke  out  into  a  religious  frenzy  which  swept  the  islands,  the 
complete  Christianization  of  which  is  one  of  the  standing  missionary 
marvels  without  parallel  in  history.  With  his  changed  religion,  the 
native's  habits  of  indolence  and  licentiousness  were  not  much  modified. 
It  was  soon  found  that  "  the  commercial  instinct  of  New  England  was 
far  stronger  in  Hawaii  than  its  religious  enterprise,"  yet  the  Christian- 
ization was  wholesale  and  unprecedentedly  sudden  and  complete,  but 
the  old  warfare  between  the  teachers  of  religion  and  the  lust  of  gain 
broke  out.  The  missionaries  were  denounced  and  the  lowest  passions 
of  the  natives  appealed  to,  so  that  Christianity  declined  for  a  time 
as  rapidly  as  it  had  grown.  As  epoch-making  as  Kamehameha  anni- 
hilating taboo  by  the  single  act  of  conspicuously  sitting  at  the  table  of 
the  women  on  a  great  occasion,  was  the  defiance  of  Pele  by  his  queen 
after  his  death,  who  descended  alone  into  the  crater  Kilauea  to  prove 
to  her  people  the  folly  of  their  superstitious  fear.  "  In  spite  of  their 
persuasions  and  threats  of  vengeance  awaiting  her,  she  accomplished 
her  purpose,  singing,  as  she  went  to  face  the  wrath  of  the  goddess,  a 
Christian  song,  and  returned  unharmed,  a  living  witness  against  the 
false  gods  from  whose  sway  she  had  so  lately  escaped." 

Christianity  changed  the  character  of  these  people,  transmuting 
their  pride  into  humility  and  kindness,  so  that  in  1843  the  king  volun- 
tarily gave  what  other  races  had  to  fight  for — a  constitution  and  lib- 
erty, relinquishing  also  two-thirds  of  his  individual  property  and 
private  lands.  Among  tropical  races,  not  ignorance,  but  weakness  of 
character,  idleness  and  the  vices  it  breeds,  is  the  chief  difficulty.  The 
missionaries  have  often  planted  but  not  watered,  and  have  neglected 
the  patient  and  vigilant  paternal  care  which  these  adult  children  need. 
The  savage's  intellect  is  quick  and  ready  and  his  memory  strong,  and 
knowledge  gives  him  emancipation  and  a  great  sense  of  power,  but 
his  moral  nature  is  inert  and  sluggish.  He  lacks  self-control,  so  that 
if  higher  education  is  attempted  at  all  among  backward  races  it  must 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND  THEIR  TREATMENT       659 

be  with  a  constant  sense  of  proportion.  "  Long  before  1850  a  church 
was  in  sight  from  every  hamlet;  the  Bible  was  in  every  hut;  and  the 
people  were  giving  more  to  religious  charities  according  to  their 
means  than  any  people  in  Christendom.  There  were  over  10,000,000 
printed  pages  in  their  own  language,  mostly  educational  matter,  and 
in  1843  18,000  children  attended  school.  This  was  the  maximum. 
There  were  (I  follow  here,  in  the  main,  Armstrong)  all  the  outward 
signs  of  a  nation  of  steady  habits,  but  the  energy  of  the  whites  was 
behind  and  sustained  it  all ;  the  people  were  passive,  plastic,  and  prac- 
tically infants.  Of  the  white  man's  signatures  on  the  public  pages  of 
that  day,  one-half  were  made  by  marks,  while  only  one  native  failed 
to  write  his  own  name.  In  reading  and  writing  the  natives  were  the 
equals  of  the  average  New  Englander,  but  being  made  of  very  unequal 
stuff  the  growth  was  not  from  within  outward.  The  two  races  were  in 
effect  two  thousand  years  apart  in  real  civilization.  The  Hawaiians 
in  their  little  Pacific  paradise  were,  like  Adam  and  Eve  in  Eden,  with- 
out hardship,  and  it  is  a  question  whether  humanity  can  develop  well 
under  paradisical  conditions.  They  accepted  civilization  but  did  not 
adopt  it ;  they  did  not  know  what  it  meant."  "  The  action  of  the 
American  Board  must  in  the  light  of  results  be  put  down  as  a  mistake 
as  to  facts  and  an  error  in  judgment."  "  In  thirty  years  they  had 
received  into  church  membership  50,000  souls,  of  whom  20,000  had 
died,  while  8,000  had  been  excommunicated."  "  Not  that  the  natives 
were  altogether  hypocrites,  but  hospitality  and  desire  to  please  are 
national  traits,  and  they  easily  took  the  point  of  view  of  their  guests." 
There  was  too  little  training  in  practical  life,  and  no  training  can 
"  make  heathen  into  Puritans."  "  A  maxim  of  mission  work  might 
well  be,  '  Ideas  take  root  in  a  moment,  habits  only  in  generations.'  " 
The  period  of  decay,  which  began  about  1850,  gathered  momentum. 
Intermarriage  with  a  stronger  race  is  changing  the  native's  mental  and 
bodily  traits  as  in  Siam,  while  education  divorces  him  from  his  early 
traditions.  It  also  increases  his  aversion  to  manual  labor  and  makes 
him  "  shun  the  field  as  the  owl  does  the  light  of  day."  He  prefers 
clerkships,  and  is  utterly  unable  to  compete  with  the  Chinaman,  who 
in  Hawaii  monopolizes  the  trades,  the  money,  and  the  women,  the 
offspring  with  whom  is,  like  many  Eurasian  compounds,  better  than 
either  parents.  The  lower  class  woman  married  to  a  Chinaman,  or  one 
of  the  upper  class  to  a  white  man,  becomes  an  excellent  wife  and 
mother,  and  nowhere  else  are  race  distinctions  more  completely  oblit- 
erated, so  that  every  cross  is  possible.  The  Chinaman  who  came  in 
as  a  laborer  soon  hired  his  former  employer,  brought  up  a  good  class 
of  children,  and  soon  outnumbered  the  male  population  of  all  other 
nationalities.  Probably  the  period  that  C.  L.  Brace  describes  has 
already  been  reached,  but  the  moral  condition  of  a  decadent  race 
"  seems  to  be  beyond  the  reach  of  any  system  of  morality  or  of  the 
purest  religion."  The  whole  history  is  summed  up  in  "  a  swift  adop- 
tion of  the  externals  of  civilization  going  hand  in  hand  with  a  steady 
physical  decline,  and  a  promising  but  suddenly  arrested  moral  develop- 


66o  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

ment."  The  first  stage  of  mission  work,  which  acts  upon  the  head, 
and  perhaps  upon  the  heart,  is  liable  to  bring  conceit  and  self-confi- 
dence; while  the  second  stage,  which  works  upon  the  life,  is  incal- 
culably more  difficult. 

The  missionaries  in  Hawaii  destroyed  heathen  temples,  built 
churches,  and  preached  humanity  and  Christianity.  "  The  Kanaka 
was  impoverished,  while  his  converters  came  into  possession  of  vast 
territories  which  brought  in  yearly  golden  harvests."  The  silk  cul- 
ture '  was  introduced  by  the  English  with  everything  in  its  favor  and 
developed  very  rapidly  until  the  missionaries  forbade  Sunday  work, 
and  by  the  methods  here  necessary  the  silkworms  had  to  forego  their 
Sunday  food  and  died,  and  with  them  the  industry  became  extinct. 
Every  missionary  report  enlarged  upon  the  great  advantages  of  civili- 
zation and  Christianity,  but  omitted  to  mention  the  steady  decline 
of  the  native  population. 

Twombly "  says  of  the  Hawaiian  "  that  the  white  man  fastened  on 
them  an  ineradicable  curse.  There  have  never  been  snakes  on  the 
island,  but  the  most  venomous  serpents  would  have  been  a  merciful 
visitation  in  comparison  with  the  vipers  in  human  form  who,  for 
more  than  thirty  years,  poisoned  their  bodies  and  contaminated 
their  minds."  The  missionaries  came  a  generation  too  late.  Now  in 
their  degradation  they  care  little  even  for  the  possession  of  land, 
and  where  the  aboriginal  soil  is  held  by  others  there  can  be  little 
national  aspiration.  "  In  no  respect  are  the  native  Hawaiians  holding 
their  own  or  making  progress."  "  The  native  to-day  is  an  anomaly 
in  civilization ;  he  can  not  understand  its  significance  or  adjust  himself 
to  its  requirements."  "  The  native  neither  fights  his  destiny  nor  his 
enemies.  These  happy  people  laugh  and  sing;  they  deck  themselves 
with  flowers  without  a  thought  of  the  future  and  not  much  more  for 
the  present  hour.  It  is  not  fatalism,  but  a  want  of  mental  and  physical 
energy.  Such  are  the  30,000  natives  invested  by  Congress  with  a 
political  power  that  no  other  Polynesian  race  ever  possessed."  Their 
character  has  been  marked  by  striking  contrasts.  "  A  mirthful  people, 
they  had  a  most  somber  religion ;  they  loved  flowers,  but  worshiped 
hideous  idols;  poetic  in  temperament  and  delighting  in  their  bards, 
they  had  no  written  language ;  kindly,  they  propitiated  their  gods  by 
bloody  sacrifices ;  holding  women  under  strict  taboo,  their  customs 
concerning  kinship  and  inheritance  were  generally  in  favor  of  the 
female  lineage;  docile  and  amiable,  they  delighted  in  warfare;  their 
weapons  were  rude  but  effective;  they  ate  little  meat  and  yet  were 
strong." 

'  Neuhauss :  Die  Hawaii-Inseln.  Virchow  und  von  Holtzendorff,  Sammlung 
Wiss.  Vortrage,  Berlin,  1886.  See  also  Hawaiian  America,  by  Caspar  Whitney. 
New  York,  1899;  The  Real  Hawaii,  by  Lucien  Young,  1899;  A  Brief  (School) 
History  of  the  Hawaiian  Republic,  by  W.  D.  Alexander. 

2  The  Native  Hawaiians  of  Yesterday  and  To-day.  Read  at  the  Mohawk  Con- 
ference. October,  1901. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND  THEIR  TREATMENT       66 1 

L.  F.  Alvarez,  M.  D./  reports  a  circular  of  the  Board  of  Health 
to  physicians  all  over  the  Sandwich  Islands,  asking  their  view  of  the 
cause  of  the  decrease  of  the  natives.  They  placed  first  the  kahuna. 
By  this  system  occult  sorcerers,  as  it  is  believed,  can  pray  to  death 
any  one  they  choose,  their  prayers  being  secretly  supplemented  some- 
times by  poison.  It  is  a  kind  of  crude  faith-cure  by  which  nostrums 
are  often  given  to  a  sick  man's  relatives.  Although  the  law  forbids 
the  practise  of  medicine  without  a  license,  the  trial  by  jury  of  natives 
makes  conviction  impossible.  No  law  against  this  can  be  enforced. 
The  modern  kahuna  differs  from  the  old  in  that  he  takes  the  medicine 
himself,  which  is  chiefly  the  intoxicating  awa.  Although  they  also 
give  it  freely  to  patients  with  whom  it  is  often  fatal,  especially  with 
children  and  old  people,  who  are  not  accustomed  to  its  alcoholic  poison, 
they  teach  their  countrymen  that  Hawaiians  are  subject  to  Hawaiian 
diseases  and  can  not  be  cured  by  foreign  remedies.  The  next  most 
common  form  of  extinction  of  the  natives  is  syphilis,  which  is  aggra- 
vated because  few  apply  to  the  physicians,  and  their  methods  of  eating 
poi  with  their  fingers  out  of  the  same  calabash,  sleeping  on  the  same 
mat,  passing  the  family  pipe  from  mouth  to  mouth,  etc.,  keep  up  the 
contagion.  In  all  the  Hawaiian  Islands  in  1841,  smallpox  carried  off 
100,000  inhabitants,  and  this  disease  has  broken  out  on  the  average 
every  five  years  since.  In  1898  nearly  one-fourth  of  the  population, 
or  eighty  per  cent  of  all  affected,  died  of  measles.  Here,  too,  about 
seven  per  cent  of  the  school  children  were  found  leprous,  and  the 
forced  removals  to  Molokai,  from  which  there  is  no  return  and  which 
is  almost  certain  death  in  from  three  to  fifteen  years,  often  separate 
husband  and  wife,  parents  and  children.  Compulsory  clothing  in 
place  of  the  more  or  less  adamitic  costumes  has  been  as  deleterious 
to  the  Hawaiians  as  it  would  be  to  compel  Europeans  to  adopt  native 
costumes.  The  islanders  regard  dress  as  ornament,  to  be  paraded  by 
day  and  laid  aside  at  night,  and  colds  and  influenzas  galore  result. 

Infanticide,  one  of  the  inveterate  customs  of  Hawaii,  arose,  as 
with  many  other  Polynesians,  because  the  limited  territory  forced 
this,  or  else  famine  or  inter-tribal  warfare,  to  keep  down  the  popula- 
tion. The  missionaries  estimated  that  when  they  came  nearly  two- 
thirds  of  the  children  were  put  to  death  either  before  or  after  birth. 
A  change  from  natural  to  artificial  conditions  reduces  reproductive 
power,  and  so  it  came  that  those  races  that  were  first  civilized  soonest 
became  childless.  To  these  causes  of  decline  are  added  licentiousness 
and  its  resultant  diseases.  Malo."  the  native  historian,  stated  that 
"  all  the  people  of  the  island  are  miserably  diseased.  Foreigners  have 
lent  their  whole  influence  to  make  the  Hawaiian  Islands  one  great 
brothel."    "  This  statement,"  adds  Elkin,  "  is  borne  out  by  the  facts."  ^ 

'  The  Hawaiians:  Why  they  are  Dying  Out.  Pacific  Medical  Journal,  July, 
1893.  ^  Hawaiian  Spectator,   1839. 

*  An  Inquiry  into  the  Causes  of  the  Decrease  of  the  Hawaiian  People.  Am. 
Jour,  of  Sociology,  Xovember,  1902. 


662  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

"  The  civilization  which  the  missionaries  thrust  upon  the  Hawaiians 
was  the  mongrel  offspring  of  a  fossil  theology  and  a  laissez-faire 
economics.  The  missionaries  taught  them  by  precept  how  to  lay  up 
treasure  in  heaven,  and  the  missionaries'  children  taught  them  by  ex- 
ample how  to  lay  up  earthly  treasure,"  although  the  field  left  them 
for  the  latter  operation  was  very  limited.  The  recent  slight  check  in 
the  decline  of  population  is  likely  to  be  temporary.  Blackman,^  a  sin- 
gularly competent  writer,  describes  modern  Hawaii  as  a  struggle  for 
survival  between  three  irreconcilable  elements:  the  aboriginal  cult, 
Christianity  and  civilized  skepticism,  and  greed  and  vice.  The  full- 
blooded  Hawaiians  in  1896  owned  but  0.06  of  the  soil  of  the  islands, 
having  in  three  generations  been  dispossessed  by  foreigners.  Nearly 
eighty-two  per  cent  of  the  children  between  six  and  fourteen  are  now 
compelled  to  go  to  school.  Yet  after  fifteen  years  of  teaching  there, 
C.  M.  Hyde  says  he  had  met  but  one  native  who  merited  the  name  of 
student.  Our  abstract  and  implacable  system  assumed  that  the  edu- 
cation best  fitted  for  man  was  best  for  the  Kanaka  in  his  taro-patch. 
Each  of  the  many  incoming  races,  males  always  greatly  exceeding 
females  in  number,  has  contributed  its  own  peculiar  vices.  Three 
periods  in  the  last  century  promised  prosperity  and  ended  in  lasting 
injury.  "  The  sandalwood  trade  slew  its  thousands,  the  whaling 
industry  its  ten  thousands,  and  the  sugar  industry  now  threatens  to 
exterminate  the  remnant.  As  if  to  hasten  the  process,  the  Govern- 
ment, now  territorial  and  thus  appointive,  is  persistently  carrying  out 
a  wholesale  policy  of  liquor  licenses.  Inaugurated  in  the  later  days 
of  the  so-called  republic,  the  number  of  these  has  increased  almost 
sevenfold  during  the  last  six  years — as  if  to  administer  an  opiate  to 
the  victim  before  the  sacrifice."  Thus  here,  too,  civilization  "  eats 
up  the  savage."  The  other  Sawaiori  races  will  not  long  outlast  them, 
as  the  parent  race  from  which  they  all  spring  is  long  extinct. 

III.  The  Philippines,  with  one  thousand  islands,  perhaps 
two  thousand  tribes,  many  tongues,  great  heat,  nearly  five 
per  cent  of  its  8,000,000  inhabitants  illiterate,  yet  many  of 
them  better  started  on  the  path  of  education  and  religion  by 
the  Spanish — who  have  raised  them  far  above  the  level  of 
most  eastern  islanders — than  we  are  prone  to  admit,  presents  a 
difficult  problem  to  a  nation  with  no  colonial  experience  and 
inclined  to  believe  that  in  the  records  of  other  nations  there 
is  little  to  learn.  From  our  experience  with  Indians  our 
soldier  has  learned  severity,  and  from  contact  with  the  negro 
we  have  learned  contempt  for  dark  skins,  and  this  is  a  bad 
preparation   for  dealing  with  the  very  intricate  problem   in 

'  The  Making  of  Hawaii.     New  York,  1899.     See  pp.  75-240. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT      663 

these  islands.  Perhaps  we  should  have  cooperated  with 
Aguinaldo  or  formed  a  protectorate,  and  were  wrong  in  in- 
sisting on  absolute  surrender  before  any  and  everything  else, 
but  the  time  for  this  is  irrevocably  past. 

Professor  F.  Rinne,  of  Hanover,'  compares  the  diversities  of  the 
Philippine  races  to  those  of  the  different  German  states  a  century 
ago,  and  suggests  that  the  problem  of  unity  must  be  worked  out  slowly 
from  within  in  these  islands,  as  it  was  by  the  Teutons.  He  thinks 
that  the  pride  and  love  of  freedom  of  the  Tagalogs  will  make  har- 
monious relations  between  victors  and  vanquished  forever  improbable, 
especially  in  view  of  the  hauteur  of  the  Americans,  who  regard  even 
the  cultured  natives  as  niggers,  but  this  comparison  suggests  nothing 
practical.  Englishmen  point  us  to  Sir  Andrew  Clark's  work  in  estab- 
lishing the  federated  Malay  states,  but  this  is  practicable  only  where 
there  are  recognized  rulers,  be  they  Khedives,  SuUans,  Datos,  or 
Rajahs;  but  in  the  Philippines  the  masses  have  no  hereditary  chiefs 
such  as  invited  Great  Britain  to  intervene  in  the  Malay  states.  Each 
of  the  latter  are  veiled  crowned  colonies,  the  British  really  forcing 
their  advice  upon  each  ruler.  Blumentritt*  urges  that  it  is  against 
the  very  nature  of  the  Anglo-Saxons  to  give  up  power  once  committed 
to  them.  He  states  that  there  is  less  illiteracy  among  the  Filipinos 
than  in  the  Balkan  Peninsula,  in  Russia  as  a  whole,  in  many  provinces 
of  Spain  and  Portugal,  or  than  in  the  Latin  republics  of  South  Amer- 
ica, and  that  the  Filipinos  have  shown  a  better  prima  facie  right  to 
form  an  independent  state  than  many  a  European  and  American 
state  has  shown. 

D.  C.  Worcester  declares  that  "  one  might  imagine  that  morality 
would  be  at  a  low  ebb  among  a  people  whose  women  are  almost  with- 
out modesty,  and  where  all  alike  agree  that  there  is  no  future  life 
nor  any  sure  retribution  for  evil  deeds  in  this.  Nothing  could  be 
further  from  the  truth.  Such  a  thing  as  a  faithless  wife  is  almost 
unknown.  Again  and  again  we  left,  wholly  unprotected,  enough  prop- 
erty to  make  a  dozen  of  them  very  wealthy  according  to  their  stand- 
ards, yet  they  never  stole  a  penny's  worth  from  us.  On  the  whole, 
after  making  somewhat  extensive  observations  among  the  Philippine 
natives,  I  am  inclined  to  formulate  the  law  that  their  morals  improve 
as  the  square  of  the  distance  from  churches  and  other  so-caleld  '  civ- 
ilizing influences.'  " '  But  these  statements,  while  they  may  be  to 
some  extent  true  of  the  Tagalogs,  or  possibly  the  Visayas  and  SIo- 
canos,  can  hardly  apply  to  the  Negritos  or  to  the  wild,  lewd,  barbarous 
and  cannibal  tribes  of  the  interior  and  the  smaller  islands. 

^  Zwischen  Philippines  und  Amerikanern  auf  Luzon.  Hanover,  1901,  p.  46 
€t  seq. 

*  Die  Filipinos.      Hamburg,  1900. 

'The  Philippine  Islands  and  their  People,  New  York,  1898,  p.  413. 


664  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Schurman,  who  presided  over  the  admirable  work  of  the  first 
Philippine  Commission,  insisted  that  "  any  decent  kind  of  a  govern- 
ment of  Philippines  by  Philippines  is  better  than  the  best  possible 
government  by  Americans."  Those  who  debate  whether  the  natives 
can  ever  be  loyally  American  at  heart,  who  limit  their  studies  of  them 
to  the  degree  of  pacification,  the  intensity  of  animosity  caused  by 
war,  the  percentage  of  illiteracy,  their  capacity  to  work,  or  their 
courage  and  disciplinability  as  soldiers,  important  as  these  questions 
are,  realize  neither  the  full  complexity  of  the  problem  before  us,  or 
see  its  true  and  only  method  of  solution,  or  feel  the  urgency  of  our 
present  duty. 

Under  Spain  there  were  1,914  teachers,  and  in  theory,  but  not  in 
practise,  education  was  compulsory  from  ten  to  twelve.  There  were 
six  secondary  private  colleges,  sixty-nine  private  Latin  schools  for 
boys  and  a  few  for  girls.  There  were  two  Spanish  normal  schools 
in  Manila,  which  were  free,  and  paid  each  pupil  ten  dollars  a  month. 
In  1888  education  cost  124,963  Mexican  dollars,  and  the  agricultural 
schools  alone  spent  113,686  more.  There  were  two  colleges  estab- 
lished in  1601  and  1610  respectively,  one  for  theology  and  jurispru- 
dence and  the  other  for  pharmacy,  intended  primarily  for  Spanish 
youth,  but  to  which  natives  were  admitted.  Besides  these  there  were 
eight  agricultural  stations,  a  nautical  school  for  pilots,  very  important 
here,  and  with  a  three-year  course,  a  school  of  painting  and  sculpture, 
and  a  military  academy. 

Blumentritt's  twenty  years'  study  of  the  Filipinos  convinces  him 
that  as  soldiers  they  are  courageous,  economical,  and  entirely  ame- 
nable to  strict  discipline,  with  a  perseverance  that  disaster  can  not 
overwhelm.  This  was  General  Gordon's  opinion  of  them  when  they 
fought  under  him  in  the  Taping  rebellion.  Under  the  Spaniards  they 
were  for  fifteen  years  accustomed  to  a  system  akin  to  the  Austrian, 
which  gave  them  an  army  of  from  12,000  to  18,000  men  in  peace, 
with  at  least  100,000  in  war.  This  ^rmy,  whose  services  the  Ameri- 
cans could  have  had  as  compensation  for  the  naval  protection  of  a 
young  republic,  would  have  cost  far  less  than  the  extravagant  Ameri- 
can volunteers  and  been  more  mobile. 

The  logic  of  the  situation  is  plain  and  unequivocal.  We  should 
express  our  national  independence  of  Old-World  tradition  by  develop- 
ing a  new  colonial  policy  based  not  upon  precedent,  although  learning 
all  its  lessons.  We  should,  like  the  framers  of  our  Constitution  and 
Declaration  of  Independence,  go  back  to  first  principles  and  steer  by 
stars  and  not  by  coast-marks.  Assuming  that  those  islands  are  to  be 
developed  for  the  interests  of  their  inhabitants,  renouncing  the  policy 
of  making  them  pay  the  hundreds  of  millions  which  the  war  cost, 
and  of  voting  away  their  property  and  franchises,  as  the  Taft  Com- 
mission proposed,  without  their  consent  and  hearty  cooperation,  not 
disposing  of  their  most  important  business  before  they  are  admitted 
to  participate  or  taken  into  active  partnership,  for  even  "  to  give  them 
good  government  from  above  without  evoking  their  own  active  co- 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       665 

operation,  as  England  has  clone  for  the  people  of  India,  is  to  sap 
and  atrophy  their  own  capacity  for  self-government,"  we  should  first 
of  all  study  the  native  customs,  traditions,  sentiments,  and  ideas,  and 
utilize  everything  possible,  fuliil  and  not  destroy,  as  becomes  a  race 
professing  Christianity.  We  should  not  only  have  a  blue-book  con- 
taining the  opinions  of  Spanish  and  American  soldiers,  pastors,  priests, 
and  teachers,  and  exhaust  all  sources  of  testimony  according  to  the 
best  English  precedent,  but  the  Government  should  utilize  its  able 
corps  of  anthropologists  in  expeditions  to  report  on  tribal  organiza- 
tions, native  industries,  marriage  customs,  all  cults,  religious  ideas 
and  practises,  and  diseases.  We  should  study  the  situation,  political 
writings  and  parties  of  the  twenty-five  years  preceding  1896,  and  be 
sure  that  we  know  and  sympathize  with  everything  good  or  vital 
enough  to  graft  into  the  native  life.  If  war  has  made  this  hard,  and 
if  we  admit  that  this  is  even  in  part  our  fault,  we  should  feel  all  the 
more  morally  constrained  and  zealous  in  this  work  to  undo  past  mis- 
takes and  close  the  chasm.  All  native  helpers  and  suggestions  should 
be  preferred  so  far  as  possible  to  those  of  alien  and  especially  ab- 
sentee origin.  They  should  be  immune  from  the  arbitrary  power  of 
Congress,  which  the  best  of  them  so  dread.  Schurman  well  says,  our 
first  obligation  is  "  to  understand  the  character  and  circumstances  of 
the  people,  realizing  sympathetically  their  aspirations  and  ideals.  A 
government  to  stand  must  be  firmly  rooted  in  the  needs,  interests, 
judgment,  and  devotion  of  the  people."  "  There  is  no  instance  in 
history  of  a  successful  government  of  a  colony  where  profit  to  the 
parent  state  or  the  citizens  has  been  a  leading  consideration."  While 
we  remain,  it  must  be  for  the  good  of  the  inhabitants.  We  must  re- 
member that  their  aspirations  are  legitimate  and  that  "  struggling 
nationalities  are  the  jewels  of  history,  the  hope  and  promise  of  the 
world."  The  humanitarian  motive,  which  prompted  our  first  inter- 
vention, should  be  not  only  conserved  but  put  to  work.  The  conceit 
that  we  can  do  anything  because  we  have  money  and  that  we  are 
shrewd  when  we  have  only  been  lucky,  the  mouthings  of  platform 
demagogues,  the  interests  of  political  platforms  and  elections,  whoop- 
ing up  the  flag,  our  first  experience  with  real  natural  interests  and 
responsibilities  on  the  other  side  of  the  globe  that  to  our  myopic  minds 
is  so  far  away  that  it  seems,  as  James  well  says,  only  a  painted  pic- 
ture, the  bigotry  that  censured  Schurman,  who  saw  the  Sultan  of 
Sulu  and  saved  the  great  southern  islands  from  revolt,  because  he 
did  not  then  and  there  insist  on  the  emancipation  of  slaves,  which 
would  have  provoked  a  terrible  Mohammedan  war — these  are  not 
auspicious. 

But  genetic  psychology,  which  is  at  root  only  common  sense  at 
the  same  time  simplified,  magnified,  and  reenforced  by  examples  here 
as  everywhere,  has  only  the  plain  precept,  study  and  adapt,  to  develop 
the  best  that  is  indigenous,  be  patient,  adopting  a  long-ranged  policy 
that  does  not  forget  that  a  century  with  a  race  is  no  more  than  a 
year  with  an  individual.     In  education  we  should  not,  as  do  existing 


666  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

programs,  so  carefully  score  away  the  Spanish  language,  but  develop 
all  that  can  be  done  with  it ;  nor  should  we  force  out  the  native 
tongue  and  teach  only  English  in  the  lower  grades.  We  should  do 
our  utmost  to  develop  the  best  indigenous  languages,  help  gather 
traditions  and  myths,  as  Virchow,  P.  T.  Harvey,  G.  S.  Kayme,  and 
others  have  begun  to  do;  reject  at  first  no  native  custom  not  phys- 
ically immoral  or  unhygienic,  emphasize  every  native  industry  and 
teach  better  methods  and  technic,  and  strive  to  develop  good  Fili- 
pinos who  will  make  the  most  and  best  of  life  in  that  environment. 
We  should  teach  them  respect  for  their  own  heroes  and  patriots  as 
well  as  for  Washington,  Adams,  and  Jefferson,  and  incubate  not  only 
self-respect  but  pride  rather  than  shame  of  their  own  race ;  employ 
native  teachers,  and  emulate  the  ideals  and  practises  of  Leitner  in 
the  Punjab,  later  described.  Every  argument  for  child  study  at  home 
as  the  basis  of  educational  methods  and  matter  is  greatly  reenforced 
for  children  and  adults  of  an  alien  race. 


IV.  There  are  three  Africas,  says  Drummond,  the  north 
where  men  go  for  health,  the  south  for  money,  and  the  center 
for  adventure.  The  first  is  that  of  Augustine,  Carthage,  and 
the  Pharoahs ;  the  second  that  of  the  Zulus  and  diamonds ;  and 
the  third  that  of  Livingstone  and  Stanley,  which  is  half 
as  large  again  as  all  North  America,  with  some  12,000,000 
square  miles  and  a  population  estimated  at  from  140,000,000 
to  160,000,000,  although  nearly  one-third  are  Semites  or 
Arabs.  It  has  perhaps  thirteen  persons  per  square  mile. 
North  America  has  eleven,  Asia  forty-nine,  Europe  ninety- 
six.  The  Sahara  almost  equals  the  United  States  including 
Alaska.  Quite  as  characteristic  as  the  Hamites  of  the  north 
are  the  great  Bantu  race  occupying  most  of  the  south  and 
middle,  especially  the  highlands.  Ratzel,  Reclus,  and  nearly 
all  authorities  call  them  ascendent  races. 


They  are  naturally  domestic,  quiet,  vegetarian,  but  not  guiltless 
of  cannibalism,  polygamy,  fetishism,  and  belief  in  witchcraft.  Never- 
theless they  are,  according  to  Dr.  Tyler,  "  in  mental  as  well  as  phys- 
ical ability  in  no  respect  inferior  to  the  whites.  They  are  as  capable 
of  a  high  degree  of  culture  as  any  people  on  the  face  of  the  globe. 
They  are  not  only  emotional  but  logical,  and  have  retentive  memories, 
and  can  split  hairs  equal  to  any  Yankee  lawyer."  Poultney  Bigelow 
said :  "  The  Zulus  are  by  nature  ladies  and  gentlemen ;  that  is  to  say, 
they  are  better  mannered,  speak  more  gently,  are  more  graceful  in 
their  movements,  and  are  altogether  better  company  than  any  room- 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND  THEIR   TREATMENT       667 

ful  of  my  own  people  that  it  has  ever  been  my  good  fortune 
to  meet." 

According  to  Theal/  the  black  man  is  generally  large,  erect,  with 
wondrous  symmetry,  strong,  with  reasoning  powers  in  defending  him- 
self in  a  controversy  quite  equal  to  those  of  the  white.  He  is  dom- 
ineering and  vain.  Most  tribes  have  a  chief,  although  his  power  is 
little  felt  beyond  his  own  village  in  times  of  peace.  The  people  are 
the  property  of  the  rulers,  so  that  any  violence  against  their  persons 
is  atoned  for  by  a  fine  to  the  chief.  The  Bantu  religion  rests  on  the 
belief  in  spirits  and  ancestors  and  chiefs  that  can  interfere  with 
mundane  affairs.  The  greatest  of  these  controls  the  lightning.  When 
the  ghosts  are  hungry  they  send  plague  or  calamity  till  sacrifices  ap- 
pease their  appetite.  '  It  is  impious  to  mourn  for  one  who  dies  by 
lightning,  for  he  is  specially  sent  for.  Nearer  than  spirits,  the  dead 
chiefs,  or  ancestors  is  a  host  of  goblins,  water  sprites,  and  malevolent 
demons  that  meet  the  Bantu  everywhere.  There  is  no  fairyland,  but 
all  are  ministers  of  evil.  Belief  in  witchcraft  is  universal.  Occasion- 
ally one  believes  and  makes  others  believe  that  he  has  a  revelation 
from  the  spirit-world.  Many  of  the  tribes  circumcise  at  fifteen  or 
sixteen.  The  youth  then  leaves  the  society  of  women  and  is  admitted 
to  manhood.  For  two  months  they  have  license  to  steal  if  unde- 
tected, then  are  lectured  and  become  men,  with  presents  to  give  them 
a  start,  and  free  rein  is  then  given  to  immorality.  The  folk-lore  fills 
many  volumes,  but  it  is  neither  moral  nor  useful.  Animals  play  a 
large  role  in  it.  Cattle  are  their  chief  wealth.  They  weave  baskets 
and  manipulate  metals. 

They  have  had  great  leaders — Tshaka,  Dingyswago,  and,  perhaps 
ablest  of  all,  Moshesh,  born  in  1793,  a  man  of  uncommon  presence, 
who  welded  many  tribes,  was  cruel  in  war  but  mild  and  judicious  in 
government.  Theal  says,  the  Bantus  "  increase  by  natural  means 
without  parallel  elsewhere."  Their  states  of  mind  are  but  little  ex- 
plored, they  do  not  realize  the  power  of  the  whites,  submit  only  by  fear 
and  are  restless  under  restraint,  so  that  the  dread  of  a  great  native 
uprising  is  not  idle.  According  to  J.  A.  Hobson,"  in  one  section  of 
the  Christian  Church  in  the  Transvaal  a  resolution  was  lately  passed 
excommunicating  all  who  should  evangelize  the  heathen,  and  in  the 
constitution  of  the  Transvaal  all  equality  in  church  or  state  was  for- 
bidden. The  colored  people  could  not  enter  a  Dutch  church  or  even 
walk  on  the  sidewalk,  trade,  or  own  any  land  in  a  country  that  two 
generations  ago  was  all  their  own.  The  Boers  almost  enslave  many 
of  them  and  regard  them  almost  as  animals  to  be  used  for  their  benefit. 
To  this  section  the  British  never  go,  but  regard  them  as  a  low  human 
type,  and  allow  them  to  buy  liquor,  which  the  Dutch  forbade.  "  We 
must  compare  the  old  tyranny  of  the  Boer  farmer  with  the  new  tyr- 


^  History  of  South  Africa,  4  vols.      See  vol.  ii,  p.  134  et  seq. 

'The  War  in  South  Africa  :  Its  Causes  and  Effects.     New  York,  1900. 


668  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

anny  of  the  mining  capitalist."  The  cheap  black  miners  are  still 
huddled  in  compounds  and  exposed  to  vice,  but  their  masters  are 
growing  anxious  about  temperance,  for  liquor  impairs  their  efficiency. 
According  to  a  late  Blue  Book,^  lung  disease,  rheumatism,  and  syphilis 
are  increasing,  and  education  and  church  building  go  with  "  deplorable 
demoralization  on  the  part  of  young  men."  Even  rudimentary  school- 
ing is  thought  dangerous,  and  the  wish  of  the  natives  to  manage  their 
own  churches  is  beginning  to  be  thought  almost  rebellious.  Mr. 
Rhodes  ridiculed  "  the  peculiar  class  of  human  being,  the  Kaffir  par- 
son." "  The  entire  system  of  South  African  society  stands  on  the 
various  modes  of  coercing  natives  to  work  for  the  whites,"  placing 
them  where  they  can  not  refuse  wage  work.  Those  who  believe  in  the 
educability  and  future  of  the  natives  are  thought  faddists,  not  yet 
dangerous  because  so  few.  "  Indeed,  manual  labor  has  already  be- 
come a  badge  of  shame  for  the  whites,  degrading  them  to  the  level 
of  the  blacks."  Hobson  presents  an  array  of  facts  to  show  that  the 
South  African  press,  theaters,  mining,  liquor,  and  all  other  interests 
are  largely  in  the  hands  of  the  Jewish  race,  who  have  mostly  refrained 
from  direct  participation  in  politics,  but  will  soon  add  this  to  their 
other  lines  of  business.  "  The  one  important  object  is  to  secure  a 
full,  cheap,  regular  and  submissive  supply  of  Kaffir  and  white  labor." 
Premiums  are  paid  to  Kaffir  chiefs  if  there  has  been  a  shortage  of 
labor.  Captive  Bechuanas  are  indentured  by  force  if  charged,  though 
not  convicted,  of  rebellion.  One  writer  considers  it  humanity  that 
they  are  not  killed,  but  made  to  do  three  months  of  honest  work  in 
the  year.' 

Belgium,  which  subsidized  Stanley's  exploration  and  which  is  now 
supreme  in  the  Congo  Basin,  with  a  population  of  from  8,000,000  to 
27,000,000,  has,  in  violation  of  treaty,  made  this  region  a  huge  net- 
work of  monopolies.'* 

The  great  interest  is  rubber,  and  to  this  almost  everything  else 
seems  sacrificed.  If  a  tribe  refuses  to  furnish  its  quota,  it  is  said  to 
be  in  rebellion  and  punitive  expeditions  are  organized  which  lay 
waste  the  villages,  burn  huts,  and  slaughter  men,  women,  and  chil- 
dren. We  are  told  that  not  only  does  the  state  itself  engage  in  cap- 
turing slaves,  but  it  encourages  and  officially  protects  the  traffic.  "  On 
the  Lualaba  I  have  seen  hundreds  of  large  canoes  coming  down  from 

'G.  31.     1899,  p.  76. 

^  See,  too,  the  publications  of  the  Aborigines  Protection  Society,  organized  in 
1837,  especially  his  accounts  of  the  past  treatment  and  present  condition  of  South 
and  West  African  natives  under  European  influence,  by  the  secretary  of  the  society, 
H.  R.  Fox  Bourne.  Almost  every  traveler  there  since  Sir  Richard  Burton  tells 
the  same  story.  Compare  also  Clive  Day,  The  Dutch  in  Java,  New  York,  1904, 
PP-  434- 

*  The  Curse  of  Central  Africa,  by  Captain  Guy  Burrows.  With  which  is  incor- 
porated A  Campaign  Amongst  Cannibals,  by  Edgar  Canisius.  R.  A.  Everett  & 
Co.,  London,  1903,  pp.  276. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       669 

Nyangwe  and  Kassongo  laden  with  slaves  packed  together  like  sheep. 
The  Arab  or  his  niampara  in  charge  of  the  convoy  was  armed  with  an 
official  passport  signed  by  the  commissaire  de  district,  and  bearing 
his  official  seal.  These  passports  generally  set  forth  that  the  bearer 
was  authorized  to  '  recruit '  labor,  and  all  agents  of  the  state  were 
required  to  aid  him.  Of  course,  as  there  is  no  voluntary  labor  in  the 
country,  the  Arab  purchases  his  cattle  in  the  cheapest  market.  The 
universal  principal  is  '  that  of  placing  the  burden  of  everything  upon 
the  natives.'  The  latter  are  cannibals,  with  a  very  strong  craving 
for  animal  food,  which,  as  they  have  no  domestic  animals  except  dogs, 
they  can  not  get  except  in  time  of  war."  Details  of  many  cannibal 
feasts  are  described.  "  The  greatest  delight  of  these  negroes  is  to  be 
in  a  position  to  domineer  over  their  fellow  blacks  of  another  tribe." 
They  seem  to  have  an  exquisite  pleasure  in  witnessing  human  suffer- 
ing. It  has  been  "  fortunate  for  the  white  man  that  the  negro  invari- 
ably detests  his  neighbor  of  another  tribe  with  a  deep  and  lasting 
hatred,  prompting  him  to  take  part  in  any  scheme  likely  to  give  him 
power  over  his  brother  black.  It  has  been  solely  by  playing  tribe 
against  tribe  that  the  whites  have  been  able  to  maintain  a  footing  in 
Africa.  The  day  is  perhaps  coming  when  the  aborigine  will  see  the 
folly  of  this;  and  should  he  ever  do  so  the  reign  of  the  European  is 
over,  so  far  at  least  as  tropical  Africa  is  concerned.  I  am  convinced 
that  that  day  is  not  so  distant  as  some  enthusiastic  colonizers  affect 
to  believe."  We  are  told  that  the  quality  of  men  sent  by  King  Leo- 
pold, who  has  the  greatest  personal  interest  in  the  profits  accruing 
from  this  colony, is  far  inferior  to  those  sent  by  England,  that  they  often 
become  discontented  and  irritable,  and,  having  little  moral  courage, 
often  give  way  to  nostalgia.  In  one  conflict,  in  which  114  were  killed, 
"  seven  tons  and  more  of  human  meat  were  cut  up  into  roasts,  steaks, 
chops,  and  cutlets."  In  one  expedition  of  native  soldiers,  led  by  a  few 
white  men,  the  record  is,  "  We  had  undergone  six  weeks  of  painful 
marching  and  had  killed  over  nine  hundred  natives — men,  women,  and 
children.  But  the  enemy  and  disease  had  destroyed  half  of  our  own 
force,  and  the  expedition  was  a  failure."  Had  it  succeeded,  it  would 
have  "  added  fully  twenty  tons  of  rubber  to  the  monthly  crop,"  until 
the  impossible  was  required  of  the  tribe  and  they  revolted  and  re- 
sumed their  massacres. 

The  tortures  described  and  photographed  in  this  heart-rending 
book,  of  natives  scalped  alive,  slowly  cut  and  stabbed  to  death,  and 
hacked  to  pieces,  with  portions  of  the  bodies  of  other  victims  tied 
about  their  necks,  make  painful  reading.  We  are  not  surprised  that 
this  book  has  been  suppressed,  and  we  must  add  that  at  least  one  of 
the  two  authors  seems  animated  by  personal  resentment  connected 
with  his  leaving  the  Belgian  service,  so  that  the  animus  of  the  book 
may  be  suspected.  It  has  happened  that  such  conditions  have  brought 
out  facts,  notorious  on  the  ground,  but  which  the  public  has  great 
difficulty  in  learning.  Most  of  the  facts  here  stated  seem  not  incredi- 
ble, and  many  are  vouched  for  by  official  records,  competent  persons, 


670  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

or  photographs,  but  the  question  always  is,  How  far  are  they  repre- 
sentative ? ' 

Joseph  Thomson,^  who  has  carefully  studied  Africans  on  the  spot, 
has  little  respect  for  the  popular  claim  of  civilization,  progress,  the 
good  or  conversion  of  the  negro,  or  the  habit  of  calling  the  trader 
"  the  pioneer  of  civilization,  thinking  only  of  the  native  first  and  of 
himself  afterward."  We  see  the  work  of  other  nations,  he  says,  in  its 
true  light,  when  they  bespatter  the  ruined  homes  and  jungles  with 
the  blood  of  the  people,  all  for  the  good  of  the  negro.  He  contrasts 
this  with  the  early  Portuguese  expansion  to  advance  God's  kingdom, 
when  missionary  zeal  rose  to  a  pitch  never  surpassed,  till  there  was  a 
chain  of  mission  posts  almost  around  the  coast  line  and  far  up  the 
Congo  and   Zambesi.     With  the   fall   of  Portugal,   England,   Spain, 

1  Two  English  soldiers,  A.  G.  Leonard  '  and  F.  W.  Sykes,*  have  written  amaz- 
ingly frank  books  which  show  in  every  chapter  contempt  of  the  natives  and  the 
dominance  of  commercial  interests  over  every  humanitarian  point  of  view.  The 
stories  of  midnight  massacre,  captains  burning  native  kraals,  and  the  appearance 
at  the  dramatic  moment  of  Cecil  Rhodes,  the  peace  lover,  the  modern  Colossus, 
with  his  intense  magnetism  and  his  splendid  cuisine — all  reveal  a  state  of  the  Saxon 
military  mind,  in  which,  were  it  supreme,  the  native  can  read  his  swift  doom.  The 
splendid  book  of  Sir  Harry  Johnston,*  the  discoverer  of  the  Okapia  half  deer  and 
half  zebra,  is  written  in  a  spirit  in  extreme  contrast  with  that  of  Fielding  Hall  or 
Furniss.  To  him  the  natives  have  too  little  interest  to  make  it  worth  while  to  get 
into  sympathetic  rapport  with  them.  Very  different  is  the  frankness  of  Miss 
Colenso,*  who  describes  the  twenty  years  of  peace  between  the  Zulus  and  the  colo- 
nists of  Natal.  When  the  former  refused  to  give  up  two  refugees,  war  broke  out, 
in  which  one  of  the  young  men  was  killed  and  the  other  captured  and  set  free  with 
no  punishment.  "  Rivers  of  blood  flowed  to  enforce  demands  that  were  in  the  end 
put  on  one  side  as  utterly  valueless."  It  is  a  long  and  sad  story  in  which  the 
natives  "  showed  immense  courage  and  the  highest  warlike  qualities  and  were  well 
led  by  Cetewayo,  one  of  the  ablest  leaders  of  men."  The  culminating  tragedy  of 
the  war,  the  death,  and  the  final  capture  and  isolation  of  Cetewayo,  gives  it  all  a 
pathetic  close. 

When  General  Gordon  found  the  work  he  was  expected  to  do  among  the  Ba- 
sutos  was  unprovoked  and  unjust,  he  wrote  that  he  could  not  do  it  "  without  sink- 
ing his  conscience,"  and  so  resigned.''  He  declared  that  "  government  by  coercion 
is  essentially  rotten,"  and  that  "  the  history  of  the  South  African  wars  is  essentially 
that  of  wars  undertaken  in  support  of  unjustifiable  acts." 

'The  Results  of  European  Intercourse  with  the  African.  Contemporary  Re- 
view, March,  1890. 


2  How  we  Made  Rhodesia.     London,  1896,  p.  356. 

*  With  Plummer  in  Matabeleland.    An  account  of  the  operations  of  the  Matabele- 
land  relief  force  during  the  rebellion  of  1896.     Westminster,  1897,  p.  291. 

"  The  Uganda  Protectorate,  2  vols.,  pp.  1018.     London,  1902. 

•  History  of  the  Zulu  War  and  its  Origin,  by  Frances  E.  Colenso.     London, 
1880,  p.  491. 

''  Boulger  :   Life  of  General  Gordon,  vol.  ii,  p.  77  et  seq. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND  THEIR   TREATMENT       ^7' 

France,  and  Holland  were  hard  at  work  perpetrating  "  one  of  the 
most  gigantic  crimes  that  has  ever  stained  the  annals  of  history." 

Mr.  Blyden/  our  colored  minister  to  Liberia,  in  a  recent  article 
shows  how  superior  the  Mohammedan  methods  have  been  in  many 
respects  over  white  civilization  in  Africa,  and  the  repressive 
effects  of  our  methods  there.  They  have  not  abolished  polygamy  nor 
slavery,  but  it  should  not  be  forgotten  that  both  have  their  partial 
justification,  and  at  a  certain  stage  slavery  may  be  the  best  discipline 
for  lowly  races.  Bartle  Frere,'  in  discussing  laws  relating  to  the 
differences  between  savage  and  civilized  life,  as  bearing  on  the  deal- 
ing of  colonies  with  aborigines,  has  to  admit  that  in  temperate  cli- 
mates on  islands  where  the  English  settle,  although  not  so  much  in 
hot  climates,  the  natives  are  seen  slowly  to  disappear.  The  whites 
check  black  races  by  Europeanizing  them,  and  the  latter  react  and 
drag  the  whites  down. 

Perhaps  the  best  record  of  the  customs  of  the  Bantu,  Zulu,  and 
other  South  African  tribes  is  the  Blue-Book  report  of  Sir  Bartle 
Frere,  published  in  1883.  All  sources  of  information — natives,  mis- 
sionaries, judges,  soldiers,  etc. — were  utilized  to  find  whether  the 
aboriginal  customs  of  marriage,  land  tenure,  criminal  procedure,  local 
government,  etc.,  should  be  legalized  or  superseded.  The  result  was 
a  surprise,  for  it  was  found  that  in  tribes  that  had  not  been  disturbed 
by  outside  white  influences  all  these  and  other  matters  were  regu- 
lated by  unwritten  but  rigid  tradition,  and  that  in  many,  if  not  most, 
respects  the  whites  had  more  to  learn  than  to  teach.  The  chief,  while 
absolute  in  some  respects,  can  make  no  laws  and  is  subject  to  all  that 
exist  when  he  comes  to  power.  His  conduct  is  in  most  matters  con- 
trolled by  hereditary  headmen  or  councillors,  who  are  themselves 
governed  by  the  opinion  of  the  people.  A  chief  who  decreed  without 
consultation  would  find  his  decision  defied  if  it  did  not  chance  to 
coincide  with  the  popular  whim.  All  rests  on  oral  traditions  of  old 
men,  and  so  conservative  are  they  that  in  one  tribe  but  one  change 
was  made  for  fifty  years.  Each  tribe  has  its  territory,  and  after 
selecting  his  portion  the  chief  allots  districts  to  sub-chiefs,  who  assign 
it  to  individuals,  who  build  their  kraal  and  hut,  sub-allots  to  younger 
brothers,  etc.,  who  plow  and  till  but  do  not  exchange  or  sell.  As 
land  is  not  manured,  and  mealies  exhaust  the  soil  in  a  very  few  years, 
moving  is  easy  and  land  has  little  value.  Each  kraal  reserves  its  own 
grazing  land,  sharply  marked  off  from  cultivated  areas.  Primogeni- 
ture prevails,  and  all  its  contingencies  are  provided  for.  Each  wife, 
son,  and  daughter  has  well-defined  rights  and  duties.  They  do  not 
countenance  wills.  All  is  so  provided  by  custom  that  it  would  be 
impossible  for  a  man  in  his  last  weak  moments  to  disturb  the  regula- 
tion.    The  giving  of  cattle  for  a  wife  insures  a  father's  interest  in 


*  See  Journal  of  the  African  Society,  1 901. 
•Jour.  Anthrop.  Inst.,  1882,  pp.  313-354. 


6/2  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

his  daughter's  chastity,  without  which  his  dower  is  smaller.  If  she 
is  treated  badly  she  can  run  away  and  the  husband  does  not  receive 
back  his  cattle,  but  he  does  if  she  misbehaves,  so  her  relatives  have  an 
interest  in  her  good  conduct.  The  wife  takes  pride  in  the  size  of 
the  gift  and  does  not  respect  herself  till  it  is  all  paid.  When  this 
custom  is  disregarded,  as  is  often  the  case  under  missionary  influence, 
conjugal  unhappiness  follows.  Divorce  is  very  rare,  and  adultery  is 
fined.  The  wife  owns  all  her  father  gives  her.  Each  sex  has  its  own 
duties,  and  the  women  work  hard  only  about  eight  weeks  per  year, 
so  that  "  the  actual  labor  performed  by  the  women  bears  no  compari- 
son to  what  is  performed  by  the  women  of  the  lower  class  in  Eng- 
land." Polygamy  is  always  believed  in  and  often  practised.  Women 
favor  it,  for  it  is  their  pride  to  belong  to  a  large  establishment. 
Women  at  about  thirty-six  years  of  age  often  "  retire  "  from  wed- 
lock and  go  to  live  with  the  children.  She  aids  her  husband  to  find 
and  dower  a  second  wife,  stays  a  year  to  direct  her,  and  then  with- 
draws. The  kraal  to  which  she  goes  treats  her  with  great  respect. 
A  man  is  entitled  to  take  the  widow  of  his  deceased  brother,  and  the 
children  born  to  him  are  legally  those  of  his  brother.  Crimes  are 
graded  according  to  the  dignity  of  the  person  against  whom  they  are 
committed.  Every  man  must  report  to  his  superior  any  wrong  or 
unusual  act,  and  if  he  does  not  do  so  is  held  responsible  for  it.  In 
native  tribunals  accuser  and  accused  are  heard  and  examined,  as  are 
all  their  witnesses,  and  the  chief  retires  and  renders  his  judgment  in 
private.  Torture  in  obtaining  evidence  is  unknown  save  for  witch- 
craft. The  spoor  law  tracks  stolen  cattle,  their  only  wealth,  to  a 
kraal,  which  is  collectively  liable  if  it  can  not  show  that  they  passed 
on.  If  the  trail  is  lost  between  two  villages,  both  are  liable.  Thus 
cattle  are  almost  always  rescued.  The  English  object  to  being  re- 
sponsible for  others,  and  so,  as  the  community  have  no  interest  in 
informing,  theft  multiplies.  An  English  reviewer  ^  says,  "  Any  candid 
reader  of  the  Blue  Book,  after  considering  the  evidence  of  the  magis- 
trates and  missionaries  who  lived  for  years  in  constant  contact  with 
the  Kaffirs,  must  rise  from  its  perusal  with  a  feeling  that  the  native 
is  neither  vicious  nor  hopelessly  lazy.  His  faults  seem  to  be  in  great 
measure  the  faults  of  children  or  animals  when  acting  under  the 
influence  of  fright,  hardly  knowing  what  they  are  doing.  The  con- 
tact of  Europeans  with  the  native  has  in  the  first  instance,  at  least, 
not  tended  to  improve  him."  But  even  this  writer,  with  a  character- 
istic English  eye  to  utility,  adds  that  "  the  native,  if  treated  intelli- 
gently, with  due  regard  to  his  history  and  traditions,  will  undoubtedh' 
prove  a  valuable  asset  in  the  labor  market  in  South  Africa." 

In  February,  1903.  twenty-six  African  chiefs  were  summoned  in 
council  to  answer  the  question,  "  Can  native  owners  of  land  sell 
outright :  that  is,  part  with  land  in  perpetuity   for  themselves,  their 


^  E.  Blackwood  Wright :  Jour,  of  the  African  Society,  April,  1903,  p.  274. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES   AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       ^73 

children,  their  family,  and  tribe?"  Each  chief  gave  a  clear  and  in- 
telligent negative  answer,  some  detailing  reasons.  All,  without  ex- 
ception, said  land  could  not  thus  be  sold,  that  this  was  a  foreign  cus- 
tom. A  writer  holds  that  "  in  a  new  country  like  Africa,  where  mil- 
lions of  people  are  to  be  ruled  by  a  very  few  white  men,  whose  work 
can  not  be  continuous  owing  to  the  climate,  so  deleterious  to  Euro- 
peans, and  where  the  means  of  enforcing  law  and  order  are  chiefly 
conspicuous  by  their  absence,  it  is  indeed  a  serious  thing  to  sanction 
new  measures  in  place  of  those  which  the  natives  have  worked  out 
in  the  course  of  centuries  for  themselves.  It  is  beginning  to  be  better 
understood  than  it  was  in  old  times  that  the  best  means  of  governing 
the  people  is  through  their  own  chiefs."  ' 

Allen  Upward,  late  resident  administrator  in  Kabba,  reports  *  sin- 
gular indifference  to  the  interests  of  the  natives,  even  merchants 
losing  trade  to  foreign  rivals  because  they  do  not  consult  the  tastes 
of  their  customers.  He  was  urged  by  Mr.  Aitken,  agent  of  the  Church 
Missionary  Society,  to  induce  the  natives  to  embrace  Christianity  by 
Government  proclamation  as  the  Mohammedans  did,  insisting  that 
they  would  not  appreciate  the  difference.  Mr.  Upward  found  the 
natives  mostly  honest  and  sensible,  with  a  high  standard  of  morality. 
He  quotes  Lieutenant  Drysdale,  who  says  of  the  Basutos  that  "  the 
worst  class  of  natives  is  the  converted  one,  as  is  often  the  case.  They 
are  generally  very  dishonest  and  also  very  dirty,"  and  he  adds  for 
himself  the  extreme  view  that  "in  the  face  of  all  the  evidence  it  is 
difficult  to  resist  the  conviction  that  the  person  who  lends  any  help 
to  Christianize  the  African  is  a  wilful  evildoer."  "  To  say  that  we 
are  in  Africa  for  the  good  of  the  native  is  cant.  It  is  cant  of  which 
Englishmen  are  much  too  fond,  and  foreigners  find  it  easier  to  par- 
don our  greed  of  dominion  than  the  unctuous  professions  by  which 
we  love  to  disguise  the  truth  from  ourselves." 

Sir  Harry  Johnston  ^  thinks  the  negro  more  than  any  other  race 
is  marked  out  by  mental  and  physical  traits  as  a  possible  slave.  He 
has  "  great  physical  strength,  docility,  cheerfulness  of  disposition,  a 
short  memory  for  sorrows  and  cruelties,  and  an  easily  aroused  grati- 
tude " ;  has  little  homesickness  provided  he  is  well  fed;  can  toil  hard 
under  the  hot  sun  and  in  an  unhealthy  climate;  has  little  race  fellow- 
ship :  and  makes  not  only  a  good  workman  but  a  good  soldier.  They 
have  been  and  are  still  sold  throughout  the  Mohammedan  world,  and 
captured  and  often  treated  with  the  greatest  cruelty.  They  began 
to  be  imported  into  America  as  early  as  1503,  and  the  trade  was  regu- 


'  Encjlish    Governors  and  African  Chiefs.     Col.    J.   G.   B.   Staflford,    Jour,    of 
the  African  Society,  April,   1903. 

'  The  Province  of  Kabba,  North  Nigeria.     Jour,  of  the  African  Society,  April, 
1903. 

'A  History  of  the  Colonization  of  Africa  by  Alien  Races.     Cambridge,  1899, 
pp.  146. 

82 


674  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

larly  established  by  Charles  V  in  1517.  Dr.  Robert  Brown*  estimates 
that  from  1680  to  1786,  2,130,000  negro  slaves  were  imported  into 
the  English-American  colonies.  Near  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury over  70,000  a  year  were  imported  into  America.  Occasionally  a 
negro  prince  was  captured.  It  is  hard  to  say  whether  slaves  have 
suffered  more  when  transported  by  sea,  where  many  of  them  have 
perished  or  been  thrown  overboard  to  escape  detection,  or  by  the  in- 
human methods  of  land  traffic.  Boys  are  in  chief  demand  in  the 
East,  and  they  are  usually  made  eunuchs  before  they  are  sold,  and 
sometimes  branded,  insufficiently  fed,  and  subjected  to  nameless  hor- 
rors ;  and  only  in  the  early  part  of  the  century  was  the  traffic  defi- 
nitely abolished.  England  has  attempted  to  do  penance  by  founding 
Sierra  Leone  and  by  helping  Liberia.  Denmark  first  forbade  the 
trade  for  her  subjects  in  1792;  in  1804  the  United  States  forbade  the 
introduction  of  more  slaves ;  in  1807  Parliament  abolished  the  trade 
so  far  as  British  subjects  were  concerned;  in  1815  Napoleon  ended 
the  trade;  it  was  abolished  in  all  the  British  dominions  in  the  '30s, 
and  Spain  and  Portugal  were  paid  to  abolish  the  traffic.  France  gave 
it  up  in  all  her  possessions  in  1840.  It  continued  in  Portuguese  pos- 
sessions till  1878  and  in  the  United  States  till  1863.  This  traffic 
across  the  Sahara  has  been  greatly  reduced ;  the  slave  raids  of  the 
Zulus  and  Angoni  ended;  but  the  Arabs  in  east  Central  Africa  still 
continue  their  raids.  This  business  has  filled  Africa  with  war  and 
suffering.  Johnston  holds  that  a  slight  modicum  of  good  has  been 
mixed  with  the  great  evil  in  its  prosecution.  The  races  that  will  not 
work  are  made  to.  In  general,  the  negro  has  now  been  given  back 
his  freedom,  but  if  he  does  not  use  it  aright  and  continues  his  heedless 
life,  his  subjection  in  some  form  or  other  is  certain. 

William  Torrens  ^  gives  us  many  interesting  details  of  the  efforts 
within  recent  years  to  suppress  this  traffic,  especially  by  British 
cruisers,  and  characterizes  the  endeavors  of  the  different  nations  of 
Europe.  Very  often  men  are  slain,  and  the  traffic  largely  consists  of 
boys,  who  are  made  eunuchs,  and  of  girls.  Thomson's  summary  state- 
ment is,  "  I  unhesitatingly  affirm  in  the  plainest  language  that  so  far 
our  intercourse  with  African  races,  instead  of  being  a  blessing  has 
been  little  better  than  an  unmitigated  curse  to  them."  The  frightful 
miscarriage  of  the  desire  of  religious  people  has  been  due  to  the 
nature  of  commerce,  to  the  slave  trade,  the  gin  trade,  and  gunpowder. 
"  Chiefs  have  been  tempted  to  sell  their  subjects,  mothers  their  chil- 
dren, men  their  wives.  Tribe  was  set  against  tribe."  "  Twenty  mil- 
lions of  human  beings  probably  underestimates  the  number  of  killed 
and  captured  for  European  gain,  and  his  was  not  the  most  fortunate 
fate  who  lived  to  become  a  slave.  For  him  was  reserved  the  spectacle 
of  slaughtered  relatives  and  a  ruined  home." 

Now  it  is  precisely  drink  that  Mohammedanism  most  strenuously 

'  The  Story  of  Africa. 

*  The  East  African  Slave  Trade.     Fortnightly  Review,  vol.  xlix,  1888. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND  THEIR  TREATMENT       675 

and  successfully  sets  its  face  against,  so  that,  as  compared  with  its 
progress  in  Africa,  Christianity  is  at  a  standstill.  Mohammedan  seed 
seems  to  have  all  taken  root,  but  Christianity  has  ever  been  a  delicate 
exotic.  The  reason  is  that  Mohammedanism  has  been  elastic  and 
adaptable;  it  asks  apparently  little,  but  really  very  much.  Its  very  in- 
feriority as  a  religion  has  caused  its  success;  it  has  given  just  what 
could  succeed.  The  Christian,  on  the  other  hand,  has  done  so  little 
because  he  tried  to  do  so  much,  and  has  so  little  comprehended  his 
problem.  He  has  great  enthusiasm,  but  great  ignorance  and  errone- 
ous ideas.  He  ignores  all  pedagogical  principles,  and  acts  as  if  in  a 
single  generation  he  could  lift  individuals  or  even  races  from  the 
bottom  to  the  top  of  the  culture  ladder  and  graft  Christianity  upon 
brutish  brains.  At  best  he  has  only  stupefied  them  with  doctrine  be- 
yond their  grasp.  "  Before  any  great  advances  will  be  made  in  the 
Christian  propaganda  of  Africa  a  total  revolution  in  the  methods  of 
work  must  be  accomplished.  Surely  the  time  has  come  when  pro- 
fessorships for  the  preparation  of  missionaries  should  be  founded," 
so  that  they  be  freed  from  the  unworkable  traditions  of  the  past  and 
from  the  hampering  influences  of  unsuitable  theological  training.  At 
bottom  the  negro  is  very  rehgious.  He  can  accept  the  lofty  idea  of 
God  which  Islam  presents. 

In  1900  the  negroes  in  the  United  States  numbered  8,840,789, 
and  they  are  increasing  at  the  rate  of  about  150,000  per  year.  Mr. 
C.  D.  Warner,'  while  commending  the  progress  made  since  the  time 
it  was  an  offense  to  teach  the  negro  the  alphabet  because  it  made 
human  property  insecure,  insists  that  the  education  of  the  children 
of  the  negroes  of  this  country  should  be  of  the  lower  and  not  of  the 
higher  kind.  They  are,  he  says,  an  inferior  race.  While  Africa  has 
seen  the  civilization  of  the  Egyptians,  Carthaginians,  and  Saracens, 
and  while  a  negro  emperor  ruled  the  large  and  well-ordered  empire 
of  Songhay  on  the  Niger  in  the  fourth  century,  he  urges  that  no 
negro  ever  invented  an  alphabet ;  that  they  have  been  relatively  un- 
affected by  higher  races;  that  while  by  nature  the  negro  is  cheerful, 
contented,  fond  of  music,  very  emotional,  he  is  also  shiftless  and  irre- 
sponsible, lacks  stamina  and  trustworthiness,  is  injured  by  the  mere 
top-dressing  of  culture  as  well  as  by  being  the  pawn  of  politics,  and 
should  not  be  treated  like  superior  races.  His  training  should  be 
essentially  practical,  domestic,  agricultural,  chiefly  if  not  entirely  in- 
dustrial, and  he  makes  no  provision  even  for  the  training  of  the  few 
exceptional  negroes. 

In  slavery  the  negro  did  not  worry ;  was  not  fired  by  ambitions 
about  his  possible  future,  but  led  a  humble  if  somewhat  animal  life 
in  his  little  cabin.  There  were  many  hygienic  restraints;  habits  were 
regular  and  food  and  clothing,  though  often  plain,  were  sufficient  for 
the  master's  interests  in  his  well-being  if  no  more.     He  was  kept  in- 

^  The   Education  of  the  Negro.     President's  Address,  Am.  Soc.  Sci,  Ass'n, 

Washington,  May  7,  1900. 


676  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

doors  at  night,  and  there  were  no  Hquor  saloons  for  him  to  frequent, 
and  in  sickness  he  was  cared  for.  When  he  became  free  and  invested 
with  the  duties  and  responsibilities  of  citizenship,  new  and  heavy 
demands  were  made  upon  his  intellect.  Many  heads  were  turned  by 
roseate  dreams  of  the  future.  During  the  flush  times  immediately 
following  the  war,  when  cotton  was  high,  this  increase  was  not  noted, 
but  with  the  depreciation  of  farm  products  and  the  loss  of  labor  which 
followed  he  has  often  lost  his  mental  equilibrium,  and  that  from 
stress  and  strain  which  would  not  affect  a  race  mentally  stronger. 
Religious  excitement  is  often  ascribed  as  one  cause  of  insanity,  and 
while  this  is  sometimes  true  of  the  negroes,  the  relation  of  cause  and 
effect  is  often  just  the  reverse  of  this.  His  disease  expresses  itself 
often  through  his  highly  emotional,  religious  nature.  Perhaps  his- 
tory presents  no  parallel  to  the  sudden  creation  of  a  nation  in  a  day 
by  the  proclamation  of  emancipation,  but  the  fact  of  mental  inferior- 
ity according  to  the  established  standards  of  measuring  culture  and 
civilization  is  unquestionable.  The  negro  is  excitable  and  lives  in 
his  emotions,  and  his  insanity  is  of  a  more  demonstrative  type,  states 
of  exaltation  being  vastly  more  frequent  than  those  of  depression. 
Paresis,  from  which  the  negroes  used  to  be  thought  exempt,  is  now 
abundantly  demonstrated  among  them,  and  seems  essentially  a  metro- 
politan disease.  The  problems  of  the  Southern  insane  asylum  are 
peculiar.  Their  lack  of  education  restricts  the  means  of  diversion, 
and  most  are  farm  hands  unable  to  take  up  the  ordinary  hospital 
occupations;  but  on  the  other  hand,  while  the  inmates  are  unusually 
recalcitrant  against  negro  attendants,  they  are  especially  amenable  to 
white  control.  Heredity  seems  more  dominant  with  them  than  with 
the  more  cultivated  races.  Emancipation  seems  to  have  greatly  in- 
creased disease.  "  As  compared  with  insanity  in  the  whites,  mental 
disease  among  the  negroes  has  risen  from  one-fifth  as  common  in 
1850  to  one-half  as  common  in  1890."  ^  Consumption,  now  the  scourge 
of  the  race,  has  also  increased. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  Atlanta  University  publications  on  the 
negro  question  are  of  great  value.  In  1890  there  were  25,000  colored 
teachers,  and  they  now  practically  conduct  the  schools  for  their  race. 
In  the  second  quarter  of  the  century  many  Southern  States  made  it 
a  penal  offense  to  teach  the  negro  or  permit  him  or  cause  him  to  be 
taught.  From  1870  to  1899  the  negro  school  systems  of  the  former 
slave  States  have  not  cost  the  white  taxpayers  a  cent,  except  possibly 
in  a  few  city  systems.  "  It  is  a  conservative  statement  to  say,  then, 
that  American  negroes  have  in  a  generation  paid  directly  $40,000,000 
in  hard-earned  cash  for  educating  their  children."  Negro  teachers 
are  needed  to  teach  their  race.  On  the  whole,  they  are  far  less 
trained  and  less  paid  than  whites,  so  that  one  great  and  growing  need 

^  G.  F.  Miller,  M.  D. :  The  Effects  of  Emancipation  upon  the  Mental  and 
Physical  Health  of  the  Negro  of  the  South.  An  Address  before  the  So.  Med. 
Psy.  Ass'n,  Asheville,  N.  C,  September,  1896. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES   AND   THEIR   TREATMENT       677 

is  training  schools  for  teachers.  "  The  backwardness  of  education 
of  the  white  people  is  in  no  degree  due  to  the  presence  of  the  negroes, 
but  their  presence  has  actually  been  contributing  to  the  sustenance  of 
the  white  schools." 

There  is  now  reason  to  believe  that  the  educational  opportunities 
afforded  to  negroes  in  the  South  along  industrial  lines  are  better 
than  those  enjoyed  by  the  poor  whites,  and  indeed  in  some  significant 
pedagogic  respects  the  best  in  the  world,  as  I  pointed  out  in  Chapter 
III.  Slavery  made  labor  degrading  for  white  men,  and  to  engage  in 
it  they  would  forfeit  race  standing.  Now  the  negroes  are  in  a  sense 
a  wedge  dividing  the  whites  of  the  poor  from  those  of  the  upper 
class.  If  the  negroes — thanks  to  Tuskegee  and  Hampton — attain  the 
means  of  better  industrial  and  social  well-being  than  the  poor  whites, 
race  hate  on  their  part  will  be  intensified.  No  one  familiar  with  these 
schools  and  with  the  lowest  whites  in  the  South  can  doubt  that  the 
latter  are  likely  to  be  soon  outstripped  in  education  and  prosperity  by 
the  blacks.  The  future  of  the  entire  black  race  is  to-day  more  hopeful 
than  ever  before,  chiefly  from  the  work  of  one  negro,  Booker  Wash- 
ington, who  is  perhaps  solving  not  only  our  negro  problem  but  that 
of  the  Dark  Continent,  as  well  as  providing  object-lessons  for  colonial 
statecraft  the  world  over.  As  autocrat  of  the  Philippines  he  would 
probably  accomplish  what  armies  and  white  pedagogues  and  Congress 
can  never  do.  At  any  rate,  no  one  can  study  the  above  two  institu- 
tions without  increased  respect  for  the  race  and  without  dreams  of  a 
possible  new  type  of  higher  civilization  for  them.  There  is  danger 
that  race  hostility  will  be  intensified,  and  that  the  poor  whites  will  be 
led  to  desperate  efforts  to  assert  the  superiority  of  their  color.  Few 
desire  less  for  the  negro,  but  only  more,  while  the  necessity  of  indus- 
trial education  for  the  children  of  the  poor  whites  is  clear  and  strong. 

V.  Of  all  the  aborigines  of  America  those  of  Greenland 
have  been  known  ever  since  Eric  the  Red  reached  them  from 
Iceland  in  986.  The  Eskimos,  numbering  some  40,000,  very 
widely  spread  yet  very  unique,  homogeneous  in  language  and 
custom,  are  perhaps  preglacial  and  descended  from  cave- 
men. They  are  cheerful,  peaceful,  kind  to  each  other,  per- 
haps because  of  their  stern  environment,  and,  according  to 
Rink,^  "  before  their  degeneration  by  contact  with  the  whites 
they  were  truthful  and  honest."  They  have  a  Shamanistic 
religion,  with  definite  belief  in  another  life,  which  anthropolo- 
gists have  suggested  might  be  utilized  in  many  ways  by  mis- 
sionaries— whom  Rink  thinks  helpful,  and  to  whom  Nansen 
charges  up  most  evils.     No  more  interesting  people  exist,  and 


'  Esquimaux  Tales  and  Traditions. 


678  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

a  few  anthropologists  have  rivaled  religious  teachers  in  their 
zest  and  self-denial  in  studying  them.  In  the  tenth  century 
there  were  twelve  Christians  in  Greenland,  and  in  1900  the 
Moravians  withdrew  considering  their  work  complete,^  but 
they  are  prone  to  lapse  to  old  ways. 

In  Patagonia,  at  the  other  end  of  the  New  World,  there 
are  no  ruins  or  any  other  indications  of  a  once  higher  civi- 
lization. The  natives,  the  tallest  race  on  earth,  living  on  the 
pampas  a  life  that  has  such  fascination  that  no  one  having 
once  tasted  can  ever  forget  it,  are  passing  to  extinction, 
chiefly  from  rum  and  smallpox.  H.  H.  Prichard  ^  says  "  it 
is  probable  that  I  may  be  their  last  chronicler."  Their  de- 
pendence on  the  guanaco  is  very  analogous  to  that  of  the 
Eskimo  on  the  seal,  and  their  relation  to  horses,  which  they 
ride  so  much  that  their  lower  limbs  are  often  undeveloped  and 
bent,  is  like  that  of  the  Eskimo  to  his  kayak.  The  latter  has 
never  seen  a  horse,  and  the  Tehuelche  never  used  a  boat.  The 
fat  hunger  of  both  is  sometimes  almost  an  obsession. 

Prichard  calls  them  "  a  kind-hearted,  docile,  lazy  race,  invariably 
most  courteous.  Treat  them  as  you  desire  to  be  treated  and  you  will 
always  receive  grave,  quiet  consideration."  "  To  see  a  race  so  kindly 
picturesque  and  gifted  with  fine  qualities  of  body  and  mind,  absolutely 
at  hand-grip  with  extinction,  seems  to  me  one  of  the  saddest  results 
of  the  growing  domination  of  the  white  man."  "  One  of  the  strongest 
feelings  which  I  brought  away  with  me  from  Patagonia  was  a  hatred 
of  the  trader,  who  battens  upon  the  failings  of  the  Tehuelches."  If 
he  hears  of  a  festival  or  any  tribal  ceremony,  he  arrives  on  the  spot 
with  drink.  He  trades  the  vilest  liquor  for  horses,  and  when  the  men 
are  well  steeped  he  makes  some  magnificent  bargains.  The  horrors 
of  the  wars  of  civilization  would  pale  beside  their  cold-blooded  slaugh- 
ter. The  pioneer  trader  with  his  stores  of  cheap,  maddening  liquor 
is  free  to  sell  as  much  as  he  pleases,  although  it  is  a  well-known  fact 
that  such  trading  means  ruin  and  extermination  to  the  unhappy, 
ignorant  folk  who  buy. 

When  the  Argentine  was  unable  to  subdue  the  Patagonians  some 
years  ago,  says  Beech,  a  foreigner  undertook  this  task  by  planting 
large  areas  with  potatoes,  from  which  a  spirit  was  distilled  that  was 
very  fatal  to  the  natives. 

The  Indians  of  the  two  continents  are  generally  well  developed 
physically.     Child   life   among   them  has   peculiar  charms.      Despite 

1  H.  P.  Beach  :  Geography  and  Atlas  of  Protestant  Missions.    New  York,  1901. 
'Through  the  Heart  of  Patagonia,  1901. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND  THEIR   TREATMENT       679 

some  common  traits,  their  languages  are  more  numerous  than  all 
those  of  Europe  and  Asia,  and  nearly  all  have  the  quality  of  holo- 
phrasm  or  encapsulation  in  high  degree.  They  have  little  literature, 
but  many  myths.  Their  life  is  generally  tribal  or  communal.  The 
most  common  element  of  their  religious  life  is  totemism,  often  mer- 
ging into  zootheism.  They  adore  the  heavenly  bodies,  have  number- 
less prayers,  fasts,  and  terpsichorean  w^orship,  and  many  call  them 
the  most  religious  people  on  earth.  In  Canada  these  men  of  the  stone 
age,  numbering  over  100,000,  have  been  treated  kindly,  after  the 
French  method.  Agents  are  trained  and  kept  in  office  for  life,  farms 
are  allotted,  liquor  forbidden,  and  there  is  no  Indian  question.  Their 
race  is  not  very  fecund  or  viable,  and  depression  from  feeling  them- 
selves doomed  is  often  thought  a  chief  cause  of  their  decline.  Dr. 
Brown  urges  that  too  great  cleanliness  is  especially  unwholesome  for 
them,  and  that  to  remove  the  dermal  excretions  too  carefully  is  often 
fatal. 

Indigenous  culture  was  most  highly  developed  among  them  in 
Mexico  and  Peru.  "  The  first  effect  of  the  voyages  of  Columbus  and 
his  successors,"  says  Fiske,^  "  was  to  arouse  the  spirit  of  romantic 
curiosity  to  a  fever  heat."  The  Toltecs  or  builders  are  compared  to 
the  Pelasgi,  to  whom  Greek  historians  ascribed  all  their  troublesome 
problems  of  origin.  Over  against  this  Toltec  empire  in  Mexico  were 
the  Chichimecs  or  barbarians,  who  were  not  members  of  the  con- 
federacies of  the  Pueblo  towns.  When  Cortez  landed  he  had  the 
immense  advantage  of  answering  in  outer  respects  the  requirements 
of  the  national  legends  of  Quetzalcoatl.  His  blond  complexion,  light 
hair  and  beard,  all  suggested  the  national  sun  god.  He  was  a  strange 
combination  of  bravery,  craft,  endurance,  unscrupulousness,  fertility 
of  device,  and  devotion.  Through  his  mistress,  a  native,  he  learned 
that  the  Aztec  confederacy  bore  heavily  upon  the  tributary  towns,  but 
burned  all  his  ships  and  set  forth  like  a  quixotic  knight-errant  with 
four  hundred  and  fifty  mail-clad  Spaniards,  twelve  small  cannon,  and 
fifteen  horses.  The  latter,  being  unknown,  seemed  frightful  monsters 
to  the  natives.  When  the  chief  was  captured  under  the  Indian  system 
but  not  killed,  his  office  could  not  be  filled  and  the  native  phratries 
were  paralyzed.  At  first  the  Spaniards  were  thought  invulnerable, 
and  Cortez  faced  vastly  superior  numbers  successfully  and  released 
human  victims  caged  and  fattening  for  sacrifice  in  town  after  town 
among  these  people  more  than  two  ethnic  periods  behind  his  own, 
as  if  a  modern  German  army  had  attacked  ancient  Nineveh,  Babylon, 
or  Thebes.  The  glory  of  the  ancient  Mexican  civilization  has  no 
doubt  been  magnified,  and  it  is  so  extinct  that  the  facts  can  never  be 
completely  ascertained.  Despite  the  awful  blot  of  cannibalism  devel- 
oped into  an  elaborate  and  imposing  ceremonial,  the  civilization  of 
Montezuma  was  in  some  respects  superior  to  that  of  the  Spaniards 
even  in  this  age  of  their  glory.     He  was  war  chief  and  high  priest  in 

'The  Discovery  of  America,  vol.  ii,  p.  214. 


68o  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

one ;  the  elaborate  tribal  system  which  here  attained  one  of  its  highest 
developments  focused  in  his  person ;  and  his  capture,  while  it  was  an 
achievement  of  dazzling  prowess,  was  an  outrage  upon  every  principle 
of  international  ethics,  honor,  or  courtesy.  The  motive  of  the  Span- 
iards to  diffuse  a  higher  Christian  civilization  was  alloyed  by  the 
most  heinous  atrocity,  and  even  if  on  the  whole  the  Inquisition  was 
better  than  cannibalism  and  human  sacrifice,  this  and  all  missionary 
motives  were  here  mere  tinsel  gilding  of  the  buccaneering  sentiments 
which  underlay  and  actuated  this  invasion. 

Bastian '  estimates  that  the  conquest  of  Mexico  cost  about  150,000 
lives;  that  the  Spanish  governors  of  Salazai  and  Chirino  worked 
15,000  Indians  to  death;  that  by  the  export  of  slaves  to  the  West 
Indies  Panuco  was  almost  depopulated ;  and  that  many  thousands 
died  of  the  hard  labor  to  which  the  Spaniards  condemned  them  in 
Mexican  mines.  Smallpox,  introduced  in  1545,  is  said  to  have  slain 
80,000,  and  the  epidemic  which  began  in  1576  to  have  swept  away 
about  2,000,000  more.  The  Spaniards  did  not  understand  the  complex 
system  of  native  irrigation,  and  the  droughts  and  floods  caused  by  their 
destruction  of  it  caused  famines,  while  the  sudden  disturbance  of  all 
social  and  industrial  relations,  the  banishing  of  natives  used  to  the 
warm  valleys  to  the  cold  plateaus,  and  sometimes  conversely,  were 
fatal  to  many  more.  D'Alva  estimates  that  King  Ahuitzotzin  had 
about  80,000  war  captives  slain  to  dedicate  his  new  temple — a  lust  of 
murder  that,  as  Bastian  well  remarks,  would  shame  the  despot  of 
Dahomey.  "  As  we  bore  the  banner  of  the  cross,"  wrote  a  contem- 
porary Spanish  historian,  "  and  fought  for  our  faith,  God  gave  us 
victory  and  we  slew  great  multitudes  of  the  heathen."  On  one  Ash 
Wednesday  order  was  given,  "  in  honor  of  the  day,  to  shoot  about  300 
wretched  excommunicants."  "  It  is,"  says  Bastian,  "  an  indisputable 
fact  that  the  introduction  of  Christianity  into  Mexico,  instead  of 
fulfilling  its  mission  of  exalting  the  race,  demoralized  the  inhabitants 
and  introduced  the  condition  of  dull  apathy  in  which  we  now  see  the 
Indians  sunk." 

The  Peruvians  were  probably  the  first  in  all  America  to  rise  above 
barbarism  and  develop  a  truer  nationality  than  any  other,  despite  the 
fact  that  they  had  no  system  of  writing  save  the  knotted  cords  or 
quipus.  In  a  region  about  Lake  Titicaca,  not  far  below  the  summit 
of  the  Matterhorn  in  elevation,  still  marked  by  colossal  architecture 
which  is  comparable  in  magnitude  and  as  imperishable  as  the  Pyra- 
mids and  the  Colosseum,  the  Incas  had  slowly  developed  a  most  unique, 
interesting,  and  instructive  life,  with  food,  dress,  government,  religion, 
habits,  and  social  customs  distinct  from  anything  else  known  in  the 
world.  They  had,  moreover,  abolished  cannibalism,  established  garri- 
sons to  secure  their  conquests,  built  military  roads  comparable  with 
these  of  Rome,  storehouses  and  barracks,  and,  though  ignorant  of  the 
principals  of  the  arch,  their  masonry  defies  modern  methods.    In  many 

^  Mexico.     Virchow  und  von  Holtzendorff:   Sammlung  Wiss.  Vortrage,  1874. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND  THEIR  TREATMENT       68 1 

other  respects  besides  their  colonial  system,  the  Peruvian  polity  was 
not  unlike  that  of  ancient  Assyria.  Pizarro  was  inspired  by  the  ex- 
ample of  Cortez,  but  he  was  less  educated,  fonder  of  gold,  and  prob- 
ably less  under  the  influence  of  religious  motives.  He  was  less  subtle 
and  more  brutal.  From  the  captured  Inca  he  took  some  $15,000,000 
worth  of  gold  besides  the  silver  as  a  ransom,  and  then  put  his  captive 
to  death.  The  splendor  of  gold  dazzled  Spain,  and  Spaniards  flocked 
to  the  New  World  by  ship-loads,  seizing  estates,  spoiling  the  tem- 
ples, enslaving  the  people,  and  always  aiming  at  the  control  of  the 
mechanism  of  native  administration.  At  best  the  story  is  a  sickening 
one,  and  the  apologetic  attitude  of  Fiske  seems  utterly  unwarranted 
by  the  facts  which  he  himself  records. 

The  infernal  picture  of  slavery  in  Hispaniola  is  one  of  the  blackest 
pages  in  human  history,  and  is  marked  by  hideous  cruelties  and  tor- 
tures usually  unpunished.  In  151 1  the  Dominican,  Montesino,  began 
his  scathing  impeachment  of  the  slave  trade,  and  one  of  his  first  con- 
verts. Las  Casas,  once  a  slave  owner,  himself  began  his  extraordinary 
crusade  for  the  abolishment  of  negro  slavery.  His  work  diminished 
the  amount  of  slavery  and  mitigated  its  evils,  and  though  it  by  no 
means  led  to  its  abolition,  made  the  torch  of  Wilberforce,  Garrison, 
and  Lincoln  burn  the  brighter. 

Even  here  we  have  the  most  striking  contrast,  such  as  has  since 
been  so  common,  between  admirable  laws  made  at  home  and  the  most 
flagrant  violation  of  thejr  spirit  and  letter  in  every  item  by  those 
actually  in  contact  with  the  natives.  No  part  of  American  colonial 
history,  says  Captain  Bourke,'  has  been  more  neglected  than  that 
which  relates  to  the  laws  of  the  Spanish  dominions.  These  show  that 
the  Spanish  crown  from  the  first  aimed  at  the  elevation,  civilization, 
and  Christianity  of  its  new  subjects.  An  elaborate  code  in  four  vol- 
umes, published  in  1681,  shows  that  assimilation  and  not  destruction 
was  deliberately  aimed  at,  and  that  many  aborigines  were  sensibly 
improved  by  the  Spanish  introduction  of  horses,  cattle,  sheep,  goats, 
hogs,  and  chickens,  planting  of  orchards,  and  new  trades  like  carpen- 
try, wagon-making,  blacksmithing,  stone  masonry,  etc.  In  1504,  in 
Queen  Isabella's  will,  all  are  solemnly  charged  that  "  they  neither  con- 
sent nor  allow  any  of  the  Indians,  native  of  or  resident  in  said  isles  and 
mainland,  to  receive  any  harm  whatever,  either  in  person  or  property," 
but  that  they  be  treated  justly,  compensated  for  injury,  etc.  The  laws 
enforced  monogamy  ;  forbade  the  sale  of  daughters  :  compelled  Spanish 
men  to  support  women  who  had  children  by  them  ;  urged  schools  for  the 
aborigines  in  every  village;  established  the  Universities  of  Lima  and 
Mexico  in  1551,  as  before  this  Charles  V  had  established  the  Fran- 
ciscan University  of  Tzintzontin,  which  "  had  become  the  great  uni- 
versity, whose  ruins  are  among  the  most  impressive  on  our  conti- 
nent."    The  sale  of  Indian  captives  taken  in  war  was  forbidden  in 

'  The  Laws  of  Spain  in  their  Application  to  the  American  Indians.  American 
Anthropologist,  1894,  p.   193. 


682  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

extreme  and  emphatic  terms;  those  thinking  themselves  oppressed 
could  write  directly  to  the  king ;  liquor-selling  was  forbidden ;  natives 
were  not  allowed  to  sell  their  property  holdings  save  in  due  legal  form. 
An  Indian  servant  could  break  a  contract  if  he  did  not  receive  proper 
medical  treatment  when  he  was  ill ;  his  master  had  to  pay  all  dues 
and  had  no  further  claim  upon  his  services  when  he  recovered.  The 
dark  side  was  the  progressive  reduction  to  imprisonment,  which  is 
little  less  than  another  name  for  slavery  for  debt. 

In  Mexico  the  native  Indian  population,  now  some  forty-three 
per  cent  of  the  whole,  has  been  steadily  decreasing  during  the  cen- 
tury, although  as  a  whole  this  race  is  very  prolific.  During  the  sixty- 
five  years  ending  in  1875  the  European  race,  now  nineteen  per  cent, 
nearly  doubled;  the  mixed  race,  thirty-eight  per  cent,  trebled;  but 
the  native  race  diminished  slightly  but  steadily.  If,  however,  we 
include  mixed  bloods,  they  are  steadily  increasing,  and  a  recent  esti- 
mate places  the  pure  whites  at  only  twenty  per  cent  of  the  population. 
The  causes  usually  assigned  to  this  decrease  are  bad  food,  shelter, 
medical  treatment,  especially  the  ravages  of  smallpox,  and  premature 
marriages.  Of  the  perhaps  one  hundred  and  fifty  tribes  originally 
here,  the  Spaniards  give  us  records  of  thirty-three,  but  these  are  dying 
out,  as  did  the  edible  dumb  dog  when  the  Spaniards  began  to  tax  it. 
Members  of  an  Indian  tribe  rarely  mix  with  white  races  but  inter- 
marry among  themselves,  and  this  prevents  assimilation.  Starr  has 
revived  the  old  theory  that  all  inhabitants  of  the  New  World  are  grad- 
ually assuming  the  Indian  type,  and  some  hold  that  in  Peru,  Bolivia, 
and  Mexico  Indian  blood  will  ultimately  rule.  The  Mexican  of 
Spanish  descent  is  generally  less  energetic  and  less  vascular  than  the 
Spaniard,  just  as  the  American  is  less  so  than  the  Englishman;  so 
that  it  would  seem  that  the  problem  of  acclimatizing  Anglo-Saxons 
here,  and  perhaps  in  the  New  World  generally,  is  perhaps  not  yet 
solved.  The  American  in  Mexico,  who  often  excites  fears  of  ultimate 
dominance,  is  always  a  speculator  and  a  "  dreamer  of  golden  dreams." 
He  introduces  improved  hotels,  electric  lights,  and  better  modes  of 
transportation,  but  much  farther  than  this  he  rarely  goes,  for  his  push 
and  restlessness  find  insuperable  barriers  of  climate  and  tradition. 
He  does  not  take  kindly  to  the  midday  siesta  or  the  many  feasts, 
saints'  days,  and  holidays,  while  the  very  productiveness  of  nature 
neutralizes  one  of  the  chief  incentives  to  work,  and  the  monotony  of 
the  seasons  does  not  compel  extra  elTort  in  summer  to  prepare  for  the 
winter.  Such  facts,  with  others,  incline  Le  Plongeon  to  regard  the 
^  natives,  despite  their  present  decline,  as  likely  to  survive  the  less 
adapted  Europeans,  and  the  vast  and  mysterious  monuments  of  Cho- 
lula,  Palenque,  Teotihuacan,  and  Mitla  prompt  him  to  reverse  the 
once  current  view  that  the  natives  were  of  Asiatic  origin  and  to  urge 
that  the  empire  of  the  Mayas  centering  at  Yucatan  was  the  original 
source  of  civilization,  which  proceeded  thence  to  India,  Egypt,  Greece, 
etc.  It  is  certain  that  the  Mexican  Indians  have  lost  a  well-developed 
civilization  and  literature,  and  that  many  of  their  languages  have  be- 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       683 

come  primitive  and  others  died  out,  and  that  since  the  Spanish  con- 
quest they  have  fallen  into  a  semi-barbarous  state/  No  historian  or 
philosopher  can  ever  estimate  the  loss  to  the  world  by  this  wreckage 
of  an  ancient  and  highly  developed  civilization,  so  completely  exter- 
minated that  we  can  never  know  very  definitely  what  it  was,  contain- 
ing for  us  perhaps  priceless  scientific  and  practical  lessons  which 
might  do  us  as  much  good  in  dealing  with  this  race  as  what  they  got 
from  us  did  them  harm.  Race  pedagogy  has  irretrievably  lost  we 
know  not  what  arts  of  irrigation,  taxation,  high  tribal  organization, 
native  agriculture,  industries,  new  solutions  of  family,  social,  and 
ethical  relations.  Even  the  Aztec  religion  would  very  likely  seem 
less  repulsive  if  we  knew  it  fully  and  in  the  inner  sympathetic  way 
in  which  religions  are  now  studied.  The  new  solutions  of  so  many 
of  our  own  problems,  dimly  seen  here,  should  suggest  how  many 
more  things  than  our  philosophy  dreams  of  or  our  history  records 
have  been  in  and  vanished  from  the  world,  and  wring  our  hearts  with 
pity  not  only  for  vanished  races  but  for  ourselves. 

With  the  experience  of  years  of  travel  in  Australia,  Lumholtz ' 
made  good  use  of  the  provisions  for  his  five  years  of  exploration 
among  the  relatively  unknown  inhabitants  of  the  mountains  of  Mex- 
ico, many  of  them,  at  least,  supposed  to  be  descendants  of  the  ancient 
Peruvians,  whose  semicivilization  was  destroyed  by  Pizarro.  The 
most  representative  of  these  tribes,  the  Huichols,  are  remarkable  for 
their  vast  body  of  legendary  lore,  which  is  to  them  gospel,  truth,  and 
history;  their  music  and  the  great  endurance  of  the  singing  shamans, 
who  can  sing  each  night  for  at  least  a  fortnight  of  "  how  the  gods  in 
the  beginning  composed  the  world  out  of  chaos  and  darkness  " ;  how 
they  instituted  the  customs  of  the  Huichols  and  taught  the  people  all 
they  had  to  do  to  please  them;  to  build  temples,  hunt  deer,  go  for  the 
hikuli  plant,  to  raise  corn,  make  bows  and  arrows,  and  ceremonial 
objects.  "  There  are  no  written  records  kept  of  these  traditions. 
They  live  on  the  lips  of  the  people  as  national  heirlooms,  passing 
from  one  generation  to  the  next  as  originally  did  the  sagas  and  folk- 
songs of  the  ancient  Northmen.  The  gods  are  supposed  to  be  stand- 
ing all  around  the  horizon  seeing  and  hearing  everything,  and  the 
shaman  in  his  prayers  turns  toward  the  four  quarters  or  the  four 
winds  of  the  world,  because  if  one  god  does  not  respond  another  may. 
Rarely  does  he  address  a  long  prayer  to  any  one  direction.  The  gods 
are  angry  with  man  and  begrudge  him  everything,  particularly  the 
rain,  which  is  of  paramount  importance  to  the  very  existence  of  the 
tribe,  but  when  the  shamans  sing  of  their  deeds  they  are  pleased  and 

^  Matias  Romero:   Geographical  and  Statistical  Notes  on  Mexico.      1898. 

^  Unknown  Mexico,  by  Carl  I.umholtz.  2  vols.  Charles  Scribner's  Sons, 
New  York,  1902,  pp.  530  and  487.  See  also  Sappel :  Mittelamerikanische  Reisen 
u.  Studien,  Braunschweig,  1902,  p.  420.  Also  K.  v.  d.  Steinen  unter  den  Natur- 
volkern  Ikaziliens,  Berlin,  1894.  Also,  e.g.,  Squier's  :  Peru,  New  York,  1877, 
Also  Paul  Marcou  :  Travels  in  South  America,  New  York,  1875,  2  vols. 


684  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

relent,  and  they  liberate  the  clouds,  which  they  have  been  keeping 
back  for  themselves,  and  rain  results."  "  Taking  it  all  in  all,  their 
great  gift  of  music,  combined  with  their  ready  response  to  emotional 
influences,  the  immense  wealth  and  depth  of  their  religious  thought 
and  their  ingenuity  in  expressing  it  pictorially,  can  not  fail  to  fasci- 
nate the  observer."  They  are  secretive,  and  it  is  very  hard  to  gain 
their  confidence.  "  Will  these  natives,"  exclaims  Lumholtz,  "  ever 
reveal  to  me  their  thoughts  and  throw  any  light  on  the  early  stages 
of  human  culture?"  In  some  of  their  great  feasts  and  fasts  they 
would  "  rise  and  pray  aloud  with  so  much  fervor  that  they  and  all 
the  rest  would  be  moved  to  tears.  Frequently,  too,  they  would  make 
circuits  inside  of  the  temple,  stopping  in  front  of  little  chairs  and 
talking  to  them  as  if  the  gods  were  sitting  in  them."  The  philosophy 
of  their  entire  life  may  be  summed  up  in  the  sentence  which  one  of 
their  shamans  once  gave  utterance  to,  "  To  pray  to  Grandfather  Fire 
and  to  put  up  snares  for  catching  deer,  that  is  to  lead  a  perfect  life  " 
(p.  46). 

Their  customs  and  ceremonials  are  extremely  numerous  and  elab- 
orate, with  a  ritual  minutely  prescribed.  "  Every  man  among  the 
Huichols  is  the  son  of  some  special  god;  every  woman  the  daughter 
of  some  goddess,  and  their  names  often  indicate  this."  The  main 
ideas  of  these  people  are  religious.  Their  life  is  "  one  continual  wor- 
ship." "  No  woman  ever  undertakes  any  handiwork  without  first 
asking  the  gods  for  help  in  her  undertaking."  Their  ceremonial 
arrows  stuck  upright  in  the  ground,  the  sacred  plumes  of  which  they 
make  great  use  in  their  worship,  the  symbolic  eyes  of  God,  the  prayers 
for  luck  in  weaving  and  textile  work — everything  is  religious.  "  No 
flower  is  ever  plucked  unless  with  some  pious  intention"  (p.  215). 
"  Religious  feeling  pervades  the  thoughts  of  the  Huichols  so  com- 
pletely that  every  bit  of  decoration  he  puts  on,  the  most  trivial  of  his 
every-day  garments  or  utensils,  is  a  request  for  some  benefit,  a  prayer 
for  protection  against  evil,  or  an  expression  of  adoration  of  some 
deity.  In  other  words,  the  people  always  carry  their  prayers  and 
devotional  sentiments  with  them  in  visible  form." 

It  appears  that  the  Huichols  were  better  off  before  than  after  the 
white  man's  arrival,  when  there  was  not  much  to  steal,  when  there 
was  nothing  for  judges  to  "  grab,"  neither  cattle  nor  money,  and  when 
there  were  no  police  and  no  prisons.  In  building  a  house,  they  pause 
to  pray  with  every  level  and  row  of  thatch.  Every  one  has  an  idol 
buried  in  his  fields.  They  are  also  kept  in  the  houses,  and  especially 
in  the  granaries.  It  is  ill  luck  to  show,  and  still  more  to  part  with, 
these  monos.  In  their  religious  festivals,  which  are  often  strangely 
fused  with  Catholicism,  they  sometimes  proceed  on  bare  knees  for 
miles.  "  It  makes  an  ethnologist  sad  to  think  how  completely  the 
ancient  customs  have  been  destroyed  in  the  course  of  a  few  centuries 
by  the  Spanish  friars."  They  made  the  pagans  forget  the  profound 
thoughts  their  ancient  ceremonies  at  once  hid  and  revealed  by  sub- 
stituting the  gorgeous  splendor  of  their  feasts  without  the  inner  mean- 


ADOLESCENT  RACES   AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       685 

Ing  of  Christianity.  "  Nothing  but  a  senseless  jumble  remains  of  the 
splendor  of  the  olden  times.  Then  every  movement,  every  adornment, 
even  the  clothing  itself,  had  its  special  object  and  meaning.  Now  the 
intellect  of  the  race  has  become  blunted  and  the  Indian  himself  de- 
graded and  poor.  His  religious  devotion  alone  remains  unchanged. 
He  dances  to-day  before  the  Miraculous  Christ  with  the  same  zeal  as 
his  ancestors  did  before  the  same  gods  and  for  the  same  purpose,  to 
acquire  health,  and  for  the  same  benefits."  "  Many  an  Indian  here  is 
capable  of  composing  music  that  would  delight  civilized  audiences. 
This  devotion  to  music  imparts  to  the  general  character  of  the  masses 
in  Mexico  a  gentleness  and  refinement  of  manner  that  distinguishes 
them  favorably  from  the  plebeian  in  the  big  cities  of  the  North  "  (p. 
388).  "It  seems  to  me,  after  my  long  experience  with  the  Mexico 
Indians,  that  in  their  natural  state  they  are  in  certain  points  superior 
not  only  to  the  average  Mexican  half-caste,  but  to  the  common  run 
of  whites.  We  are  brought  up  to  look  upon  primitive  people  as  syno- 
nyms of  all  that  is  crude,  evil,  and  vicious.  Nothing  could  be  more 
erroneous.  I  could  cite  a  heathen  tribe  in  India  who  consider  a  lie 
the  blackest  dishonor,  and  a  tribe  on  the  islands  of  Bering  Sea  who, 
when  discovered  by  Russian  missionaries,  were  leading  a  life  so 
nearly  in  accord  with  the  Gospel  of  Christ  that  the  teachers  con- 
fessed they  had  better  let  them  alone."  An  otherwise  fanatical  mis- 
sionary, the  Monk  Duran,  in  his  book  on  Mexico,  written  sixty  years 
after  the  conquest,  in  referring  to  the  false  opinions  of  the  Spaniards 
regarding  the  native  Indians,  said :  "  There  never  was  a  nation  in  the 
world  where  harmony,  order,  and  politeness  reigned  so  supreme  as 
in  this  infidel  nation.  In  what  country  of  the  world  were  there  ever 
so  many  laws  and  regulations  of  the  state  at  once  so  just  and  so 
well  appointed?  In  regard  to  their  laws  and  ancient  modes  of  living, 
all  is  much  changed  or  wholly  lost.  Nothing  but  a  shadow  remains 
now  of  that  good  order." 

Says  Lumholtz :  "  It  is  a  very  common  mistake  to  look  upon  a 
barbarian  as  a  third-rate  white  man.  The  Indian's  physique  is  better 
developed  and  his  senses  are  better  trained  than  the  white  man's. 
His  intellect  and  clearness  of  thought  average  higher  than  the  com- 
mon people  of  Europe  and  America.  The  mental  gifts  of  many  In- 
dians would  entitle  them  to  fill  responsible  positions.  Primitive  man 
is  as  modest  in  his  ambitions  as  he  is  in  his  demands  upon  nature." 
The  aborigines  here  have  a  high  artistic  sense,  as  shown  in  their 
textiles,  which  live  among  the  remains  of  their  former  greatness. 
Some  beautiful  bits  of  pottery  are  sometimes  excavated  from  the 
mounds.  The  patterns  are  infinitely  varied,  but  all  have  a  meaning. 
Monogamy  is  the  recognized  basis  of  the  family.  "  What  we  call 
their  vices  are  due  not  to  depravity  but  to  their  religious  practises. 
Personal  modesty  is  innate  in  the  race;  justice  with  them  is  inexor- 
able; immortality  of  the  soul  is  universally  recognized.  In  their 
religious  fervor  the  aborigines  of  Mexico  have  no  equals,  certainly 
not  among  Christians.     Their  entire  life  is  one  continuous  worship 


686  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

of  their  gods,  that  they  may  gain  happiness.  Every  act  in  their  lives, 
every  work  undertaken,  is  guided  by  religious  thoughts.  All  that  we 
should  call  ornament  on  their  clothing  and  implements  owes  its  very 
existence  to  the  prayerful  thoughts  it  expresses.  Of  all  that  man  has, 
the  gods  get  their  share.  No  crop  is  so  scanty  but  that  some  of  it 
is  ungrudgingly  sacrificed  to  the  deity  who  gave  it.  When  I  saw 
them  perform  their  religious  dances  indefatigably  for  days  and  nights, 
and  when  I  heard  them  in  their  humble  temples  invoke  divine  help  in 
tears,  I  felt  in  my  heart  that  their  pitiful  appeals  would  be  as  readily 
answered  as  the  most  eloquent  oration  of  the  high  priest  at  the  most 
elaborate  altar  Christianity  ever  raised  to  the  greater  glory  of  God. 
In  drifting  into  the  new  condition  of  life,  the  native  may  lose  his 
worldly  possessions,  but  he  still  retains  the  wealth  of  his  religiosity 
and  is  as  eager  to  comply  with  the  new  code  as  he  was  with  the 
worship  of  his  ancestral  idols.  '  The  Indians  have  too  much  religion,' 
a  padre  once  said  to  me,  '  and  they  want  more  than  is  good  for  them.' 
When  the  chief  of  the  Zunis,  whom  Mr.  Gushing  had  taken  to  Boston, 
was  asked  what  had  impressed  him  and  his  companions  mostly  in  the 
great  city  of  the  whites,  he  replied,  '  That  the  people  are  not  religious. 
Great  crowds  are  constantly  hurrying  hither  and  thither,  but  no  one 
is  praying.  I  had  thought  that  they  would  be  very  religious  because 
they  sent  missionaries  to  us,  but  I  find  they  are  not.'  It  is  not  among 
primitive  races  that  we  have  to  seek  for  the  lowest  types  of  humanity. 
The  most  depraved  and  degenerate  individuals  are  found  in  the  slums 
of  the  great  cities.  People  who  live  in  close  touch  with  nature  are  in 
fact  not  capable  of  being  as  perverted  as  civilized  criminals  are  in 
mind  and  body."  The  work  of  missionaries  is  often  needed  much 
more  among  the  conquering  soldiers  and  the  prospectors,  brandy 
traders,  and  adventurers  that  follow  in  their  wake  than  among  the 
unsophisticated  barbarians.  "  Doubtless  there  are  no  natives  on  earth 
so  wicked  as  those  who  profess  Christianity,"  said  James  Russell 
Lowell. 

Belt,^  who  was  an  observer  of  long  experience,  care,  and  training, 
says :  "  Probably  nowhere  but  in  tropical  America  can  it  be  said  that 
the  introduction  of  European  civilization  has  been  a  retrogression ; 
and  that  those  communities  are  the  happiest  and  the  best  governed 
who  retain  most  of  their  old  customs  and  habits.  Yet  there  it  is  so. 
The  civilization  that  Cortez  overthrew  was  more  suitable  for  the 
Indians  than  that  which  has  supplanted  it.  Who  can  read  the  ac- 
counts of  the  populous  towns  of  Mexico  and  Central  America, 
in  the  time  of  Montezuma,  with  their  magnificent  buildings  and 
squares;  their  gardens,  both  zoological  and  botanical;  their  markets, 
attended  by  merchants  from  the  surrounding  countries ;  their  beau- 
tiful cloth  and  feather  work,  the  latter  now  a  lost  art;  their  cunning 
artificers  in  gold  and  silver;  their  astronomical  knowledge;  their 
schools;  their  love  of  order,  of  cleanliness,  of  decency;  their  morality 

^  The  Naturalist  in  Nicaragua.      1874,  p.  282. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR   TREATMENT       687 

and  wonderful  patriotism,  without  feeling  that  the  conquest  of  Mexico 
was  a  deplorable  calamity;  that  if  that  ancient  civilization  had  been 
saved,  it  might  have  been  Christianized  and  purified  without  being 
destroyed,  and  to-day  have  stood  one  of  the  wonders  and  delights 
of  the  world.  Its  civilization  was  self-grown,  it  was  indigenous,  it 
was  unique;  a  few  poor  remnants  of  its  piety,  love  of  order,  and  self- 
government  still  remain  in  remote  Indian  townships,  but  its  learning, 
magnificence,  and  glory  have  gone  forever."  Now  they  carry  stones 
for  miles  to  finish  a  Catholic  church  as  they  once  did  to  build  cairns. 
They  love  flowers,  and  decorate  altars,  temples,  and  schools  as  of  old 
they  did  their  prayer-houses,  and  worship  saints  and  idols  as  of  old 
they  did  their  ancestral  idols. 

In  all  these  regions,  as  well  as  in  Canada,  where  40,000  are  Cath- 
olics, and  South  America,  the  Catholic  cult  has  permeated  the  life 
of  the  people  vastly  more  than  the  Protestant,  the  latter  having  but 
the  slightest  hold  in  South  America.  Warneck  says  that  native  In- 
dians are  "  more  accessible  to  Christianity  than  any  other  people." 
All  "  betray  that  gloomy  and  incurable  sadness  that  seems  to  hang 
over  natives  destined  to  perish."  Some  of  the  prominent  men  in 
Central  America,  like  President  Juarez  and  General  Moreles,  are  pure 
Indians.  There  is  little  prejudice,  and  if  educated  they  intermarry 
freely  with  the  best  Spanish  families.  The  University  of  Mexico  was 
founded  in  1553,  eighty-three  years  before  Harvard,  and  in  1824 
Humboldt  said  no  country  of  the  new  continent,  not  excepting  the 
United  States,  presents  scientific  establishments  so  great  and  solid 
as  those  of  the  capital  of  Mexico.  Often  "  paganism  was  baptized 
and  Christianity  was  paganized."  In  Central  America,  the  size  of 
Spain,  "  an  epitome  of  all  other  countries  and  climates  of  the  globe," 
an  old  god  is  paralleled  to  each  Christian  personage.  The  sun  is 
God  the  Father,  the  moon  the  Madonna,  the  stars  tutelary  saints. 
Many  natives  think  there  are  two  gods,  one  of  the  forest  especially 
devoted  to  them,  and  the  other  for  the  whites.  In  Guatemala,  in  1899, 
the  Goddess  of  Wisdom  was  venerated  in  an  anti-Roman  festival  as 
an  "  apotheosis  of  free  thought,  the  one  possible  factor  in  our  national 
culture."  In  Argentina,  nearly  fifteen  times  as  large  as  New  England, 
with  its  superb  climate,  its  silver  mines,  that  of  Potosi  alone  having 
yielded  15,000  million  dollars  since  the  Spanish  came,  where  Reclus 
thinks  men  are  found  containing  a  great  number  of  characteristics 
of  all  races,  a  center  of  so  amazing  a  development  that  some  think 
that  the  Spanish  tongue  will  one  day  rival  English  as  a  world 
language  (one  estimate  being  that  in  1920  it  will  be  spoken  by 
180,000,000),  there  is  the  greatest  desire  to  emulate  North  American 
and  European  ideals.  In  general.  South  America  shows  extreme 
religiosity.  A  great  mine  is  named  Jesus  Crucified.  Streets  are 
named  Christ,  Rosary,  Cross.  Men  and  women  are  named  Jesus, 
Conception,  Mary.  A  popular  play  is  entitled  the  Face  of  God. 
Cathedrals  in  every  stage  of  decay,  and  feasts,  fasts,  and  saint-days 
abound,  the  latter  being  so  numerous  as  to  greatly  interfere  with 


688  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

business,  a  coffee  raiser  having  abandoned  his  enterprise  because  he 
could  only  count  on  two  hundred  days  of  work  a  year.  Catholicism 
is  generally  the  state  religion,  with  only  modified  freedom  allowed 
to  other  forms  of  worship,  and  a  small  number  of  incomers  quite 
alienated  from,  and  perhaps  hostile  to,  all  religion. 

Averaging  the  sixteen  best  estimates,  our  own  Indians 
number  315,000,  although  the  Indian  Bureau  in  1900  reports 
only  270,544.  Each  family  of  five,  if  they  owned  and  divided 
the  States  exclusive  of  Alaska,  would  have  a  manor  of  forty- 
eight  square  miles,  or  30,720  acres.  Rhode  Island,  e.  g.,  would 
be  divided  among  twenty-six  Indians,  while  it  now  has  69,101 
families.  Cyrus  Thomas  says,  "  The  fact  that  the  country  was 
inhabited  by  and  in  possession  of  a  native  population  does  not 
appear  to  have  been  taken  into  consideration  in  the  solution 
of  this  problem."  The  low  culture  status  of  the  aborigines 
afforded  an  excuse  for  Europeans  to  claim  ownership,  assum- 
ing that  they  made  ample  compensation  by  bestowing  the 
benefits  of  civilization  and  Christianity.  The  history  of 
treaties,  cessions,  legislative  and  supreme  court  decisions  on 
this  subject  is  long  and  abounds  in  fluctuations  and  incon- 
sistencies. As  these  claims  are  tribal  rather  than  individual, 
they  were  till  1871  treated  by  a  legal  fiction  as  sovereign 
states.  France  alone  never  attempted  any  settled  policy  of 
extinguishing  Indian  claims. 

The  Indian  title  to  all  the  public  domain  is  now  obliterated  save 
in  162  Indian  reservations  and  those  acquired  by  the  Indians  through 
purchase.  Of  these,  51  were  established  by  treaty  or  agreement,  56 
by  executive  order,  28  by  act  of  Congress,  and  the  others  in  various 
ways.^  Parkham  says  that  "  Spanish  civilization  crushed  the  Indian ; 
English  civilization  scorned  and  neglected  him;  French  civilization 
embraced  and  cherished  him."  A  nomad  or  agricultural  race  is 
never  allowed  long  to  monopolize  a  land  that  could  support  a  denser 
population.  The  half  million  Indians  in  North  America  when  the 
white  man  came  were  immensely  impressed  by  his  mysterious  ships, 
more  wonderful  arms,  and  perhaps  most  of  all  by  the  horses,  then 
unknown  in  the  New  World.     The  red  men  little  realized,  when  they 


'Eighteenth  Annual  Report  of  the  Bureau  of  Ethnology.  i8g6-'97,  part  ii. 
Full  and  minute  maps  of  all  these  reservations,  together  with  a  complete  sched- 
ule of  Indian  land  cessions,  many  hundred  in  number,  from  the  first  in  1784  to 
August,  1894,  are  printed. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       689 

were  discovered  by  Columbus  and  his  followers,  that  the  twilight  of 
their  race  had  begun.  The  tubes  that  shot  lightning,  the  canoes  with 
wings,  the  black  clothed  medicine  men,  the  new  dress,  all  impressed 
them  as  something  supernatural  at  first,  but  they  soon  found  that  the 
white  manitous  were  not  only  human,  but  insatiably  greedy  of  gold 
and  slaves,  malignantly  cruel,  and  their  gift  of  fire-water,  which 
became  the  mammon  of  the  natives  for  which  they  would  make  any 
sacrifice,  was  perhaps  the  most  important  agent  in  the  downfall  of 
the  aborigines,  among  whom  drunkenness  had  hitherto  been  a  vice 
unknown.  This  new,  intense  appetite  made  them  dependent  on  traders 
and  agents,  and  with  a  keg  of  rum  the  white  man  could  accomplish 
what  diplomacy  and  war  both  failed  to  do.  Added  to  all  the  friction, 
distrust,  and  rupture,  there  always  lurked  this  insidious  and  baleful 
foe  which  makes  men  first  fools  and  then  beasts.  Civilization  always 
"  takes  barbarism  by  the  hot  end,"  and  here  the  difference  between 
the  custom  of  the  whites  and  the  Indians  was  too  great.  First  wel- 
comed as  gods,  the  whites  were  soon  regarded  as  devils.  In  1494 
Columbus  sent  home  twelve  ship-loads  of  Indian  slaves ;  the  same 
year  Cabot,  with  two  loads  of  English  convicts,  landed  and  carried 
home  kidnapped  Indians.  In  1500  Cortereal  took  home  fifty-seven 
hospitable  natives,  "  admirably  calculated  for  labor,"  for  slaves.  De 
Soto,  bankrupt,  butcher,  tyrant — taught  as  a  hero  in  our  text-books — 
always  returned  welcome,  with  all  his  treachery,  and  was  immensely 
devoted  to  what  he  called  "  this  sport  of  killing  Indians."  We  are 
proud  if  in  our  American  ancestry  we  find  Indian  fighters ;  but  while 
we  are  proud  of  their  heroism  we  ought  with  equal  candor  to  de- 
plore their  massacres  of  braves,  who  had  rather  be  shot  than  beg  for 
mercy  or  toil  in  servitude.  The  Puritans,  although  they  did  not,  like 
many  pioneers,  use  every  means  to  annoy  and  persecute  them,  still 
considered  them  "  doomed  and  unconverted  heathen  "  whom  it  was 
their  duty  to  dispossess,  "  since  the  enemies  of  the  Puritans  were  the 
enemies  of  God." 

In  1607  Popham's  men  on  the  Maine  coast  hunted  the  Indians  with 
dogs  and  imposed  on  them  in  every  barter.  Rev.  Samuel  Stod- 
dard, of  Northampton,  as  late  as  1703  advised  hunting  the  Indians 
with  dogs  because  they  were  thieves,  murderers,  acted  like  and  must 
therefore  be  dealt  with  as  wolves.  The  cruelty  of  Endicott,  culminat- 
ing in  many  acts  of  treachery  and  aggression,  alienated  the  Pequots 
and  caused  their  war.  All  the  horrors  of  the  French  and  Indian 
wars,  culminating  in  i754-'58,  were  directly  caused  by  the  unwar- 
rantable aggressions  by  the  colonists.  Both  France  and  England  used 
savage  allies  to  do  more  bloody  work  than  they  cared  for  the  repu- 
tation of  doing  themselves.  The  Indian  was  almost  never  the  ag- 
gressor till  forced  to  retaliation ;  the  brutal  massacre  of  the  Indians 
at  Pavonia  the  unbiased  historian  must  ascribe  to  the  cowardice  of 
Van  Twiller.  The  Esopus  War  of  1663  was  due  to  rum  on  the  part 
of  the  Indian  and  the  brutality  of  the  colonists.  The  massacre  of 
1652  in  Virginia  was  due  to  white  cruelty  and  rapacity.    In  the  Caro- 


690  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

linas  the  colonists  purchased  the  friendship  of  single  tribes,  whom 
they  employed  to  war  against  others.  Both  the  Spaniards  in  Florida 
and  the  French  in  Canada  tortured  Indian  captives  and  mangled  their 
bodies.  The  Puritans  exulted  over  King  Philip's  grief  for  the  loss 
of  his  wife  and  child,  whom  they  had  sold  into  West  Indian  slavery. 
Virginian  cavaliers,  Swedes,  and  Dutchmen  alike  regarded  the  In- 
dians as  having  no  rights  they  were  bound  to  respect.  Even  in  the 
soul  of  William  Penn  there  was  a  strange  union  of  business  shrewd- 
ness and  benevolence.  The  fact  that  all  Indian  land  was  owned  by 
the  tribe  and  not  by  individuals  was  an  excuse  for  many  territorial 
aggressions. 

The  barbarities  of  trappers  and  the  villainies  of  fur  traders  and 
the  vices  of  borderers  are  mainly  responsible  for  the  present  bad 
character  ascribed  to  Indians.  The  conspiracy  of  Pontiac  in  1763 
was  due  to  the  aggressions  of  fur  traders,  soldiers,  and  settlers;  the 
war  with  Tecumseh  was  an  open  violation  of  the  land  treaty;  the 
Creek  troubles  in  Georgia  in  1813  were  due  to  the  National  Govern- 
ment's effort  to  extinguish  all  Indian  titles  in  that  State ;  the  Black 
Hawk  War  in  1832  was  caused  by  endless  insults  and  aggressions  of 
pioneers  upon  this  ancient  chieftain ;  the  Seminole  War  in  1835  was 
one  of  the  most  outrageous  aggressions  of  lawless  frontiersmen ;  the 
Cayuse  massacre  of  Oregon  missionaries  in  1847  was  due  to  Jesuit 
priests;  the  California  massacre  of  1851  to  gold  hunters;  the  Sioux 
and  Cheyenne  massacres  in  1854  to  the  Mormon  outrages;  the  Oregon 
and  Klickitat  wars  of  1855  to  attacks  of  white  traders;  the  Digger 
War  of  1858  was  simple  slaughter  of  inoffensive  Indians  who  drove 
off  cattle  found  eating  their  acorns;  the  Navajo  revolt  of  1858,  the 
Apache  outbreak  of  1861,  the  Sioux  War  in  1862,  the  Arapahoe  and 
Cheyenne  attacks  in  1864,  the  Sioux  War  in  1866,  the  Blackfeet  out- 
break in  1869,  the  Modoc  War  of  1872,  the  Sioux  War  of  1876,  the 
Nez  Perce  War  of  i876-'77,  perhaps  the  worst  of  all,  were  due  almost 
solely  to  the  weakness  or  dishonesty  and  folly  of  agents :  every  one 
of  these  was  essentially  causeless  and  could  have  easily  been  avoided.' 

Civilization  seems  certain  to  fall  out  with  savagery,  and  although 
the  Indians  may  number  about  as  many  to-day  as  they  did  when  the 
country  was  discovered,  so  that  their  decline  in  numbers  is  relative, 
their  decline  in  virtue  and  stamina  is  absolute.  General  Crook,  whose 
life  was  largely  passed  among  the  Indians,  declared  that  they  were 
the  intellectual  peers  of  the  other  races  that  we  have  assimilated. 
Others  have  urged  that  they  have  the  right  of  sending  a  delegate  to 
Congress,  and  General  Wordsworth  declared  that  there  were  many 
Indian  chiefs  who  would  not  disgrace  its  floor.  In  some  of  their 
later  wars  they  have  displayed  a  skill  and  courage  that  evoked  uni- 
versal praise,  adopting  many  of  the  white  man's  methods,  scalping 

'  See  E.  S.  Brooks :  Story  of  the  American  Indian,  his  Origin,  Development, 
Decline,  and  Destiny.  Boston,  1887.  Also  G.  Friederici :  Indianer  u.  Anglo- 
Amerikaner.     Braunschweig,  1900,  p.  147. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES   AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       691 

no  one,  and  freeing  women  and  children.  The  very  quintessence  of 
the  spirit  of  chivalry  lives  still  among  the  Indians,  and  plenty  of 
instances  of  highest  honor  are  shown.  Huxley  was  right  in  de- 
claring that  if  he  had  to  choose  between  life  in  the  worst  quarter  of 
a  great  city  and  life  with  the  most  barbarous  tribe  known,  he  would 
undoubtedly  choose  the  latter,  for  the  savage  has  sunshine,  light,  air, 
and  freedom.  Spotted  Tail,  Red  Jacket,  Samoset,  Massasoit,  Anilco, 
Tomochi-chi,  Pontiac,  and  many  other  famous  Indians,  have  been 
distinguished  for  courtesy,  eloquence,  honor,  cordial  hospitality,  and 
Crooks  calls  King  Philip  the  American  "  Rob  Roy."  Black  Hawk, 
as  restless  as  Philip  and  as  ambitious  as  Pontiac,  is  called  one  of  the 
last  warriors  of  the  early  Indian  school,  and  his  patriotism  is  well 
compared  to  that  of  Scanderbeg  or  Winkelried.  Osceola  was  a  half- 
breed,  more  cunning  than  honorable,  but  with  great  ability.  We  have 
treated  the  Indian  neither  as  a  citizen  nor  as  a  foreigner;  for  cen- 
turies they  had  occupied  the  entire  continent,  whereas  now  in  this 
country  they  are  restricted  to  some  250,000  square  miles. 

Joaquin  Miller '  spent  five  years  among  the  Modocs,  whom  he 
describes  as  a  "  truly  gentle  savage,"  and  who,  he  thinks,  killed  one 
white  man  to  every  hundred  Indians  slain  on  their  many  a  St.  Bar- 
tholomew's Eve.  Every  white  man's  hand  was  against  him,  and  he 
had  hair-breadth  escapes  for  his  friendliness  to  them.  He  describes 
the  border  desperadoes  removed  from  all  control  by  law,  public  opin- 
ion, and  the  press,  and  in  whom  every  vile  passion  was  let  loose.  He 
tells  of  their  exalted  religious  conception  under  the  brow  of  Mt. 
Shasta,  their  hospitality,  their  children  so  rarely  needing  correction 
because  exempt  from  all  temptations  of  civilization  and  having  nat- 
ural outlets  for  their  activities,  their  noble  interpretation  of  totemism 
and  of  the  Great  Spirit,  their  contempt  for  a  god  that  needs  to  send 
or  sign  a  paper.  He  pleads  for  a  real  reservation  which  no  white  man 
should  enter,  where  their  habits  and  beliefs  should  be  unmolested  and 
where  they  be  left  to  adopt  such  of  our  customs  as  they  saw  fit.  It 
should  be  a  great  park  in  which  they  should  be  protected  and  allowed 
to  work  out  their  own  destiny,  to  instruct  us,  and  to  teach  others,  as  his 
life  among  them  did  the  author,  to  hold  aloof  from  many  features  of 
civilization,  to  love  nature,  and  hate  the  "  moral  cannibalism  where 
souls  eat  souls."  The  beauty,  devotion,  and  pathetic  death  of  Paquita 
in  the  chaparral,  Calle  Shasta,  the  last  of  her  race,  pathetically  alone, 
lost  and  out  of  place,  her  heart  full  of  memories,  with  none  living 
who  knew  her  native  language,  appeal  to  the  heart  if  not  to  the  an- 
thropologist. 

Helen  Hunt's  ^  sad  story  of  broken  faith  and  treaties  may  well 
make  us  wonder  that  men  can  so  trifle  with  justice  or  with  God's 
anger.  Even  our  soldiers  have  often  found  it  hard  to  fight  those  they 
knew  were  in  the  right.    Bishop  Whipple  calls  the  Indian  the  noblest 

'  Life  Among  the  Modocs.     An  unwritten  history.     London,  1873,  P-  400- 
'  A  Century  of  Dishonor.     New  York,  1885. 


692  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

type  of  heathen  man  on  earth.  To  read  the  outrages,  butcheries, 
nameless  crimes  and  torturings  which  are  compiled  from  oflRcial  rec- 
ords makes  the  mouth  grow  dry,  the  eyes  wet,  the  heart  throb,  the 
teeth  and  fists  clinch,  and  the  soul  to  cry  out  whether  there  is  no 
justice  in  heaven  or  on  earth. 

If  these  books  present  the  worst,  the  story  of  Metlakahtla  shows 
perhaps  the  best  of  all  modes  of  treatment.  In  1857  these  savages, 
3,000  to  4,000  in  number,  were  cannibals,  dog-eaters,  devil  dancers, 
abjectly  subject  to  their  shaman.  William  Duncan,  hearing  of  them, 
left  a  promising  business  career  and  sailed  around  Cape  Horn  to 
them,  and  was  the  first  to  study  their  tongue.  Taking  his  life  in  his 
hand,  he  ventured  among  them  from  the  fort,  told  them  that  he 
came  to  them  with  a  letter  from  God,  and  chiefly  studied  their  lives 
to  obtain  a  sympathetic  insight  into  their  points  of  view.  Finding  a 
few  who  accepted  his  chieftainship,  he  made  a  log  schoolhouse  for 
children  and  for  adults,  and  was  esteemed  a  man  with  a  new  magic. 
Mr.  Wellcome  '  tells  of  many  hair-breadth  escapes,  misconceptions,  the 
desperate  opposition  of  the  medicine  men ;  how  he  became  interpreter 
for  the  traders;  was  local  magistrate;  healed  many  quarrels;  treated 
sequestered  patients  for  measles  and  smallpox ;  set  up  a  sawmill ; 
taught  the  Indians  to  make  a  large  bar  of  soap  for  sixpence  for  which 
the  company  had  charged  two  dollars,  and  thereby  improved  their 
extreme  filthiness;  waged  a  far  more  bitter  war  with  the  whites  who 
sold  drink  than  with  the  Indians  themselves;  tried  to  mitigate  the 
sexual  degradations  that  were  developed  by  proximity  to  the  whites, 
and  finally  decided  to  evade  some  of  the  obstacles  that  beset  his  path 
by  establishing  an  isolated  model  community  twenty  miles  from  the 
fort,  with  good  fishing,  hunting,  harbor,  and  gardens.  He  required 
all  who  entered  it  to  pledge  that  they  would  cease  gambling,  drinking, 
the  practise  of  deviltry,  savage  medicine;  to  rest  and  go  to  church 
on  Sunday ;  send  their  children  to  school ;  be  clean,  industrious,  peace- 
ful, and  honest;  build  a  house  and  pay  the  tax.  Fifty  at  first  em- 
barked to  this  asylum  and  were  soon  joined  by  others.  Mr.  Duncan 
organized  a  village  council  of  twelve,  including  three  chiefs,  and  a 
native  constabulary;  built  two  hotels  for  visiting  traders  and  Indians 
to  prevent  contamination ;  dug  wells ;  formed  a  common  and  play- 
ground where  many  games  were  encouraged;  fought  slavery  in  a 
very  degraded  form  which  existed  all  about  him ;  prevented  the  sell- 
ing of  children,  and  the  reckless  giving  away  of  all  property  at  great 
potlatches ;  imprisoned  liquor  dealers ;  built  a  trading  vessel ;  formed 
a  stock  company  and  a  bank,  with  blankets  for  money ;  allowed  all 
officers  to  wear  a  badge ;  himself  publicly  flogged  offenders ;  went  to 
the  old  country  to  learn  blacksmithing,  coopering,  brush  and  broom 
making,  weaving,  spinning,  and  many  other  arts,  which  he  taught 


•  The  Story  of  Metlakahtla,  by  Henry  S.  Wellcome.      London  and  New  York, 
1887. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES   AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       693 

his  people;  organized  a  brass  band  of  twenty-one  instruments,  and  a 
fire  brigade;  his  little  company  soon  grew  to  ten  or  twelve  hundred 
people,  and  their  influence  began  to  leaven  the  surrounding  tribes 
far  into  the  interior,  and  up  and  down  the  coast  the  white  man's  ways 
were  pronounced  good. 

Mr.  Duncan  proved  himself  a  great  practical  missionary  genius. 
He  was  not  only  pastor,  but  treasurer,  teacher,  physician,  trader, 
judge,  and  friend.  He  reformed  their  funeral  methods,  where  widows 
and  slaves  were  sometimes  burned  on  a  bier;  slowly  transformed  the 
tribal  system;  improved  cooking;  established  an  immense  salmon  can- 
nery; never  told  them  that  his  God  was  better  than  theirs,  but  that 
he  was  one  who  stocked  the  sea  and  rivers  with  fish  and  the  forests 
with  game;  taught  by  the  example  of  his  own  pure  and  honest  life; 
was  a  good  bookkeeper  and  kept  his  records  open  to  all.  He  soon 
organized  a  rifle  company,  a  two-gun  battery,  a  cooperative  store; 
did  not  transform  their  totem  post  dwellings  at  first,  but  gradually 
improved  them  by  introducing  chimneys,  windows,  doors,  floors  above 
the  ground,  flowers  in  the  front  and  gardens  in  the  rear;  built  a 
market  house  and  a  small  calaboose ;  organized  a  police  system ;  and, 
layman  though  he  was,  grasped  and  put  in  practise  the  true  science 
of  civilization. 

Traders,  liquor  dealers,  and  the  Church  sought  to  drag  him  down. 
An  English  bishop  insisted  that  he  must  introduce  the  full  English 
ritual.  Mr.  Duncan  objected  that  he  dare  not  use  the  sacrament  of 
wine  because  of  their  passion  for  it  and  the  well-settled  law  by  which 
all  who  touched  it  were  imprisoned.  Neither  did  he  dare  teach  the  real 
presence  of  Christ's  body  in  the  bread  to  former  cannibals,  but  pre- 
ferred to  endure  the  charge  of  teaching  a  false  and  mutilated  Chris- 
tianity and  chose  to  be  evangelical  rather  than  ecclesiastical. 

During  one  of  his  absences  a  cyclone  evangelist  almost  destroyed 
his  work  by  a  few  weeks  of  fanatical  preaching.  The  English  Church 
Missionary  Society  by  false  representations  was  induced  to  ask  him 
to  resign,  but  every  soul  in  his  church  urged  him  to  stand  by  them 
in  their  supreme  peril  and  trial,  and  he  consented.  The  resident 
bishop  set  up  a  rival  school  and  tempted  his  chief  teacher  by  higher 
wages;  strove  to  cripple  the  financial  resources  of  the  church;  and 
finally,  after  a  long  series  of  insidious  misrepresentations  in  England 
and  Canada  and  efforts  to  undermine  Mr.  Duncan  in  his  own  field, 
succeeded  in  inducing  Sir  John  Macdonald  to  take  possession  in  the 
name  of  the  Crown  of  the  lands  on  which  the  settlement  was  built 
without  offering  any  compensation.  Denunciations  of  robbery  and 
comparisons  with  the  policy  of  the  States  in  always  buying  Indian 
lands  were  of  no  avail,  and  at  last  it  was  decided  to  remove  the  entire 
colony  into  Alaska,  a  distance  of  about  thirty  miles,  so  as  to  come 
under  the  jurisdiction  of  the  United  States.  Mr.  Duncan  preached 
their  cause  in  the  influential  churches  in  the  East,  where  he  secured 
sufficient  support  to  move,  although  Canadian  law  was  so  interpreted 
that  they  could  not  take  down  and  transfer  their  houses,  but  at  last 


694  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

with  secure  tenure  they  became  established  in  their  new  home  in 
1888  and  a  new  era  was  begun. 

This  treatment  by  the  Canadian  Government  almost  provoked  the 
Indians  to  commence  warfare  and  relapse  to  their  old  savage  con- 
dition. The  real  trouble  was  not  with  the  Indians,  but  with  the  white 
man,  who  was  blinded  partly  by  insatiable  greed  and  partly  by  igno- 
rance of  all  Indian  nature  and  ways.  The  whole  secret,  Mr.  Duncan 
declares,  is  to  look  at  the  Indian  as  a  whole,  body  and  soul,  to  study 
and  above  all  to  trust  him.  The  missionary  must  not  attack  their 
customs,  even  the  bad  ones,  at  first,  until  he  has  some  vantage-ground 
on  which  to  work,  and  must  be  filled  with  the  spirit  of  compromise. 
Our  method  of  doling  supplies  to  Indians  as  bribes  to  be  quiet  and 
to  terrorize  them  if  they  are  not,  is  the  worst  possible  way,  and  the 
present  state  of  most  Indians  in  this  country  is  a  disgrace,  not  to 
them  but  to  us.  Their  ability  to  make  noble  men  of  themselves  has 
been  demonstrated  over  and  over  again.  In  some  respects  they  are 
our  superiors,  but  we  have  developed  their  bad  and  allowed  their 
good  qualities  to  languish  or  become  extinct. 

Says  E.  W.  James :  ^  "  So  complex,  indeed,  is  the  Hopi's  religious 
life  that  we  have  no  complete  calendar  as  yet  of  all  the  ceremonies 
that  he  feels  called  upon  to  observe.  Every  act  of  his  life  from  the 
cradle  to  the  grave  has  a  religious  side.  Fear  and  the  need  for  pro- 
pitiation are  the  motive  powers  of  his  religious  life,  and  these,  com- 
bined with  his  stanch  conservatism,  render  him  a  wonderfully  fertile 
subject  for  study  as  to  the  workings  of  the  child-mind  of  the  human 
race." 

Much  as  our  Indian  policy,  bureau,  and  special  schools  have 
improved,  noble  as  have  been  the  endeavors  of  individuals  and  of  the 
Mohawk  Conference,  these  are  all  yet  very  inadequate  and  sometimes 
as  wrong  as  they  are  well  meant.  So  hostile  is  Colonel  Pratt  of  the 
Carlisle  School  to  the  tribal  system  that  he  would  stamp  it  out  and 
prevent  the  young  brave  from  returning  to  his  tribe.  Morgan  has 
shown  the  vast  chasm  that  separates  this  consanguineous  clan  system, 
which  has  pervaded  the  ancient  world,  even  Greece  and  Rome,  from 
our  modern  organization.  Some  of  the  New  York  Indian  tribes  have 
lived  in  the  midst  of  white  civilization  for  seventy-five  years  without 
impairing  their  integrity  as  a  tribe.  The  Numas  also  show  its  per- 
sistence by  an  unique  dual  organization.  A  chief  regulates  all  internal 
affairs  on  the  old  basis,  while  the  medicine  man  is  specialized  to 
represent  the  tribe  in  all  matters  relating  to  the  whites  about  them. 
The  present  Superintendent  of  Indian  Schools  advocates  compulsory 
education  of  all  Indian  children,  especially  industrially.  But  their 
own  industries,  now  languishing,  are,  as  I  have  shown  in  Chapter  III, 
if  not  more  numerous  and  more  truly  educative  than  the  trades  we 
have  learned  to  teach,  at  least  their  own.  They  could  be  thus  self-sup- 
porting, for  the  demand  for  their  products  far  exceeds  thie  supply. 


■  The  Indian  of  the  Painted  Desert.     1903,  p.  82. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND  THEIR  TREATMENT       695 

The  refinements  of  a  modern  cooking-school  are  distasteful  to  an 
Indian  girl,  and  sloyd  for  them  is  pedagogic  vanity.  The  plan  of 
creating  distaste  for  the  Indian  mode  of  life  and  breaking  up  the 
home,  and  allowing  basketry,  pottery,  bead  work,  moccasins,  flint 
chipping,  weaving,  bow,  arrow,  and  canoe  making,  skin  dressing,  and 
all  the  rest  to  go  the  way  of  the  lost  arts  is  not  on  the  line  of  devel- 
oping natural  tastes  and  abilities.  Their  unique  music,  too,  will  soon 
be  lost.^  Zitkala-sa  has  told  us  of  the  modes  of  wigwam  training,  the 
unfettered  individuality  of  really  artistic  self-expression  in  baskets, 
pottery,  loom  work,  and  drawing,  which  the  wisest  of  us  can  profit 
by.  She  says  her  mother  required  original  designs  for  her  lessons 
in  beading;  made  her  finish  everything  that  was  begun;  had  no  pa- 
tience with  lack  of  symmetry  or  insufficient  characterization;  made 
her  feel  responsible  and  dependent  on  her  own  judgment;  and  treated 
her  as  a  dignified  little  individual  as  long  as  she  was  good.    When  her 

'  Indian  songs  are  spontaneous  and  arise  from  story  or  ceremony  which  are 
their  matrix.  They  take  us  back  of  the  music  of  antiquity,  and  are,  like  wild  flow- 
ers, never  domesticated.  Their  themes  are  of  love,  peace,  war,  death,  heroes,  ani- 
mals or  birds,  thunder,  prayers,  children.  Alice  Fletcher  says  that  music  envel- 
opes the  Indian's  individual  and  social  life  like  an  atmosphere.  Some  of  these 
songs  have  been  harmonized  by  J.  C.  Fillmore  and  by  Arthur  Farwell.^  Many 
songs  are  wordless,  vocables  being  used  only  to  float  the  voice.  They  have  no  in- 
struments save  only  the  voice,  drum,  and  rattle,  and  anything  like  poetry  is  still 
less  developed.  They  show  that  music  arose,  like  language,  from  mental  necessity. 
Here,  as  in  so  many  other  fields,  America  is  a  "  fossil  bed  "  abounding  in  prehis- 
toric records  to  which  scholars  look  to  fill  gaps.  Indian  songs  are  very  numerous 
but  brief  and  abrupt.  They  break  out  in  the  climax  of  a  dramatic  story  at  a  point 
where  words  are  not  sufficient.  The  most  pathetic  song  is  that  of  the  ghost  dance 
blended  from  several  old  ceremonials.  It  is  an  appeal  to  the  unseen  world  to  comfort 
those  doomed  to  slow  extinction.  In  the  trance  that  follows  they  see  the  landscape 
of  ancient  days  before  the  paleface  came,  abounding  in  game,  and  meet  the  spirits 
of  their  ancestors.  It  is  "  the  cry  of  a  people  forsaken  by  the  gods  in  which  they 
once  trusted."  It  is  essentially  peaceful.  The  Indian  singer  is  not  making  a 
musical  presentation  to  an  audience.  He  simply  pours  out  his  feelings  regardless 
of  artistic  effect.  All  is  subjective.  Choral  music  is  in  unison,  the  men  singing  an 
octave  lower.  The  voice  constantly  stirs  from  one  tone  to  another,  and  singing  is 
mostly  out  of  doors  amidst  the  voices  of  nature,  often  drowned  by  it  and  the 
sole  accompaniment  of  the  drum.  Each  tribe  and  each  society  has  its  songs  with 
initiating  rites,  and  the  right  to  songs  is  bought,  the  sellers  teaching  it  to  the  pur- 
chasers. Fines  are  imposed  for  incorrect  singing.  The  voice  is  commonly  pulsed 
creating  a  rhythm  within  a  rhythm.  When  the  Indian  hears  our  music  his  atten- 
tion is  distracted  by  the  thud  of  the  hammer,  beats,  the  disconnection  of  tones  and 
other  noises  which  he  finds  it  hard  to  ignore.  Our  harmonization  suggests  unison 
and  makes  his  melodies  sound  natural. 


1  See  Indian  Story  and  Song  from  North  America.  Alice  C.  Fletcher.  Boston, 
1900,  p.  126.  Also  Am.  Indian  Melodies.  The  Wa-Wan  Press,  Newton  Centre, 
Mass. 


696  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

musical  talent  had  "  brought  her  into  the  iron  routine  of  the  buzzing 
civilizing  machine,  she  felt  like  an  animal  driven  by  a  herder  or  a 
mummy  bound  up  for  burial;  like  a  slender  tree  uprooted  from  her 
mother  nature  and  God.  No  one  now  reasoned  with  her  quietly  as 
her  mother  used  to  do."  No  Indian  child  "  was  ever  disrespectful  to 
his  parents  until  he  had  come  under  the  civilizing  influence  of  the 
whites,"  who  have  failed  to  preserve  the  native  virtues  of  the  teepee. 
We  have  robbed  the  Indians,  but  never  so  wrongly  as  in  forcing  their 
children  from  their  homes  without  parental  consent  to  imprison  them 
in  a  remote  school,  which  should  be  brought  to  them  and  not  they 
to  it.^  Welling'  makes  a  most  incisive  criticism  on  mission  work 
among  them  and  says  none  can  do  good  but  only  harm,  unless  based 
on  mechanical  and  practical  arts  and  schools. 

The  Indians  are  not  all  alike,  but  as  different  as  Turk  and  German. 
None  now  live  as  nomads  or  hunters.  In  the  reservations,  very  like 
Weyler's  concentrado  camps,  they  are  corraled  and  impounded,  and 
can  not  leave,  paint,  or  celebrate  their  dances,  which  are  holy  passion- 
plays  to  them,  must  cut  their  hair,  and  have  little  incentive  to  activity 
of  mind  or  even  body.  Hamlin  Garland*  tells  us  that  nearly  every 
tribe  is  divided  into  radicals  and  conservatives.  The  latter  are  the 
oldest,  strongest,  bravest,  most  dignified  and  intellectual,  with  spirits 
unbroken  though  they  are  in  rags — real  patriots.  Said  one  northern 
chief,  "  I  will  not  clean  the  spittoons  of  the  white  man's  civilization." 
When  they  lose  self-respect,  they  sink  to  vagabondage ;  if  we  break 
their  wills,  we  destroy  them.  "  The  allotment  of  lands  in  severalty, 
which  began  in  land  lust,  and  is  being  carried  to  the  bitter  end  by 
those  who  believe  a  stone-age  man  can  be  developed  into  a  citizen 
of  the  United  States  in  a  single  generation,  is  in  violent  antagonism 
to  every  wish  and  innate  desire  of  the  red  man,  and  has  failed  of 
expected  results."  It  is  somber  and  pitiful  to  isolate  a  Sioux  tribes- 
man to  the  lonely  life  of  the  poor  Western  rancher.  No  man  is  more 
sociable  or  gregarious  than  the  red  man.  He  dreads  solitude,  which 
was  the  old  tribal  punishment;  hence  their  reluctance  to  the  Dawes 
land  theories  and  the  clinging  to  the  lodge. 

"  When  an  ethnologist,"  writes  J.  Walter  Fewkes  in  a  letter  to 
me,  August,  1900,  "  lives  isolated  for  many  months  among  primitive 
people  for  the  purpose  of  studying  their  customs,  he  puts  himself  in 
sympathy  with  their  race-thought  in  order  that  he  may  look  at  nature 
as  they  do.  When  this  is  long  continued,  the  whole  world  assumes 
a  different  aspect;  the  wind,  rain,  snow,  lightning,  etc.,  come  to  be 
seen  through  the  eyes  of  primitive  men,  and  to  have  a  meaning  very 
different  from  that  taught  by  science.  One  thus  comes  to  think  as  an 
Indian  thinks,  in  a  way  which  a  student  without  this  experience  can 

'  City  and  State,  June  7,  1900. 

"  Smith.  Misc.  Coll.,  vol.  xxv,  1883.  Trans.  Anthrop.  Soc,  Washington,  vol.  i, 
p.  46. 

•  The  Red  Man's  Present  Needs.     North  American  Review,  April,  1902. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES   AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       697 

never  understand.  If  this  influence  is  so  great  with  an  educated  eth- 
nologist, how  much  greater  with  uneducated  men  !  The  influence  of 
the  Indians  on  the  teachers  in  our  Indian  schools  shows  this.  Unlike 
the  ethnologists,  they  have  little  sympathy  with  aboriginal  customs, 
no  matter  how  intimate  their  contact  with  tribal  Indian  life,  because 
their  business  is  to  break  up  these  customs.  White  children  brought 
up  with  Indian  children  in  equal  numbers  would  be  influenced  far 
more  than  they  would  influence.  The  Hopi  can  teach  the  Kansas 
farmer  how  to  raise  corn  in  a  desert,  and  whoever  tries  to  farm  in 
his  ancestral  home,  Arizona,  must  adopt  the  methods  of  irrigation 
which  the  ancestors  of  the  Hopi  used  before  America  was  discovered. 
A  primitive  man  familiar  with  the  environment  knows  its  possibilities 
better  than  an  incoming  civilized  man,  whose  life  has  become  adapted 
to  different  conditions.  The  arctic  explorer  adopt?  Eskimo  habits 
to  keep  warm,  to  travel,  and  to  provide  food.  It  would  take  a  large 
book  to  enumerate  all  the  benefits  of  American  frontier  life  which 
can  be  traced  to  the  Indians.  In  short,  every  primitive  race  pro- 
foundly affects  every  civilized  race  with  which  it  comes  in  contact,  as 
every  individual  civilized  man  who  lives  with  Indians  is  himself  influ- 
enced as  much  as  he  influences.  Much  is  now  said  about  the  good 
Indian  schools  do  the  red  men,  but  I  hope  the  time  is  near  when  we 
can  consider  in  a  scientific  frame  of  mind  what  we  owe  to  the  primi- 
tive race  which  our  ancestors  found  on  this  continent." 

The  late  Mr.  Gushing,  whose  genius  for  sympathetically  working 
his  way  into  the  very  arcanum  of  the  savage  soul  is  unsurpassed  in 
all  literature  or  history,^  insists  that  tribal  prejudice  must  be  first 
known,  then  respected ;  that  the  spirit  of  people,  however  low,  should 
not  be  broken ;  that  the  teacher  should  pass  a  long  apprenticeship  as  a 
student  among  those  whom  he  is  to  serve ;  must  be  passionately  fond 
of  helping  them;  neither  show  nor  have  any  sense  of  superiority; 
and  must  make  them  earnestly  wish  for  his  teaching.  He  must  study 
everything  in  their  lives  as  a  grafter  studies  all  the  most  favorable 
points  in  a  well-grown  tree  of  wild  stock  to  insert  new  scions.  He 
insists  that  all  who  know  the  Indians  well  must  love  them ;  declares 
that  they  are  at  bottom  profoundly  religious,  with  the  utmost  fidelity 
to  all  their  sacred  teachings ;  and  that  their  deep  religious  feeling, 
which  animates  all  their  minutest  customs  and  which  is  instinct  with 
a  crude  yet  sublime  philosophy,  must  not  be  weakened.  We  must 
assume  that  our  religion  is  only  another  form  of  theirs;  must  under- 
stand how  tragic  and  destructive  all  sudden  transitions  to  culture  are ; 
that  they  love  their  traditions  incalculably  more  than  we  do  our  own, 
and  that  most  of  their  customs  work  for  morality  and  are  based  upon 
their  myths.' 

•  Twenty-eighth  Report  of  the  Indian  Bureau,  1896,  p.  209. 

*The  Zuilis,  for  instance,  tie  and  gag  a  drunken  man  on  the  theory  that  thus 
his  soul  will  not  wander  and  be  lost.  This  is  bad  psychology,  but  keeps  them 
temperate.     Their  girls  and  women  have  a  habit  of  lowering  their  face  and  shak- 


698  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Our  opinion  of  Indians  is  too  analogous  to  that  of  Cal- 
vinists  concerning  the  depravity  of  infants.  But  if  they  are 
bad,  we  are  responsible  and  we  should  have  them  on  our  con- 
science and  feel  accountable  for  their  future.  To  always  live 
on  the  edge  of  the  last  ditch  is  to  cultivate  the  qualities  of  a 
wild  animal  at  bay.  Had  we  developed  their  best  rather  than 
their  worst  traits,  had  we  made  it  our  rule  to  win  their  delib- 
erate approval  for  our  measures,  had  we  recognized  their 
many  and  essential  contributions  to  our  civilization,^  had  we 
seen  that,  as  A.  L.  Benedict  concludes,  "  the  aborigines  are  not 
in  all  respects  our  inferiors,"  and  that  "  the  key-note  to  the 
Indian  character  is  his  religion,"  had  we  conserved  at  least 
the  best  of  their  industries  (Purdy  says  the  Pomos  attained 
the  highest  art  in  basketry  ever  reached  and  that  now  it  is 
rapidly  becoming  a  lost  art),  had  we  learned  earlier  from 
them,  what  savagery  has  but  just  taught  Sorel  and  Him,  that 
the  highest  mission  of  art  is  to  ennoble  labor,  how  incon- 
ceivably different  all  would  have  been.  I  have  before  me  as 
I  write  a  manuscript  volume  of  Indian  prayers  collected  by 
Samuel  P.  Hayes.  They  are  addressed  to  the  Great  Spirit, 
to  the  sun,  moon,  the  soul  of  vegetation,  animals,  the  ghost 
of  the  dead,  but  the  soul  of  every  true  Christian  must  be 
warmed  and  at  the  same  time  rebuked  by  this  fervor  and 
faith.^  To  uproot  all  this  would  be  a  crime  against  the  soul. 
Happily  it  is  impossible.  We  must  not  cut  the  Indian  off 
from  his  past,  must  cultivate  native  amusements,  not  break 
the  power  of  the  chiefs,  and  "  make  him  an  admirable  red 
man  as  Booker  Washington  is  trying  to  make  the  negro  an 

ing  their  hair  over  it  in  the  presence  of  strangers,  and  did  not  respond  readily  to 
Eastern  teachers  ignorant  of  their  customs,  who  told  them  to  hold  up  their  heads 
and  look  boldly  into  the  faces  of  strangers  as  if  they  had  nothing  to  be  ashamed  of. 
Under  their  matriarchal  system  to  do  this  was  brazen,  wanton,  and  indecent,  worse 
than  to  invite  a  man  to  marry  them.  Again,  their  dances,  which  prudes  condemn, 
are  like  holy  passion-plays,  wherein  they  rehearse  the  great  deeds  of  their  gods 
and  heroes,  and  revive  their  golden  age  in  the  same  spirit  as  that  which  has  made 
the  success  of  Wagner's  operas. 

^  A.  F.  Chamberlain :  The  Contributions  of  the  American  Indian  to  Civiliza- 
tion.     Proc.  Am.  Antiquarian  Soc. ,  1903. 

'  Has  the  Indian  been  Misjudged  ?  Int.  Journal  of  Ethics,  1901.  See  also 
G.  B.  Grinnell :  The  Indian  of  To-day,  New  York,  1900,  pp.  185;  The  Childhood 
of  Jishib,  by  A.  E.  Jenks,  Madison,  Wis.,  1900,  pp.  130  ;  Articles  by  native  Indians 
and  others  in  the  Southern  Workman. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       699 

admirable  black  man."  We  should  not  suppress  but  develop 
the  reservation,  but  not  forbid  him  to  leave  it,  or  to  smoke, 
or  give  up  his  teepee  or  skin  clothing,  or  go  to  church.  To 
educate  by  teaching  children  not  to  honor  but  to  abhor  their 
parents  is  monstrous  and  unchristian.  Their  teachers  should, 
as  Hamlin  Garland  urges,  rescue  perishing  forms  and  symbols, 
and  if  possible  develop  new  ones  based  on  the  old.  These 
would  give  self-respect  and  make  him  feel  that  he  is  worth 
while.  They  and  negroes  need  a  training  about  as  different 
as  any  two  native  races  that  could  be  found,  and  to  educate 
them  together  is  especially  hard  on  the  red  man. 

From  Catlin  and  Schoolcraft  down  to  Powell,  Mason, 
Wilson,  Horatio  Hale,  Brinton,  Pilling,  Dorsey,  Gushing, 
Fewkes,  Fletcher,  Stephens,  Mooney,  Hough,  Matthews, 
Holmes,  James,  Boas,  McGee,  Mindeleff,  Ghamberlain,  Voth, 
Goues,  and  many  others,  the  Indian  has  been  studied  with 
an  interest,  sympathy,  and  insight  probably  quite  unparalleled, 
by  men  whose  love  of  truth  and  whose  self-denial  and  hard- 
ships in  its  pursuit  is  as  genuine  as  the  missionaries'  love  of 
souls.  While  generally  subsidizing  this  work,  our  Govern- 
ment has  not  used  its  results ;  but  the  Indian  Bureau,  when 
not  a  corrupt  ring,  and  even  legislators,  have  rarely  consulted 
these  experts,  who  seldom  appear  even  on  the  Lake  Mohawk 
programs.  The  mind  of  the  missionary  has  been  so  pre- 
possessed with  his  own  apergus  that  he  has  often  been  singu- 
larly incompetent  to  profit  by  the  results  of  these  studies, 
which  should  have  been  a  part  of  his  professional  training. 
Most  of  all  impervious  is  the  mind  of  the  average  teacher  of 
Indian  children,  although  in  all  these  fields  there  have  been 
exceptions  well  known  and  unknown.  At  root  the  "  Indian 
question  "  can  not  be  solved  by  Gongress,  the  army,  the  clergy, 
or  the  pedagogue.  It  lies  mostly  beyond  the  ken  of  the  his- 
torian. The  only  real  authority  in  the  field  is  the  ethnologist 
who  has  lived  with  the  Indian  as  he  lives,  won  his  confidence 
and  taken  his  point  of  view  and  read  the  literature  about  him. 
Even  the  anthropologist  who  devotes  himself  to  the  work  of 
digging  open  mounds,  comparing  arrow-fleams  or  the  modes 
of  releasing  the  bowstring,  measuring  skulls,  bodily  dimen- 
sions, acuteness  of  sense,  often  has  no  light  in  his  soul  that 
is  not  darkness,  and  some  seem  indifferent  to  the  welfare  of 


700  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OV  ADOLESCENCE 

the  aborigines.  From  the  standpoint  of  this  book  this  is  un- 
scientific, because  in  all  studies  of  man's  psychic  life  moral 
distinctions  are  supreme.  Arduous  as  is  the  work  of  accurate 
observation  and  sympathetic  interpretation  (Fewkes  thinks  all 
previous  studies  of  the  Moqui  snake  dance,  painstaking  as 
they  have  been,  were  radically  wrong),  it  is  not  complete  till 
we  are  told  what  in  it  is  good  and  what  bad  for  the  savage, 
what  next  higher  cult  it  most  resembles,  or  how  the  best  of 
its  psychic  content  can  be  given  a  better  interpretation  or 
alternative  expression.  To  do  this  requires  far  wider  knowl- 
edge and  a  far  higher  order  of  mind,  but  the  purest  and  the 
only  complete  science,  a  true  psychology  must  now  insist,  is 
practical,  and  pedagogic  applications  are  not  open  to  the 
charge  of  utilitarianism,  but  it  is  precisely  in  these  that  the 
culture  of  to-day  and  still  that  of  to-morrow  culminates  as 
surely  as  the  will  is  the  key  to  the  intellect.  The  Indian  has 
been  sympathetically  studied  far  longer  than  has  childhood 
and  youth,  but  this  rich  body  of  knowledge  remains  unused. 
Experts  like  Gushing  and  Miss  Fletcher  are  not  heard  even 
as  to  what  not  to  do.  Were  they  mute  if  asked  what  next 
steps  to  take  in  order  to  fulfil  and  not  destroy,  the  sociologist, 
genetic  psychologist,  and  the  student  of  comparative  religion 
should  take  up  their  work  and  address  themselves  to  the  task. 
One  of  the  chief  functions  of  religion  is  to  conserve  the  past 
in  history  and  to  see  to  it  that  the  older  and  deeper  powers 
of  the  soul  that  can  make  for  righteousness  are  not  repressed, 
but  brought  out. 

VI.  India. — From  what  has  just  preceded  it  is  plain  that 
race  pedagogy  needs  a  far  fuller  treatment,  which  I  have  long 
planned  and  hope  to  attempt.  We  must  pause  for  a  yet  more 
cursory  glance  at  what  is  commonly  regarded  as  the  world's 
masterpiece  of  colonization  where  extinction  is  not  threatened 
or  hardly  possible.  India  contains  294,000,000  inhabitants,  or 
nearly  one-fifth  of  the  human  race.  We  little  know  the  vast- 
ness  of  even  calamities  in  Asia.  In  1877  the  Yellow  River, 
long  been  walled  till  it  had  deposited  a  bed  high  above  the 
country,  broke  loose  and  flowed  in  some  places  30  miles  wide, 
10  feet  deep,  and  20  miles  an  hour,  destroying,  the  Times  said, 
10,000  square  miles,  from  1,000  to  3,000  villages,  7,000,000 
persons,  and  most  of  their  cattle. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES   AND  THEIR  TREATMENT       "JOl 

Of  its  many  tongues  and  dialects  only  eleven  are  spoken 
by  as  many  as  five  millions  each,  and  English  is  twenty-eighth, 
being  the  language  of  but  224,000.  All  these  people  are  ruled 
by  1,500  officials  in  black  and  65,000  soldiers  in  red.  England 
has  broken  up  wars  between  hostile  races,  enforced  order  and 
taught  respect  for  justice,  broken  up  a  few  customs  abhor- 
rent to  civilization  and  developed  a  few  colonial  adminis- 
trators of  the  highest  type,  James  Brooke,  Stanford  Raffles,  Sir 
Andrew  Clark,  Sir  George  Grey,  and  others.  Nowhere  have 
the  problems  of  life  been  more  pondered,  and  there  is  no  depth 
of  crime  or  height  of  virtue  not  found  in  India.  The  people 
mostly  live  in  small  villages  and  religion  dominates  life. 

William  Digby,*  who  has  had  long  personal  acquaintance  in  India, 
presents  an  astounding  array  of  facts  and  figures  from  official  records 
to  show  that  India  is  progressively  worse  off  for  being  a  province  of 
the  Crown,  and  takes  as  his  motto, 

Earth  is  sick  and  Heaven  is  weary 

Of  the  hollow  words  that  states  and  kingdoms  utter 

When  they  talk  of  truth  and  justice. 

He  insists  that  the  country  is  certain  to  do  worse  in  the  future  than 
in  the  past.  From  an  income  of  two  pence  per  head  per  day  in  1850, 
the  country  had  sunk  in  1882  to  one  and  one-half  pence,  and  in  1900 
to  three-fourths  of  a  penny  per  head  per  day.  Mr.  Digby  had  access 
to  many  reports,  marked  confidential,  and  refused  in  the  House  of 
Commons.  From  the  many  tables  and  careful  analyses,  province  by 
province,  he  shows  with  apparent  impartiality  that  England  has  more 
or  less  completely  suppressed  .murder  of  parents  and  children,  human 
sacrifices,  suicide,  voluntary  and  involuntary  torments,  and  slavery. 
Among  his  indictments  may  be  summarized  the  following:  From  the 
eleventh  to  the  eighteenth  century,  before  British  rule,  there  were 
from  one  to  four  famines  in  a  century,  nearly  all  local,  immunity 
from  death  being  generally  secured  by  the  universal  habit  of  hoarding 
in  advance  for  lean  years.  But  as  a  result  of  English  methods,  and 
especially  the  taxation  and  extortion,  which  have  made  hoarding  im- 
possible, in  the  nineteenth  century  there  were  five  famines  in  the 
first  quarter,  causing  about  1,000,000  deaths;  two  in  the  second, 
causing  about  500,000;  six  in  the  third,  with  5,000,000  recorded 
deaths;  and  from  1876  to  1900  eighteen,  in  which  about  26.000,000 
died.  His  maps,  showing  progressive  area  and  severity,  are  appall- 
ing. He  intimates  that  the  actual  number  of  deaths  have  been  far 
greater  than  the  above  figures,  and  gives  painful  details  of  localities 

'  "  Prosperous  "  British  India.      London,  1901,  p.  661. 


702  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

where,  despite  the  vaunted  English  Famine  Code,  "  the  people  died 
like  flies."  Indeed,  very  rarely  do  the  masses  of  the  people  off  the 
lines  of  common  travel  have  enough  to  eat  even  in  seasons  of  plenty. 
During  the  ten  years  1891-1900,  19,000,000  deaths  by  famine  occurred 
in  India,  while  in  all  the  world,  during  one  hundred  and  seven  years 
ending  in  1900,  the  deaths  by  war  were  only  estimated  as  5,000,000.  In 
India  the  old  law  of  Manu  levied  on  a  sliding  scale  paid  after  the  crop 
was  taken  each  year,  large  if  the  crop  was  good  and  zero  if  it  was 
a  failure,  which  comes  about  once  in  five  years.  The  English  thought 
they  knew  better  and  struck  an  average  for  all  years,  exacting  a  tax 
when  there  is  no  crop  at  all.  Moreover,  "  the  meshes  of  the  great 
fiscal  net "  are  made  smaller  and  smaller  until  "  we  are  now  taxing 
the  rag  which  the  wretched  peasant  wraps  about  his  loins,  and  en- 
forcing a  salt  tax  at  a  rate  of  four  thousand  per  cent."  *  This  shows 
Mill's  meaning  when  he  said  that  the  despotism  of  a  free  country 
over  a  conquered  state  can  easily  become  the  worst  of  all  because 
exercised  at  a  distance  and  in  ignorance  of  the  facts.  Famine  in 
India  comes  on  the  average  with  more  or  less  severity  about  once  in 
five  years,  and  should  be  provided  for  better  than  by  the  farcical 
famine  fund,  which  the  English  Government  in  India  has  expended 
in  the  vicious  expedition  to  Chitral,  and  later  lets  its  subjects  stretch 
its  skeleton  hands  to  the  world. 

The  Indian  Office  expends  £16,000,000  in  England,  and  the  total 
English  land  tax  is  not  quite  sufficient  to  support  this  absentee  land- 
lordism. The  charge  so  often  made,  that  the  natives  still  hoard,  is  over- 
whelmingly refuted.  Lord  Curzon's  figures  state  that  the  average  in- 
come of  the  people  is  forty  shillings  per  year,  but  the  results  of  a  more 
careful  examination  of  official  figures  show  it  to  be  only  twenty-two 
shillings.  By  insisting  upon  the  use  of  British-made  fabrics  and  other 
goods,  which  can  be  supplied  cheaper,  many  native  industries  have 
been  killed.  Again,  the  Government  has  put  money  into  railroads, 
because  these  have  yielded  a  more  immediate  return,  instead  of  devel- 
oping irrigation,  the  practicability  of  which  has  been  abundantly 
proven,  and  which  would  be  for  the  good  of  the  natives.  Without 
going  into  detail,  if  Digby  is  right,  rents  have  enormously  increased ; 
foreign  rule  is  a  growing  scourge;  vast  currents  of  wealth  flow  into 
England;  the  prosperity  of  India  is  English  and  not  Indian;  visitors 
only  see  the  Anglo-Indian  colonies  and  not  real  India;  the  eulogies 
of  moral  and  material  welfare  in  the  Blue  Books  apply  only  to  Anglo- 
stan  and  not  to  Hindustan ;  nearly  ninety-nine  per  cent  of  the  gross 
produce  is  taken  for  rent  by  landlords,  who  pay  one-half  to  the  British 
Government;  official  publications  are  pitfalls  for  the  unwary,  and 
many  instances  of  untrustworthy  official  figures  are  shown ;  the  real 
yield  in  all  India  together  is  barely  two-thirds  the  estimated  yield; 
and  the  writers  that  claim  unstinted  praise  for  England  for  the  grow- 

*  M.  A.  M.  Marks :  The  Treatment  of  Subject  Races.  Int.  Jour,  of  Ethics, 
July,  1900. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       7^3 

ing  prosperity  of  India  are  victims  of  misrepresentation,  for  at  least 
100,000,000  of  the  population  are  living  in  extreme  poverty.  In  some 
provinces  rents  have  been  increased  four  and  five  hundred  per  cent, 
and  the  propertied  classes  been  almost  destroyed;  the  price  of  foods 
enormously  increased;  the  natives  more  and  more  excluded  from  all 
official  positions  and  influence;  their  leading  classes  especially  dis- 
credited, impoverished,  and  incapacitated;  and  the  pathos  of  it  all  is 
that  the  people,  growing  more  and  more  helpless,  often  have  a  touch- 
ing faith  in  political  and  material  redemption  through  Great  Britain, 
despite  their  slow  and  systematic  starvation. 

Whatever  be  true  of  Digby's  work,  it  must  be  admitted  that  his 
analysis  of  figures  is  extremely  ingenious  and  effective;  his  command 
of  the  subject  great;  his  quotations  from  the  literature  in  the  field 
show  that  he  represents  a  large  and  old  party  of  dissent  that  has 
hitherto  been  pretty  effectively  suppressed.  The  prices  and  products 
in  detail  are  eloquent  and  contain  the  gist  of  the  whole  matter.  In 
most  places  there  is  not  even  any  appearance  of  prosperity,  or  even 
comfort.  The  people,  all  borrowing  money  and  losing  their  lands,  are 
in  nameless  dread  of  the  tax-collectors;  are  utterly  unable  to  store 
anything  for  emergencies;  and  everything  is  tending  for  the  worse 
and  not  for  the  better. 

R.  C.  Dutt '  has  forcefully  drawn  attention  to  the  overassessment 
of  agricultural  holdings  in  India  and  gathered  abundant  testimonies 
indicating  that  the  best  remedies  for  famines  there  were  more  moderate 
rents,  increased  irrigation,  and  longer  leases.  In  Bombay  the  land 
revenue  now  represents  between  twenty  and  thirty-three  per  cent  of 
the  gross  produce ;  in  Madras,  from  twelve  to  twenty  per  cent  for  dry 
lands  and  from  sixteen  to  thirty-one  per  cent  of  the  gross  produce  on 
wet  lands;  in  the  central  provinces,  the  last  assessment,  soon  after 
1890,  was  very  largely  enhanced,  often  exceeding  one  hundred  per 
cent.  The  expending  party  is  permanently  in  power,  the  retrench- 
ment party  without  control,  and  yet  retrenchment  is  a  case  of  life 
and  death.  In  Great  Britain  the  public  debt  was  reduced  £160,000,000 
within  forty  years  after  the  Crimean  War,  but  in  India  the  public 
debt  went  on  increasing.  "  A  greater  danger  than  the  mutiny  of 
1857  not  only  threatens,  but  has  actually  overtaken  India  in  the 
impoverishment  of  the  people  both  in  the  frequency  and  intensity 
of  recent  famines,  and  the  highest  type  of  courage  and  statesman- 
ship, such  as  was  evinced  by  a  Canning  and  Lawrence  in  the  past, 
will  be  needed  once  more  to  save  the  empire,  to  moderate  rents  and 
taxes,  to  reduce  debt  and  expenditure,  to  deal  with  India  as  England 
deals  with  her  other  colonies  in  financial  matters,  and  to  associate 
the  people  in  the  control  of  their  finances  and  in  the  administration 
of  their  own  concerns."  "  We  hear  constantly  of  the  elasticity  of  the 
Indian  revenues  and  of  the  recuperative  power  of  the  Indian  people, 


'  Famines  and  Land  Assessments  in  India,    London,  1900.     See  also  his  Eco- 
nomic History  of  Britisfi  India.     London,  1902. 


704  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

but  the  famines  of  1897  and  1900  are  a  terrible  answer  to  such  con- 
soHng  but  unsound  and  untrue  representations." 

This  writer  gives  in  detail  the  history  of  the  various  famines  since 
that  of  1770.  A  study  of  the  death-rates  shows  that  within  the  last 
generation  deaths  have  been  most  numerous  and  famines  most  intense 
in  those  places  where  the  cultivators  are  least  protected  against  over- 
assessment.  Most  of  the  population  of  India  depend  upon  the  soil,  and 
its  peasantry  is  the  most  frugal  perhaps  on  earth.  "  It  is  a  sad  but 
significant  fact  that  the  last  famine  of  this  century  (1900)  is  also  the 
most  wide-spread  and  severest  famine  that  has  ever  visited  India." 
The  rule  in  Madras  is  that  assessments  should  not  exceed  one-third 
of  the  gross  produce  of  the  soil  where  the  land  is  not  irrigated  at 
Government  cost.  There  has  been  undue  enhancement,  with  no  judi- 
cial check  in  these  assessments.  The  Madras  famine  of  1877  stirred 
the  Government  to  levy  a  new  famine  tax  and  pledge  that  its  pro- 
ceeds should  be  expended  for  no  other  purpose.  The  pledge  was 
broken  soon  after  it  was  given.  Excluding  that  paid  as  interest  on 
Indian  railways,  the  total  money  spent  in  fifteen  years  fell  short  of 
the  grant  pledged  and  raised  by  over  eight  millions  of  tees  of  rupees. 
The  protective  railways  have  been  mostly  constructed  and  pro- 
ductive roads  seem  now  in  order.  Over  seventeen  thousand  acres 
of  land  are  now  irrigated,  although  many  of  the  old  irrigation 
works  were  constructed  by  Hindu  and  Mohammedan  rulers.  It  is 
often  pleaded  that  no  agriculturists  should  be  forced  to  use  and  pay 
for  water  from  these  works  against  their  will,  as  is  now  the  case. 

T.  Morrison  ^  has  written  a  work  of  great  value.  He  assumes 
that  in  the  background  of  the  English  mind  is  the  belief  that  India 
should  be  so  governed  that  one  day  she  may  govern  herself  and  take 
her  place  in  a  British  confederacy.  No  statesman  would  dare  to 
advocate  perpetual  vassalage.  He  does  not  believe,  however,  that 
the  present  policy  is  tending  to  give  India  this  power,  but  rather 
the  reverse.  She  lacks  all  sense  of  nationality.  Morrison  asserts 
universal  discontent  of  the  Indian  people  and  the  resentment  of  all 
the  educated  young  Indians.  "  The  people  do  not  acknowledge  that 
our  rule  has  been  beneficial  to  them."  Especially  in  late  years  the 
Government  has  been  "  losing  the  confidence  of  the  people."  "  The 
educated  classes  now  denounce  the  English  and  all  their  works  in 
India  with  ferocity."  He  describes  a  growing  interest  in  political 
questions,  and  with  it  says  that  the  "  unpopularity  of  the  British 
Government  is  rising  at  an  accelerated  pace."  As  another  observer 
recently  said,  "  every  educated  Hindu  is  a  rebel."  "  We  have  not 
based  our  dominion  upon  principles  which  commend  themselves  to 
the  political  instincts  of  the  people,  and  hence  our  Government  has 
failed  to  take  root  in  the  country;  it  rests  upon  the  top  of  the  people, 
and  by  its  massive  weight  keeps  them  in  their  places  and  prevents 

'  Imperial  Rule  in  India,  being  an  examination  proper  to  the  government  of 
dependencies      Westminster,  1899,  p.  147. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES   AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       705 

commotion,  but  it  draws  no  nourishment  from  the  soil,  and  the  people 
have  not  come  to  look  upon  it  as  a  part  of  themselves."  The  Moham- 
medans and  Hindus  especially  could  never  subordinate  their  religions 
and  racial  jealousies  for  the  common  good  unless  under  the  strongest 
provocation  of  danger.  The  Pax  Britannica  is  really  increasing  the 
antagonism  of  the  races,  especially  these  two,  and  the  higher  English 
education,  as  well  as  the  principle  of  popular  government,  is  doing 
the  same.  Free  institutions  mean  growth  of  parties,  and  these 
formed  along  preexisting  lines  of  cleavage,  which  in  India  are  race 
and  religion.  Thus  the  very  antipathies  and  jealousies  which  are  the 
greatest  obstacle  to  India's  ever  becoming  a  nation  would  be  in- 
creased. The  English  and  Mohammedans  are  both  beef-eaters,  and 
the  Hindu  papers  often  arouse  a  wide-spread  horror  by  statistics  of 
the  murder  of  cows.  These  have  caused  riots,  and  the  leaflet  entitled 
"  The  Cry  of  the  Cow  "  has  been  widely  circulated  and  is  very  in- 
flammable. In  a  hot  country,  it  is  said,  beef-eating  can  suit  no  one, 
and  it  is  done  out  of  spite.  An  impartial  observer  would  say  that 
England  had  acted  on  the  principle  divide  et  impcra.  The  natives 
often  say  that  no  Englishman  has  ever  yet  been  hanged  for  the  murder 
of  a  native,  while  no  jury  fails  to  convict  where  the  reverse  occurs. 
The  Austro-Hungarian  monarchy  has  found  liberalism  and  parlia- 
mentarism to  only  aggravate  the  differences  between  Germans,  Mag- 
yars, Bohemians,  Poles,  Croatians,  and  Italians.  Diaz  in  Mexico  was 
wiser,  although  all  who  worship  formula;  will  condemn  every  step 
though  they  praise  the  result.  He  even  suppressed  newspapers,  as 
Crispi  did  in  Italy,  because  they  tended  to  disruption.  Is  anarchy 
growing  underneath  in  India?  Will  a  foreign  yoke  be  increasingly 
necessary  to  save  her  from  it?  Switzerland  is  free,  yet  a  nation, 
though  perhaps  not,  as  Renan  says,  "  from  communitive  historic  ante- 
cedents." The  Ottoman  Empire  has  fused  without  it.  Only  in  the 
oligarchic  classic  world  were  patriotism  and  religion  fused  by  epon- 
ymous ancestors.  Tamerlane  founded  the  great  Mogul  Empire,  as 
did  Akbar  his  in  Hindustan,  although  both  were  foreign  conquerors; 
but  they  so  identified  themselves  with  the  people  they  subjugated 
that  they  came  to  take  their  glories  as  their  own.  Forcible  conversion 
to  Christianity  will  not  eliminate  religious  strife.  The  English  are 
too  haughty.  They  will  not  allow  a  native  to  carry  an  umbrella  over 
his  head  in  their  presence,  insist  on  salaams  which  they  will  not  re- 
turn, and  in  general  the  English  have  failed  to  identify.  East  of 
Suez,  where  Kipling  says  there  are  no  Ten  Commandments,  the  heart 
and  soul  of  order  means  honoring  and  worshiping  the  ruler.  There 
must  be  monarchy,  power,  centralization.  There  have  been  few  polit- 
ical ideas  in  India  because  the  one  elevating  conception  which  gives 
pathetic  interest  to  all  the  sad  story  of  bloodshed  called  Indian  history 
is  the  devotion  of  the  followers  to  their  head.  Imperialism  casts  a 
spell  upon  them.  They  still  glory  in  the  traditions  of  the  Empire  of 
Delhi.  One  can  still  see  this  in  their  intense  delight  at  the  very 
sight  of  their  local  ruler  princes  as  they  pass.  The  people's  saluta- 
84 


706  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

tion  shows  joy  and  rapture.  Morrison  thinks  this  might  have  been 
centered  in  Queen  Victoria  had  she  gone  to  India  and  addressed  the 
rulers  in  the  terms  he  suggests.  As  it  is,  however,  he  believes  that 
the  Government  has  been  of  late  losing  in  the  esteem  of  the  upper 
classes  until  now  they  have  only  a  cold,  unsympathetic  criticism  for 
the  Government,  which  is  often  hostile,  and  for  all  of  which  the 
pseudo-liberal  policy  is  directly  responsible.  The  most  successful  In- 
dian administrators,  like  Henry  Lawrence,  Nicholas,  Sir  Henry  Ram- 
say, whose  names  were  a  spell  over  half  a  province,  were  all  soldiers, 
unsophisticated,  and  with  fresh  minds  and  no  sectarian  ideals. 

The  native  press  rarely  supports  the  British.  Many  native  gradu- 
ates are  turned  out  of  school  who  can  find  no  post,  and  so  write  their 
discontent  in  the  press.  Some  would  have  the  colleges  turned  over 
to  natives,  and  let  the  principal  enforce  the  Hindu  religion  and  pro- 
hibit what  Brahminical  law  forbids.  Thus  morals  would  be  more 
effectively  taught  than  by  eclectic  systems  of  ethics  made  in  England, 
because  in  India  no  moral  code  can  stand  without  the  sanction  of 
religion. 

Meredith  Townsend,^  after  fifty  years  of  observation,  thinks  Eu- 
rope has  never  materially  influenced  Asia,  and  that  if  the  spell  of 
English  invincibility  were  broken  in  India  the  best  native  friends  of 
Great  Britain  would  spring  at  her  throat  as  did  the  Sepoys,  and  soon 
no  trace  but  impoverishment  would  be  left  for  all  her  years  of  do- 
minion. Here  and  in  China,  all  that  Europe  has  effected  is  "  to  create 
an  impression  that  the  whites  are  intolerably  fierce  and  cruel,  and 
that  they  understand  nothing  but  making  money."  The  Asiatics  dis- 
like Christianity,  and  even  in  India  take  more  naturally  to  Islam. 
To  be  a  Christian,  a  native  must  leave  caste  and  become  a  man  with- 
out a  country,  but  he  can  become  a  Mussulman  without  doing  so. 
The  former  is  too  individualistic.  To  Europeanize  the  Hindu  would 
be  like  flinging  an  aged  nun  upon  the  world  to  earn  her  bread.  The 
missionary  is  divided  from  the  native  by  a  Chinese  wall  as  great  as 
that  which  separates  a  Chinaman,  with  his  dress,  color,  and  thought, 
from  a  New  Yorker.  He  never  becomes  anything  like  an  Indian. 
He  starts  all  manner  of  useful  industries,  is  schoolmaster  as  well, 
and  aims  at  the  total  Europeanization  of  the  natives.  He  can  not 
resist  the  desire  to  make  them  English  in  language,  literature,  and 
science,  and  wishes  to  saturate  the  East  with  the  West,  so  that  those 
with  whom  he  succeeds  are  a  hybrid  class,  neither  one  nor  the  other, 
with  originality  destroyed,  self-reliance  weakened,  aspiration  wrenched 
in  a  new  direction,  as  if  Chinamen  should  attempt  to  convert  us,  not 
only  to  accept  Confucius,  but  to  become  Chinese. 

A  very  competent  authority  ^  states  that  the  administration  of 
criminal  law  in  India  among  the  Mohammedans  had  until  recently 

'  Asia  and  Europe.     Westminster,  1901. 

'  Sir  James  Fitzjames  Stephens :  History  of  Criminal  Law  in  England,  1883, 
vol.  iii,  ch.  xxxiii 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND  THEIR  TREATMENT       7° 7 

many  advantages  over  the  English  system.  The  penal  code  is  always 
one  of  the  most  delicate  of  all  the  problems  of  colonial  administra- 
tion, and  is  indeed  a  "  grim  present  for  one  people  to  make  to  another, 
and  little  calculated  to  excite  affection."  The  code  now  adopted  is 
not  only  an  immense  improvement  upon  the  attempted  revival  of  the 
old  institutions  by  Warren  Hastings  in  1774,  which  had  to  be  abol- 
ished seven  years  later,  but  also  upon  the  English  home  code,  in  that 
it  is  far  simpler,  made  by  young  men  often  not  lawyers,  well  cal- 
culated to  be  administered  by  simple  magistrates,  and  just  as  good 
and  as  hard  to  evade  as  if  more  explicitly,  elaborately,  and  politely 
phrased. 

Thus,  after  eighty  years,  no  great  missionary  of  the  Church  with 
distinct  independent  vitality  has  arisen,  and  if  all  retired  the  work 
might  soon  be  undone.  We  have  produced  bahoos  passing  excellent 
examinations  but  limp,  when  to  produce  permanent  results  they  should 
be  Christian  fanatics,  wondering,  arguing,  and  commanding.  These 
races  can  accumulate  experience  for  practical  purposes;  they  have 
built  great  cities,  perfected  agriculture,  invented  letters  and  many 
arts,  reconciled  masses  to  a  hard  destiny,  and  meditated  eternal  prob- 
lems, so  that  every  creed  save  fetishism  is  Asiatic  and  was  first 
preached  by  a  brown  man.  But  his  progress  is  easily  exhausted,  his 
society  stereotyped,  his  brain  paralyzed  with  conceit,  he  stagnates, 
is  polygamous,  he  lacks  real  pity.  The  chasm  between  the  brown  and 
white  has  always  existed,  and  intermarriages  are  rare,  and  always 
with  a  sense  of  wrong.  "  There  is  no  corner  of  Asia  where  the  life 
of  a  white  man,  unprotected  by  force  either  actual  or  potential,  is 
safe  for  an  hour;  nor  is  there  an  Asiatic  state  which,  if  it  were  pru- 
dent, would  not  expel  him  for  once  and  forever."  The  Europeans 
distrust  native  power.  Their  bruskness,  inaccessibility,  and  econ- 
omy of  time  and  lack  of  ceremony  is  intensely  disliked.^ 


*  Very  typical  is  the  description  by  a  well-informed  Englishman  of  an  event  he 
witnessed  that  seemed  to  him  not  comic,  but  simply  bewildering  and  strange.  The 
Rana  of  Oodeypore  is  the  highest  Hindu,  not  a  Pope,  but  his  fiat  is  necessary  to 
consecrate  any  Hindu  sovereign.  Neither  is  he  a  Mikado,  for  he  is  not  a  Son  of 
God.  To  insult  him  would  shock  every  Hindu,  and  the  extinction  of  his  race 
would  be  felt  as  that  of  the  house  of  Othman  would  be  by  all  the  Turks.  Practi- 
cally, the  line  of  Ranas  has  been  unbroken  since  perhaps  about  1200  B.  C,  although 
some  think  it  600.  Thus  Popes  and  Bourbons  are  parvenus.  The  death  of  this 
ruler  is  an  event  to  all  Hindus  and  an  appalling  woe  to  the  1,500,000  people,  whom 
he  immediately  rules.  They  can  not  think  Ais  death  natural,  and  the  whole  com- 
munity gives  itself  up  to  the  wildest  emotion.  Nobles  beat  their  breasts  ;  priests 
flock  in  ;  frenzied  women  insist  on  their  right  to  the  funeral  pyre  ;  the  whole  popu- 
lation, among  whom  to  insult  the  beard  brings  instant  murderous  vengeance,  sub- 
mit for  woe  to  the  last  earthly  humiliation  of  shaving.  This  Englishman,  Yate, 
describes  all  this  as  a  spectacular  tragedy  with  no  trace  of  unkindness,  but  simply 
says  the  men  "were  howling  and  beating  their  breasts";  the  women  jumped 
about ;   the  men  looked  "  funny  "  without  their  hair,  as  did  the  red  umbrellas.     He 


7o8  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Graham  Sandberg*  describes,  as  one  fruit  of  European  conquest, 
the  Eurasians  as  mostly  descended  from  English  men  and  Indian 
women,  often  speaking  English  and  calling  themselves  Christian; 
sometimes  so  white  that  it  is  hard  to  detect  the  Oriental  taint  in  their 
blood.  Like  most  mixed  races,  they  bear  the  disabilities  of  both. 
Their  religion  and  social  system  debars  them  from  native  industries, 
while  their  color  and  antecedents  disqualify  them  from  European 
industries,  so  that  they  are  often  despised  by  both  races.  The  Por- 
tuguese founded  the  Eurasian  community,  although  many  have  been 
reabsorbed.  Pride  of  European  birth  is  generally  strong,  although 
it  has  not  developed  that  respect  and  prosperity  found  in  the  half 
Dutch  Singalese  of  Ceylon.  Toward  the  latter  half  of  the  eighteenth 
and  the  first  decades  of  the  nineteenth  century  British  civilians  could 
set  up  a  harem,  if  they  chose,  here,  and  schools  were  established  for 
their  children;  but  latterly  soldiers,  sailors,  and  low  conditions  of 
men  have  been  chiefly  fathers  of  modern  accessions.  It  should  not 
be  forgotten  that  some  Eurasians  are  legitimate  children  of  honest 
parents,  but  the  richest  and  most  polished  of  them  are  nevertheless 
under  a  taboo,  although  it  is  far  less  rigorous  than  in  the  southern 
part  of  our  own  country.  For  in  the  Presidency  many  a  well-edu- 
cated lady  with  a  splash  of  purple  in  her  blood  is  met  in  society,  and 
there  are  all  grades  of  mixture,  from  half  white  to  "  four  cents  in  the 
dollar."  What  to  do  with  the  festering  hordes  of  low-class  Eura- 
sians, mostly  the  fruits  of  sin,  the  very  sediment  of  pagan  Asia,  the 
best  of  them  constantly  roving,  often  begging  with  effrontery  from 
Englishmen  as  if  they  had  claims  upon  them,  often  with  hereditary 
languor  and  constitutional  laziness,  is  a  burning  question. 

The  Anglo-Indians  live  with  the  natives,  know  their 
language,  and  come  into  all  kinds  of  external  relations  with 
them ;  "  and  yet  they  know  next  to  nothing  about  them.  In 
the  whole  century  of  intercourse  no  Anglo-Indian,  whether 
official  or  adventurer,  has  ever  written  a  book  which  in  the 
least  degree  revealed  to  his  countrymen  the  inner  character, 
or  wishes,  or  motives  of  any  considerable  section  or  any  great 
single  class  of  this  immensely  numerous  people."  Nobody 
has  explained  their  unique  ideas  of  society,  property,  right, 
for  Europeans  are  by  nature  and  the  will  of  God  stupid. 
Such  a  book  would  give  to  its  author  fame  and  fortune,  but 

believes  the  Rana's  reign  began  1500  years  or  so  ago  (when  his  ancestors  were  tat- 
tooed savages  loving  human  sacrifices  like  the  Maoris).  There  is  nothing  for  him 
pathetic  or  suggestive.  It  is  a  big  crowd  in  a  very  lovely  region  with  preposterous 
rites,  and  it  seems  especially  strange  that  two  claimants  to  the  throne  should 
await  Colonel  Wright's  decision  between  them.  Yate  is  in  an  unknown  world. 
'  Our  Outcast  Cousins  in  India.     Contemporary  Review,  vol.  Ixi,  1892,  p.  880. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES   AND  THEIR  TREATMENT       709 

it  will  never  be  written,  for  the  English  do  not  understand  the 
people  they  govern  so  well.^  It  is  simply  one  race  fitting  its 
ideas  to  those  of  another  whose  hearts  the  European  does  not 
in  the  least  degree  comprehend,  and  knows  and  admits  that 
he  does  not.  He  only  knows  justice,  mercy,  tolerance,  and 
firmness,  and  applies  them,  and  the  native  in  a  way  approves. 
Clive  knew  nothing  of  any  native  tongue,  and  the  examina- 
tion Wallah  who  speaks  the  language  so  well  understands  no 
better.  There  is  an  invisible  but  impassable  wall  like  that 
which  separates  the  coach  dog  from  the  horse  he  lives  and 
runs  with.  The  Indian  erects  this  wall,  deliberately  secluding 
his  mind  which  he  never  unlocks.  A  few  cultivated  Euro- 
peans have  married  and  lived  happily  with  native  wives,  but 
they  are  on  different  sides  of  this  wall.  The  caste  spirit  is 
involutive  and  separative,  and  has  led  to  self-shrouding  as  if 
revelation  were  blasphemy.  The  loneliness  and  isolation  of 
the  mind  is  great,  and  all  Englishmen  go  home  as  soon  as 
their  work  is  done. 

Yet  now  R.  J.  Wilkinson '  urges  that  the  English  methods  of  edu- 
cating in  the  East  are  unpractical,  make  people  litigious,  arrogant, 
averse  to  manual  and  technical  work,  and  develop  a  class  of  literary 
malcontents.  Western  training  weakens  by  disuse  the  very  acute 
powers  of  observation  they  inherit.  They  often  lose  the  very  names 
of  plants  and  animals ;  the  old  literature  perishes,  and  there  is  nothing 
to  take  its  place  that  strikes  root.     Many  vernacular  teachers  have 

'  Since  this  was  written  one  such  book  has  appeared,  not  of  the  Hindu,  but  of 
the  cognate  Burmese  Buddhists,'  which  should  mark  an  epoch  in  understanding  a 
subject  people  and  should  be  the  vade  niecum  of  the  administration,  and  especially 
of  the  missionary.  It  shows  how  new  creeds  are  embroidered  on  older,  and  these 
on  yet  older  ones,  and  so  on  below  what  we  popularly  call  mind  down  into  the 
depths  of  the  soul.  It  shows  how  all  religion  sprung  from  pain  and  want,  and  how 
Buddha  found  the  great  place  by  renunciation  and  opened  a  way  for  thronging 
millions.  It  makes  this  old  faith  glow  again  in  the  hearts  of  its  own  disciples,  as 
well  as  of  foreigners,  and  all  who  feel  a  gospel  mission  to  these  lands  should  first 
ask  themselves  the  challenging  question  how  to  restore,  and  then  how  to  improve 
on,  this  ideal  of  life.  One  such  sympathetic  masterpiece  for  all  other  races  and 
faiths  would  be  the  first  step,  for  all  I  plead  for  in  behalf  of  undeveloped  races  is 
what  I  have  striven  to  write  for  youth. 

»  Education  of  Asiatics.  Special  Reports  on  Educational  Subjects,  vol  viii,  p. 
685.     London,  1902. 


*  The  Soul  of  a  People,  by  J.  Fielding  Hall,     London,  1899. 


710  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

but  a  very  limited  vocabulary,  and  know  little  but  the  books  they 
teach.     Scientific  instruction  does  not  efface  superstitions. 

Conquest  will  not  vivify  Asia.  Grant  Duff  complains  that 
the  graduates  of  Madras  University  do  not  know  how  to  use 
their  alien  attainments.  One  of  the  most  interesting  efforts 
to  develop  indigenous  talent  was  made  by  Dr.  Leitner/  who 
undertook  to  revive  native  schools  in  the  Punjab  in  place  of 
the  inferior  and  hated  English  Government  schools.  He 
arrived  in  India  in  1864  and  found  that  under  the  influence 
of  the  policy  of  their  conquerors  to  force  upon  them  a  foreign 
culture  based  on  physical  science,  industry,  and  trade,  which 
they  thought  fit  only  for  the  older  classes,  under  inspectors 
who  banished  privacy,  even  placing  boys  and  girls  side  by 
side,  teaching  the  children  a  strange  tongue  and  a  still  more 
obnoxious  creed,  it  was  no  wonder  that  in  a  few  years  their 
own  schools  had  declined  from  one  to  every  1,440  inhabitants 
to  one  in  9,028.  The  Punjab  is  classical,  teeming  with  noble 
and  ancient  memories,  where  the  priest  was  professor  and 
poet,  and  where  education  was  both  a  religious  and  a  social 
duty.  Fakirs,  yogis,  minstrels,  genealogists,  astrologists, 
almanac  makers,  pundits,  and  even  Brahmans  teach,  but  with 
no  classes  which  reduce  intellect  to  a  dull  common  level,  in 
huts,  markets,  homes,  on  ship,  and  every  male  child  save 
the  outcast  alone  was  taught  not  only  to  read  and  write  in  a 
difficult  language  and  to  compute,  but  a  mass  of  traditional 
literature  and  morals.  Teaching  made  the  Brahman  caste, 
which  Leitner  thinks  is  still  maintained  only  by  their  monop- 
oly of  learning.  It  is  a  sacred  duty  for  those  who  know  to 
teach,  and  by  virtue  and  education  in  four  stages  ending  in 
asceticism  and  meditation,  it  is  possible  to  reach  the  gods. 
Elementary  teaching  often  began  with  a  form  of  contract  with 
God ;  the  alphabet  is  sacred  and  new  letters  have  almost  upset 
religious  belief.  In  so  subtle  and  complicated  a  language, 
grammar  is  philosophy,  and  as  the  sage  passes  on  in  the  cur- 
riculum and  progresses  correspondingly  in  virtue,  he  may  attain 
a  point  whence  he  studies  downward  and  backward  till  his 
knowledge  culminates  in  being  focused  upon  the  child  whom 

'  History  of  Indigenous  Education  in  the  Punjab  since  Annexation  and  in  1882, 
by  G.  W.  Leitner,  LL.  D.     Calcutta,  1883. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND  THEIR  TREATMENT       7" 

he  teaches,  and  thus  reincarnates  his  soul,  which  might  be 
reborn  over  and  over  by  love  of  youthful  studies.  Genius  is 
common  in  India,  which  only  lacks  means  of  communication 
to  bring  it  to  fame,  and  a  savant's  life  is  often  so  devoted  to 
study  that  his  curriculum  is  his  biography,  and  his  culture, 
instead  of  making  him  restless  like  that  of  the  West,  gives  him 
poise  and  repose.  Teaching  is  essentially  secret,  and  even  the 
native  shorthand,  bookkeeping,  lexicography,  poetry,  litera- 
ture, and  rhetoric  are  regarded  as  the  crown  of  all  human 
possessions. 

These  ideals,  and  schools  which  represented  them,  Leitner 
found  in  danger  of  extinction  and  devoted  himself  to  their 
revival,  adding  only  a  little  English  and  a  few  scientific  rudi- 
ments as  a  happy  combination  between  the  East  and  the  West. 
He  retained  old  teachers,  methods,  and  subjects,  simply  in- 
creasing the  teachers'  fees  wherever  the  new  topics  were 
added.  This  policy,  however,  did  not  conform  to  England's 
idea  of  forcing  her  Hindu  subjects  to  take  up  the  white  man's 
burden,  and  was  not  only  abandoned,  but  I  have  looked  in  vain 
through  later  Government  reports,  and  even  in  Chamberlain's 
more  or  less  official  History  of  Education  in  India,  published 
in  1 90 1,  to  find  any  reference  to  Leitner  or  the  great  move- 
ment started  in  about  1,000  schools. 

In  even  the  Straits  Settlement,  where  so  much  has  been 
accomplished  in  so  short  a  time,  the  very  situation  is  demoral- 
izing.^ In  the  words  of  a  recent  writer,  "  the  relation  of  con- 
queror to  conquered  is  an  odious  one  and  closely  resembles 
that  of  master  to  slave.  It  inevitably  makes  the  one  overbear- 
ing, arrogant,  and  unscrupulous,  and  the  other  deceitful  and 
time-serving.  .  .  .  No  man  can  bear  to  be  constantly  reminded 
of  his  inferiority,  but  neither  can  any  man  bear  to  be  constantly 
reminded  of  his  superiority." 

Conquered  people  have  in  the  past  been  often  slaughtered 
and  enslaved,  but  often,  even  in  antiquity,  amalgamated. 
Castes  in  India,  Helots  in  Sparta,  and  aboriginal  people,  who 
have  been  overslaughed  when  other  races  multiplied  so  fast 

'  The  Growth  and  Political  Organization  of  the  Federated  Malay  States,  by 
Francis  B.  Forbes.  Submitted  to  the  Senate  with  the  President's  Message,  Janu- 
ary 4,  1899.  Also  Sidney  Brooks :  The  Example  of  the  Malay  States,  Forum, 
April,  1902. 


7^2  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

they  had  to  trek,  have  led  some  theorists  to  assume  that  human 
evolution  required  a  lower  servile  and  alien  race.  The  dis- 
content of  subjugated  races  is  in  strong  contrast  with  the  alle- 
giance of  emigrants.^ 

In  his  chapter  on  the  government  of  dependencies  by  a 
free  state  in  his  Representative  Government,  John  Stuart  Mill 
declares  that  a  government  of  a  people  by  itself  has  a  mean- 
ing and  reality,  but  such  a  thing  as  a  government  of  one 
people  by  another  does  not  and  can  not  exist.  One  people, 
he  continues,  may  keep  another  as  a  warren  or  preserve  or 
human  cattle  farm  for  its  profit,  but  this  is  very  far  from 
securing  the  good  of  the  governed.  How,  he  asks,  would  the 
English  be  ruled  if  they  knew  and  cared  no  more  about  their 
own  affairs  than  they  do  about  those  of  the  Hindus?  Those 
who  go  to  foreign  parts  to  get  rich  are  those  who  most  of 
all  need  restraint,  and  are  prone  to  think  it  monstrous  that 
any  rights  of  the  natives  should  stand  in  their  way.  More- 
over, "  the  settlers,  not  the  natives,  have  the  ear  of  the  public 
at  home." 

"  A  dependency,"  says  C.  F.  Adams,^  "  is  not  merely  a 
possession  but  a  trust,  to  be  dealt  with  in  a  large  altruistic 
spirit.  I  submit  that  there  is  not  an  instance  in  all  recorded 
history,  from  the  first  precedent  to  that  now  making,  where  a 
so-called  inferior  race  or  community  has  been  elevated  in  its 
character  or  made  self-sustaining  and  self-governing,  or  even 
put  on  the  way  to  that  result,  through  a  condition  of  depend- 
ency or  tutelage." 

"  It  is  a  curious  fact,"  says  Dilke,"  "  that  the  English  races  have 
more  generally  destroyed  the  native  races  w^ith  which  they  have 
come  in  contact  in  their  young  settlements  than  has  been  the  case 
with  other  colonizing  peoples,  but  have  destroyed  the  natives  only 
afterward  to  enter  into  a  conflict  with  other  dark  or  yellow  races 
whose  efficiency  as  laborers  seems  equal  to  their  own.  While  the 
destruction  of  the  native  races  by  the  British  races  in  countries  where 
the  EngHsh  can  labor  out  of  doors  is  generally  complete,  it  is  the 
fact  that  other  European  races  who  have  set  to  work  to  destroy  the 
natives  in  similar  countries  have  not  succeeded,  and  that  the  English 


^  H.  C.  Morris  :    History  of  Colonization.     2  vols.     New  York,  1900. 

*  An  Undeveloped  Function.     American  Historical  Review,  January,  1902. 

'  Problems  of  Greater  Britain,  p.  535. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       713 

people  have  often  destroyed  them  when  trying  hard  to  keep  them  in 
existence."  He  deplores  that  while  in  British  colonies  many  inter- 
esting political  and  social  experiments  are  being  tried,  the  colonies 
of  the  Crown  know  little  of  each  other. 

In  England  the  evolution  of  the  idea  of  colonies  has  passed 
three  stages.  The  old  system  closed  with  the  revolt  of 
America,  before  which  colonies  were  conceived  as  existing 
solely  for  the  benefit  of  the  sovereign  state.  They  were  an 
asset  to  yield  as  much  profit  as  possible.  In  the  next  stage 
there  was  a  strong  body  of  British  sentiment  in  favor  of  cast- 
ing off  colonies.  In  1870  Froude  insisted  "  that  our  colonies 
are  a  burden  to  us  and  the  sooner  they  are  cut  adrift  from 
us  the  better."  The  third  stage,  Ireland  ^  thinks,  was  reached 
about  1897.  It  grew  indirectly  out  of  the  scramble  of  the 
continental  powers  for  parts  of  Africa,  which  began  in  1884, 
for  it  was  then  that  France  became  animated  with  the  old 
colonial  idea  that  had  made  her  great  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  and  which  was  expressed  in  1882  by  Leroy-Beaulieu, 
who  said  that  colonial  expansion  was  now  "  a  question  of  life 
or  death  for  France."  In  England  the  celebration  of  the 
Queen's  Jubilee,  in  1897,  was  a  powerful  stimulant  to  the 
imperial  idea,  and  it  is  now  felt  that  the  task  of  civilizing 
lower  races  is  a  thing  to  be  attempted. 

Russia's  method  has  been  almost  purely  agricultural,  with 
heavy  blows  followed  by  great  mildness  and  toleration.  She 
excels  all  others  in  the  East,  says  Reinsch,  because  she  is  semi- 
Oriental  and  not  far  above  the  Asiatic  tribes.  Her  mastery 
of  Oriental  diplomacy  is  complete,  and  the  splendor  of  her 
system  impresses  the  East  more  than  do  the  simple  business 
methods  of  the  Briton.  Germany  wins  her  way  by  her  fin- 
ished commercial,  mercantile,  and  industrial  methods.  Her 
Government  follows  her  people.  Her  rule  is  too  military  and 
bureaucratic,  while  the  French  love  home  too  much,  and  if 
abroad  wish  to  feel  the  administration  always  behind  them. 
In  all  colonies  now  the  question  of  labor  is  coming  to  the 
front,  and  this  is  ominous  for  the  natives,  and  institutions  to 
train  for  colonial  life  are  multiplying.^     This  began  in  Eng- 


» Tropical  Colonization.     New  York,  1899. 

'  Colonial  Civil  Service.     A.  L.  Lowell.     New  York,  1900. 


714  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

land  with  the  college  at  Haileybury  in  1806.  France  estab- 
lished its  Cambodian  in  1885,  and  the  Dutch  had  one  long 
before,  and  now  Britain  has  the  new  London  School  of  Tropi- 
cal Medicine  founded  in  1899.  These  institutions  are  slowly- 
coming  to  admit  more  and  more  matter  from  the  country- 
trained  into  their  curriculum,  expensive  as  this  differentia- 
tion is. 

Just  now  the  white  race  is  gathering  itself  up  for  an  ex- 
traordinary new  unity  and  a  further  step  in  advance.  Man- 
kind is  endeavoring  to  realize  its  past  and  its  present,  and  to 
anticipate  its  future.  This  new  cosmic  slogan  impavidi  pro- 
grediamur  is  now  understood  as  never  before  in  biological 
experiments  in  heredity,  in  partitioning  all  that  yet  remains 
unappropriated  of  the  world  among  a  few  leading  powers, 
and  in  compelling  the  remnant  of  humanity  to  subject  itself 
as  a  corpus  vile  to  the  Hat  experimentiim  of  colonization  and 
education.  This  makes  the  end  of  the  century  epochful  and 
momentous.  Everything  must  henceforth  have  world-wide 
dimensions  and  be  seen  in  cosmic  relations.  What  a  few  over- 
grown races  call  civilization  seems  likely  to  be  forced  upon 
the  entire  world. 

The  recent  transition  from  nationalism  to  imperialism  and 
the  attempts  at  unwilling  assimilation  of  races,  like  the  Irish, 
Poles,  and  Finns,  are  certainly  hardly  reconcilable  with  the 
philosophy  of  universal  peace  as  proclaimed  by  Saint-Pierre 
and  Kant,  nor  indeed  with  the  world  community  ideas  of 
international  law  since  Grotius  and  Suarez.  The  Nietzsche 
view  that  victorious  force  is  the  summiim  honiim  well  comports 
with  the  ideas  of  various  German  historians,  that  superior 
nations  must  civilize  inferior  by  force  if  necessary.  Says  a 
recent  writer,^  "  It  is  an  inexorable  law  of  progress  that  in- 
ferior races  are  made  for  the  purpose  of  serving  superior,  and 
if  they  refuse  to  serve  they  are  fatally  condemned  to  disap- 
pear." This  view,  that  each  nation  must  assert  itself  to  the 
utmost,  assumes  that  force  is  the  only  criterion  of  fitness,  and 
ignores  the  fact  that  civilization  must  from  time  to  time  change 
both  its  agents  and  its  nature.  Under  the  influence  of  this 
spirit,  modern  statesmen  are  seeking  to  found  empires,  as  a 

•Quoted  in  World  Politics,  by  Paul  S.  Reinsch,  p.  12. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       715 

few  decades  ago  they  did  to  found  nations.  Hence,  sea  power 
has  a  new  importance  as  compared  with  standing  armies,  and 
all  appreciation  of  the  real  virtues  of  humble  races  is  rapidly- 
being  lost.  All  this  had  undoubtedly  been  influenced  in  part, 
and  in  part  expressed  by  the  aristocratic  tendencies  of  the  new 
philosophy  of  the  survival  of  the  best  and  the  view  that  the 
interests  of  the  world  are  favored  by  the  full  development  of 
great  individuals  rather  than  by  the  happiness  of  the  multi- 
tude, which  our  cherished  ideas  of  democracy  have  hitherto 
made  supreme.  The  age  almost  appears  as  though  its  con- 
sciousness was  to  be  again  the  helpless  victim  of  historical 
forces  or  destinies,  which  were  to  rush  it  along  too  rapidly  for 
intelligence  to  fully  grasp  the  meaning  of  tendencies.  Pobye- 
donostseff's  recent  book  ^  is  pervaded  with  the  conviction  that 
the  Western  world  is  dying  with  the  fatal  diseases  of  anarchy, 
infidelity,  individualism,  and  corruption,  and  that  Russia  with 
her  autocracy,  piety,  and  village  community  system  is  to  bear 
the  light  of  the  world. 

Nearly  all  the  world  inhabitable  by  man  is  now  known. 
There  can  be  no  more  great  voyages  of  discovery  as  in  the 
fifteenth  century  save  only  toward  the  poles,  barren  of  life. 
Expeditions  like  those  of  Livingstone  and  Stanley  are  now 
forever  impossible.  On  the  map  of  the  Geographical  Society, 
the  areas  of  land  designated  as  unexplored  are  few  and  grow- 
ing rapidly  smaller.  Although,  of  course,  a  vast  body  of 
scientific  knowledge  concerning  mineral  resources,  fossil 
remains,  plant  and  animal  species,  manners  and  customs,  etc., 
is  yet  awaited,  the  preliminary  survey  of  the  world  of  man 
is  essentially  complete.  This  fact  alone  marks  a  great  epoch 
in  the  world's  history.  The  expansion  of  knowledge  has  seen 
here  a  limit  which  had  never  been  realized  before.  We  are 
now  practically  sure  that  there  is  no  living  pithecanthropoid 
or  even  Neanderthal  race,  and  as  our  knowledge  of  man  is 
rounding  up  we  realize  his  isolation  and  uniqueness  as  a 
species  by  himself,  who  has  surpassed  all  animals  and  been 
the  most  ferocious  and  deadly  in  the  use  of  his  sovereignty 
over  the  animal  world,  exterminating  species  that  he  could 
not  domesticate,  and  himself  the  author  of  the  wide  and  still 

»  Reflections  of  a  Russian  Statesman. 


7i6  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

widening  gap  between  the  lowest  of  his  species  and  the  high- 
est animals,  because  he  has  killed  off  the  missing  links. 

One  of  the  first  effects  of  realizing  this  new  limit  has 
been  the  competition  of  the  leading  nations  to  appropriate  all 
available  territory,  or  to  acquire  spheres  of  paramount  inter- 
est wherever  that  of  other  dominant  races  was  not  confirmed. 
But  one  remarkable  fact  of  the  new  century  is  a  new  cosmic 
consciousness  with  many  manifestations  and  a  new  sense  of 
solidarity  among  all  the  peoples  of  the  earth.  Christianity 
has  long  dreamed  of  universal  dominion,  remote  as  this  ideal 
still  is  of  realization,  and  uncoordinated  as  are  yet  the  efforts 
of  the  various  missionary  bodies,  the  efficiency  of  which,  co- 
operation between  them  would  vastly  increase.  The  con- 
viction that  Christianity  is  an  ultimate  and  final  form  of 
religion  beyond  which  there  can  be  no  better  or  higher  one, 
on  the  one  hand,  and  that  it  is  fit  for  the  needs  of  all  people, 
on  the  other,  is  ineradicable  from  Christian  faith.  The  laws  of 
disease,  especially  of  those  that  are  contagious,  are  essentially 
the  same  for  all  men,  so  that  medical  regulations,  it  is  urged, 
should  be  universal.  Universal  weights  and  measures  for  the 
world  have  their  ardent  advocates.  Sympathy  with  suffering 
and  calamity  in  its  remotest  part  is  now  world-wide.  Postal 
regulations  almost  give  us  a  world  postal  system.  Commerce 
knows  no  limitations  save  those  of  tariff  and  is  knitting  the 
world  into  closer  and  closer  dependency.  Inventions,  me- 
chanic arts,  and  labor-saving  devices  immediately  become 
international  and  are  everywhere  encroaching  upon  rude  or 
indigenous  forms  of  industry.  The  weather  bureaus  hardly 
recognize  national  lines;  fashions  ignore  them,  and  so  do  the 
sciences.  We  have  had  many  tentatives  toward  the  formation 
of  a  world  language  or  Volapiik ;  ^  world  coinage ;  a  universal 
religion  and  philosophy;  a  world  police  that  should  fight 
famines  as  well  as  suppress  disorder;  while  arbitration,  in- 
ternational law,  and  philosophy  are  all  beginning  to  think 
more  deeply  and  broadly  and  have  new  dreams  of  finality,  and 
of  a  new  meaning  of  the  old  Catholic  idea,  semper  iihique  et 
ab  omnibus;  while  we  hear  much  that  is  vague  concerning  a 

'  See  a  tentative  universal  phonetic  system  to  express  the  sounds  of  all  languages, 
in  Ped.  Sem.,  December,  1903. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND   THEIR   TREATMENT       717 

new  world  ethics,  world  conscience,  world  politics,  of  the 
Atlantic  as  an  Anglo-Saxon  sea,  and  the  Pacific  as  a  new 
Mediterranean,  of  globe-circling  in  sixty  days,  etc. 

All  these  influences  make  for  growing  homogeneity 
among  mankind.  Costumes  and  manners  lose  their  local  pro- 
vincial types  and  approximate.  Customs,  ancient  beliefs,  and 
even  religions  weaken  in  their  hold,  and  men  tolerate  all 
things  because  they  doubt.  The  so-called  higher  races  force 
the  lower  to  take  up  the  white  man's  burden,  and  soon  the 
latter  vie  with  the  former  in  their  worship  of  Mars,  Bacchus, 
and  Mammon.  Low  races  are  imitative  and  superficial  re- 
semblances soon  deepen.  The  school,  which  England 
especially  and  most  colonizing  nations  use  as  a  method  of 
promoting  conformity,  is  so  uniform  wherever  it  is  found  that 
the  school  system,  provided  for  the  savage  but  vanishing 
IMaori  in  Madagascar,  was  lately  called  by  Sir  Joshua  Fitch 
the  most  complete  and  perfect  in  the  world.  Uniformity  is 
for  many  the  most  inspiring  ideal  and  the  brightest  of  all  goals 
of  endeavor.  It  is  also  simple  and  easy.  Accept  baptism  and 
the  creed,  refrain  from  certain  open  gross  forms  of  vice,  and 
the  Hottentot  is  a  Christian.  Add  to  these  a  few  windy 
mouthfuls  of  effusive  phrases,  and  the  half  illiterate  southern 
negro  becomes  an  exhorter,  although  the  spirit  of  voodoo  in- 
cantation dominates  in  both  his  own  soul  and  that  of  his 
hearers.  It  will  be  a  dreary  and  monotonous  world  if  the 
dreams  of  the  jingoes  of  modern  culture  and  uniformity  are 
realized.  As  we  travel  around  the  world,  everywhere  we 
shall  have  steam  and  electricity;  modernized  costume  and 
custom ;  the  schoolhouse  and  the  three  R's ;  the  Sunday  church 
bell;  the  individuality  of  races  slowly  fading;  their  ideas 
growing  pale  in  a  common  menstruum ;  possibly  war  elimi- 
nated by  the  parliament  of  man  in  a  world  federation;  the 
food  supply  and  population  enormously  increasing;  no  illit- 
erates— this  is  a  millennium  which  has  little  charm  for  the 
biologist. 

No  race  ideal  has  ever  been  more  narrow,  provincial,  or 
banausic.  It  is  a  colossal  assumption  that  what  we  call  civi- 
lization is  the  end  of  man,  or  the  best  thing  in  the  world.  If 
history  has  any  lesson  larger  and  more  impressive  than  all 
others,  it  is  that  both  races  and  national  types  of  culture  have 


7i8  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 

their  day,  grow  old  and  die.  Each  form  of  civilization  culti- 
vates certain  powers  of  man,  perhaps  excessively,  while  others 
lie  dormant  or  are  even  repressed.  Every  race,  where  fertility 
or  the  number  of  viable  offspring  is  declining,  is  descendent 
or  decadent,  and  has  failed  in  more  factors  of  the  great  prob- 
lem of  human  development  than  it  has  succeeded  in.  The 
nations  they  represent  may  grow  by  immigration  and  increase 
in  wealth  and  power,  but  it  is  all  factitious  and  artificial.  The 
world  belongs  to  the  fertile  races.  The  best  test  of  the  success 
of  the  methods  of  treating  subject  races  is  fertility.  Just  as 
no  animal  can  be  domesticated  that  does  not  breed  in  cap- 
tivity, so  no  race  is  really  helped  by  the  dominance  of  another 
if  reproduction  declines.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  population 
increases  more  rapidly  in  a  subject  race;  if  the  average  of 
longevity  is  augmented,  we  have  the  cardinal  signs  of  benefit 
from  the  relation.  We  of  the  highest  civilization  have  left 
as  it  were  large  brain  areas  fallow;  culture  factors  of  the 
highest  importance  have  been  neglected,  and  indeed  perhaps 
always  must  be  where  supreme  excellence  in  others  is  at- 
tained, so  that  "  barbarism  with  electric  lights  "  is  always  and 
everywhere  possible.  Our  type  of  civilization  may  be  better 
in  most,  as  it  certainly  is  in  some,  respects  than  any  other,  but 
it  is  at  best  only  a  certain  group  of  excellences,  and  although 
we  are  the  bearers  of  the  world-consciousness  at  present,  it 
by  no  means  follows  that  the  highest  human  perfectibility 
is  along  the  lines  that  we  have  thus  far  followed.  Greece  and 
Rome  were  just  as  confident  of  their  own  eternal  superiority 
over  all  barbarians,  but  if  they  had  conquered  the  Germans, 
progress  would  have  had  no  relay  when  the  ancient  states  fell. 
In  its  very  nature,  civilization  must  perhaps  rise,  culminate, 
and  then  decline ;  not  primarily  by  reason  of  extirpation  from 
without  but  by  exhaustion  from  within,  or  perhaps  because 
certain  areas  or  granules  of  the  brain,  which  may  itself  be 
still  developing,  are  overworked  and  others  must  be  developed. 
Ratzel  urges  in  substance  that  we  have  treated  the  gap 
between  the  natural  and  civilized  races  with  an  indolence  that 
was  content  with  the  mere  record  of  novelties  and  romantic 
interest.  Toward  the  end  of  the  last  century^  popular  belief 
was  profoundly  influenced  by  Rousseau,  who  thought  the 
happiest  existence  to  be  a  state  of  nature  remote  from  civi- 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       719 

lization.  As  interest  in  this  problem  became  intellectual 
rather  than  sentimental  and  under  the  influence  of  evolution- 
ary theories,  the  opposite  view  prevailed.  Origins,  which  are 
everywhere  sought,  it  is  believed  are  approached  just  in  pro- 
portion as  we  find  human  races  degraded.  While  those  who 
study  religion  and  language  now  incline  to  the  theory  of 
decadence  and  degeneration,  evolutionists,  if  they  do  not  hold 
that  there  is  everywhere  only  progress  and  no  decay,  are  most 
interested  in  the  lowest  races  which  are  thought  nearest  to 
the  brutes.  This  distinction  of  upper  and  lower  must  yield 
to  the  distinction  between  forward  and  belated.  Primitive 
races  must  now  be  regarded  rather  as  on  an  equal  stage  of 
evolution,  or  at  least  one  that  does  not  differ  much  from  our 
own,  but  as  deprived  of  their  share  of  culture,  hence  arrested 
and  stunted.  We  must  drop  the  view  that  seeks  in  the  lower 
races  missing  links  between  animals  and  man.  "  There  exist 
Europeans  morally  degraded  below  the  level  of  the  Austra- 
lians. This  sad  faculty  of  being  or  becoming  like  the  brutes 
is  unhappily  present  in  all  men,  in  some  a  little  more  and  in 
others  a  little  less,  whether  it  manifests  itself  with  more  or 
less  frequency  and  plainness  depends  merely  on  the  degree 
of  acquired  capacity  of  dissimulation,  which  often  corresponds 
to  that  of  civilization."  The  idea,  therefore,  of  natural  races 
"  involves  nothing  anthropological  or  physical,  but  is  purely 
one  of  ethnography  and  civilization."  Natural  races  are  na- 
tions in  the  process  of  development.  "  The  thousands  of 
tribes  whom  civilized  men  lightly  call  savages,  correspond  to 
different  periods  of  existence  set  out  at  regular  distances  on 
the  roadway  of  ages."  The  old  Germans  and  Gauls  appeared 
no  less  uncivilized  beside  Roman  civilization  than  do  Kaffirs 
or  Polynesians  beside  ours.  "  The  gap  which  differences  of 
civilization  create  between  two  groups  of  human  beings  is  in 
truth  quite  independent,  whether  in  its  depth  or  in  its  breadth, 
of  the  difference  in  their  mental  endowments."  "  Let  us  only 
look  outside  the  border  of  the  brief  and  narrow  course  of 
events  which  we  arrogantly  call  the  history  of  the  world  and 
we  shall  have  to  recognize  that  members  of  every  race  have 
borne  their  part  in  the  history  that  lies  beyond — the  history  of 
primeval  and  prehistoric  times." 

Savage  tribes  as  a  rule  have  little  wealth,  slight  class  dis- 


720  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

tinctions,  no  laws  or  courts,  no  ignorance  or  learning,  but,  as 
Wallace  urges,  usually  have  great  respect  for  others'  rights. 
They  may  be  unprogressive,  but  may  have  reached  a  perfect 
solidarity  where  each  loves  and  works  for  all  and  equilibrium 
has  been  established.  The  arts  may  be  only  rudimentary; 
there  is  little  variety,  yet  in  justice,  well-being  and  happiness 
these  large  tribal  families,  both  prehistoric  and  contemporary, 
closed  to  outsiders,  are  at  the  very  least  in  some  cases  and  in 
some  respects  ahead  of  us.  They  may  be  as  unprogressive  as 
Ranke  says  history  is,  which  he  argues  shows  no  real  improve- 
ment, but  it  is  certain  that  the  slums  of  modern  cities  abound 
in  people  really  lower  and  often  far  more  degraded  than  those 
we  call  savages.  It  seems  at  any  rate  to  be  a  law  that  the 
lower  stratum  of  the  more  civilized  people  do  not  progress, 
although  many  will  deny  the  statement  of  Reclus  that  on  the 
whole  civilization  shows  no  moral  advance  beyond  savagery. 
While  in  many  cases  it  is  hard  to  distinguish  between 
ascending  and  descending  races,  in  many  instances  the  differ- 
ence is  manifest.  Ploetz  ^  thinks  that  the  Frenchmen  and 
Yankees  are  sinking,  and  most  West  Aryans,  European  Jews, 
English,  Dutch,  and  Scandinavians  are  rising  races.  The 
Zufiis,  the  descendants  of  the  ancient  Peruvians  and  of  the 
old  rulers  of  Yucatan,  are  oft-cited  illustrations  of  decadence. 
Virchow  thought  Lapps  and  Bushmen  pathological  and  de- 
graded by  hunger  and  want.  Sir  H.  Bartle  Frere  ^  thinks 
there  is  no  limit  to  the  improvement  of  the  Kaffirs  and  in- 
stances the  extraordinary  career  of  Tyo  Soga.  Although  he 
holds  that  most  African  races  were  descending  when  the 
Europeans  came,  he  instances  the  remarkable  vigor  of  all  the 
great  Bantu  family,  and  especially  the  Bechuanas,  the  best  of 
the  Zulus,  and  the  rare  ability  of  such  chiefs  as  Chaka,  who 
united  many  tribes,  had  a  coward-tree  where  all  who  mani- 
fested fear  were  slain  after  every  battle,  and  who  ruled  with 
great  justice  and  sagacity,  and  Cetewayo  who  for  some  time 
kept  England  at  bay.  The  difficulty  of  making  this  discrimi- 
nation causes  us  constantly  to  confound  ethnic  infancy  with 
old  age.     Reclus  ^  tells  of  an  experienced  traveler  who  found 

^  Tiichtigkeit  unserer  Rasse  und  der  Schutz  der  Schwachen.     Berlin,  1895. 

*  Jour.  Anthrop.  Inst.,  1882,  p.  313  et  seq. 

•  Comptes  Rendus,  1896,  p.  761. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES   AND   THEIR   TREATMENT       721 

a  fine  and  happy  tribe  in  Africa  really  living  close  to  nature, 
who  was  philosopher  enough  to  declare  that  they  would  be 
justified  in  killing  him  for  discovering  them,  and  few  will 
dissent  from  his  statement  that  the  American  Indians  would 
be  better  to-day  had  they  never  met  white  men. 

Very  interesting  is  the  suggestion  of  Professor  O.  T. 
Mason.^  Lower  races,  he  premises,  feel  chiefly  emulation  or 
despair  in  the  presence  of  higher  ones.  Their  chronology, 
technology,  speech,  social  system,  and  industries  are  all 
challenged  and  bettered.  When  we  try  to  develop  them,  he 
thinks,  we  should  follow  a  definite  program  or  curriculum 
and  begin  with  food  and  hygiene,  then  should  come  dress, 
then  shelter,  and  then  in  further  sequence  war,  industry, 
ornament,  the  arts  of  gratification,  traffic,  family,  organiza- 
tion, government,  and,  last  of  all,  religion.  The  first  of  these 
are  easiest  and  the  last  progressively  hardest  to  change,  but 
to  leap  consecutive  stages  in  this  order  or  to  invert  its  cate- 
gories is  fatal  in  many  ways,  because  it  opens  discouraging 
chasms  between  the  point  attained  and  the  goal,  and  because 
of  the  unnatural  strain  to  both  the  physical  and  psychic 
organism.  Moreover,  if  by  reason  of  mixed  blood  or  great 
ability  a  subject  of  an  inferior  is  forced  up  to  the  status  of  a 
higher  race,  he  is  usually  ostracized  from  his  own  and  also 
from  the  dominant  people  with  whom  he  can  not  compete. 
Overstimulated  savages  generally  perish  miserably  or  lapse 
to  a  lazy  vegetative  existence  in  the  presence  of  higher  stocks. 
Function  varies  easier  than  structure,  and  family,  church,  and 
religion  are  the  hardest  and  last  to  change.  Perhaps  the  best 
only  should  be  selected  for  these  hothouse  processes.  Few 
anthropologists  would  venture  yet  to  thus  formulate  the  stages 
of  evolution,  and  few  experts  or  laymen  will  agree  with  this 
suggestion,  though  it  may  be  a  tendency  in  the  right  direction. 

Race  hygiene  in  the  large  sense  which  culminates  in 
human  stirpiculture  as  an  art  is  yet  to  be  developed.  From 
Plato  down  to  Grant  Allen,  who  even  goes  so  far  as  to  urge 
that  the  race  can  best  be  improved  by  marriages  only  during 
the  good-will  of  both  parties ;  to  Hegar,  the  gynecologist,  who 


1  The  Savage  Mind  in  the  Presence  of  Civilization.     Trans.  Anthrop.  Ass'n, 
vol.  i,  1 88 1,  p.  44. 
85 


722  THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

advocated  better  sexual  selection  in.  marriage;  to  Wallace, 
who  thinks  judicious  natural  selection  between  races  might 
result  in  more  and  better  posterity;  and  in  many  an  ancient 
colonial  policy,  modern  community  and  venturesome  social 
theory,  intimations  of  the  possibility  of  man's  domesticating 
himself  so  as  to  breed  more  effectively  have  been  mooted,  but 
these  schemes  must  remain  only  poetic  until  the  laws  of 
heredity  are  established  upon  foundations  solid  enough  to 
bear  the  full  weight  of  human  society.  We  do  already  know, 
however,  that  fundamental  human  qualities  are  acquired  best, 
if  not  alone,  through  heredity.  What  is  no  less  certain,  but 
not  yet  practically  recognized,  is  that  every  race  has  some 
qualities  of  body  or  soul  that  civilized  races  lack  but  sorely 
need.  In  ancient  times,  and  still  among  savages,  conquest  was 
followed  by  commingling  of  bloods.  Conquered  races  were  ab- 
sorbed and  assimilated  by  intermarriage  as  in  the  colonies  of  an- 
cient Rome  and  among  savage  tribes,  who  kill  the  males  among 
their  enemies  and  marry  the  females.  This  process  requires 
a  long  time  and  also  requires  peace.  Reclus  states  that  for 
pure  outlines  of  form  and  grace  of  movement  many  savages 
surpass  civilized  man.  We  have  also  a  large  body  of  evidence 
of  the  very  superior  stamina  and  mental  vigor  produced  by 
some  race  mixtures.  The  bad  qualities  of  half-breeds  are  gen- 
erally due  to  prejudice  and  social  ostracism.  That  the  Beothuk 
and  Tasmanian  blood  now  flows  in  nobody's  veins,  the  biologist 
considers  an  irreparable  loss,  and  holds  that  these  two  very 
vigorous  stocks  must  on  general  principles  have  contained  very 
precious  elements  that  might  have  revitalized  some  decadent 
or  accelerated  some  other  ascendent  stock,  or  been  quickened 
themselves  if  wisdom  or  chance  had  effected  the  proper  com- 
bination. 

The  Ainos  of  Japan,  who  are  vanishing  by  amalgamation, 
are  a  very  different  and  more  primitive  type  than  the  Japa- 
nese, and  both  appear  to  be  benefited  by  the  process  of  absorp- 
tion. The  Portugese  and  the  Dutch  have  been  intermarrying 
for  several  centuries  in  farther  India  to  the  advantage  of  both 
races,  as  is  true  of  the  Russians  with  the  older  natives  of 
Siberia.  The  mixture  of  Arabs  with  the  North  Africans  has 
produced  the  Moors;  many  crossings  of  the  Turks,  the 
mixture  of  the  Spaniards  and  Indians  in  South  America  and 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       7^3 

Mexico,  especially  in  Chile,  which  have  resulted  in  Neo- 
Indian  and  Neo-Aryan  types,  show  how  favorably  the  crossing 
of  races  may  act  if  differences  are  not  great  and  if  both  sexes 
of  both  races  marry  with  each  other  instead  of  only  the  men 
of  one  with  the  women  of  the  other.  While  the  negro  and 
American  Indian  are  not  infertile,  the  results  here  are  more 
in  doubt,  and  perhaps  the  same  may  be  said  of  the  French  and 
African  that  has  produced  the  Creole.  The  Anglo-Saxons 
are  a  mixed  race;  the  Germans  and  even  the  Jews  have 
mingled  their  blood  with  many  other  people,  so  that  cross- 
fertilization  seems  to  be  the  law  of  human  races. 

The  friction  points  between  higher  and  lower  races  are 
many.  Very  prominent,  if  not  first,  is  sex.  The  great  mutiny 
in  India  was  very  largely  due  to  this  cause.  Often  in  this 
inflammable  field  governments  are  influenced  against  their 
best  judgment  by  popular  clamor,  as  when  vast  numbers  of 
British  matrons  petitioned  for  the  abolition  of  child  marriages, 
or  when  Mrs.  Fawcett  braved  public  censure  by  advocating 
the  contagious  diseases  act  which  involved  the  recognition  of 
prostitution  sufficiently  to  bring  it  under  medical  control,  or 
as  is  seen  in  our  chronic  Mormon  problem,  and  the  many 
fanatical  efforts  to  enforce  European  modes  of  marriage  and 
divorce  among  lower  races  at  a  stage  of  development  when 
they  are  either  meaningless  or  would  be  offset  by  greater 
injury.  Another  friction  point  is  property,  which  with  lower 
races  is  tribal  or  communal.  Land,  if  not  assumed  to  be 
owned  by  the  discoverer,  has  been  bought  for  a  bauble,  and 
then,  if  the  civilized  conscience  was  stirred  later,  redress  has 
been  by  doles,  pensions,  grants,  or  grazing  leases,  which  have 
tended  to  pauperization,  stagnation,  and  decay.  Our  failure 
to  understand  the  tribal  society,  the  phratry,  gens,  and  sept, 
which  was  the  mode  of  union  of  Latins,  Sabines,  Dorians, 
Spartans,  and  Hebrews,  is  another  source  of  disastrous  mis- 
understanding. Labor  is  another  and  growing  source  of 
trouble.  Savages  are  either  idle  or  work  and  act  by  long 
rhythmic  periods  and  abhor  our  regular  daily  system.  Lan- 
guage is  a  great  barrier,  and  the  prejudices,  outbreaks,  and 
wars  caused  by  failure  to  understand  make  another  long  and 
sad  chapter.  Race  prejudice  is  very  strong  among  primitive 
peoples.      They    are   peaceable    and    affectionate    with    each 


724  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

Other,  but  suspect  or  abhor  aliens  as  enemies,  and  their 
customs  and  traditions  are  a  tribal  palladium  they  are  loath 
to  jeopardize.  Religious  diversities  have  generally  seemed 
greatest  of  all.  Differences  that  we  are  coming  to  regard  as 
but  branches  of  the  same  stock,  or  degrees  of  development 
of  a  cognate  content,  to  the  primitive  mind  often  seem  abso- 
lute. Externals,  like  Sabbath-keeping,  a  new  chronology, 
church  and  school  going,  seem  to  have  little  common  ground 
with  previous  customs,  although  we  are  now  coming  to  study 
and  utilize  every  psycho-kinetic  equivalent  or  analogue  be- 
tween the  higher  and  the  lower  faith.  Again  primitive  races 
live  in  their  feelings  and  instincts,  and  their  organization  of 
their  life  is  more  complete  and  settled.  The  life  of  sentiment 
and  impulse  is  contrasted  at  every  point  with  the  methods  of 
the  intellectual  life.  Thus  cultured  and  uncultured  minds 
must  at  first  radically  misunderstand  each  other.  While  we 
must  beware  of  pushing  the  analogies  too  far,  for  they  are  at 
best  restricted,  we  can  not  fail  to  see  that  some  of  these  same 
disparities  exist  between  maturity  and  youth,  especially  in  the 
mattoid  and  criminaloid  types.  The  latter  tends  to  sexual  law- 
lessness, to  consort  in  gangs  hostile  to  other  gangs,  with  a 
leader  and  often  with  common  possessions,  while  the  religious 
nature  of  youth,  though  intense  and  sincere,  often  has  low 
intellectual  forms  of  expression  and  can  be  fanatical  toward 
what  is  the  normal  religion  of  adult  life.  So  in  hygienic  regu- 
lation, where  civilization  and  savagery  conflict,  youth  is 
normally  predisposed  to  violate  these  precepts  and  to  fail  to 
appreciate  them  when  presented.  Precautions  against  con- 
tagion are  not  the  young  man's  forte.  So  in  their  suscepti- 
bility to  drink  and  to  microbes  and  their  disposition  to  believe 
in  nostrums  and  quacks  there  is  some  parallelism.  Dress  and 
undress  is  another  friction  point.  It  is  hard  for  us  to  under- 
stand that  a  man  in  a  breech-cloth  may  be  a  philosopher,  or 
a  woman  almost  nude  a  prude  in  her  modesty  and  virtue, 
although  we  know  better  how  ornament  may  defy  comfort. 
The  homologues  of  these  tendencies  in  youth  have  been  else- 
where in  this  book  repeatedly  pointed  out. 

Dumont  ^  considers  that  the  increase  of  population  is  the 

*  La  Morale  Bas^e  sur  la  Demographic.     Paris,  igoi. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES   AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       7^5 

best  criterion  of  the  customs,  manners,  and  habits  of  a  people ; 
that  it  is,  in  short,  a  veritable  ethnonietry,  A  true  science  of 
morality,  therefore,  or  ethics  will  determine  those  causes  that 
make  for  the  increase  in  numbers  and  quality  and  the  develop- 
ment of  races  up  the  scale  of  evolution.  We  shall  then  have 
a  science  of  duty  that  will  be  categorically  imperative  and 
reliable. 

In  answer  to  the  problem  of  **  the  possible  improvement  of 
the  human  race  under  the  existing  conditions  of  law  and  sen- 
timent," Sir  Francis  Galton  ^  insists  that  anthropologists 
should  regard  human  improvement,  the  grandest  of  all  ob- 
jects, as  a  subject  to  be  kept  squarely  in  view.  Dr.  Farr 
elaborately  estimated  the  worth  of  an  average  Essex  baby  to 
be  about  five  pounds.  By  a  similar  method,  Galton  calculated 
that  the  baby  of  superior  talent  would  be  worth  thousands  of 
pounds.  He  insists  that  the  vast  gain  which  England  re- 
ceived by  the  Huguenot  immigration  would  be  slight  com- 
pared to  the  annual  addition  of  a  few  hundred  children  of  the 
highest  class.  He  gives  an  elaborate  and  most  ingenious 
scheme  to  show  how,  while  extremes  both  of  degeneracy  and 
superior  talent  tend  to  be  reduced,  intermarriage  between  the 
better  classes  constantly  raises  the  level.  The  possibility  of 
improving  a  race  or  a  nation  is  thus  dependent  on  the  problem 
of  increasing  the  fertility  of  the  best  stock,  and  this  is  more 
important  than  that  of  repressing  the  worst.  He  thinks  if  a 
very  deep  interest  and  enthusiasm  in  this  subject  could 
naturally  express  itself  by  diplomas  to  select  young  men  and 
women,  and  moderate  dowries  to  encourage  early  marriages 
among  them,  this  cause  might  well  arouse  a  sense  of  religious 
obligation  and  work  against  the  tendency  in  costly  civiliza- 
tions to  shrink  from  marriage  on  prudential  grounds  or  from 
reluctance  to  sacrifice  freedom  or  leisure.  The  advantage  of 
early  marriage,  besides  a  direct  increase  in  fecundity,  means 
that  the  span  of  each  generation  is  shortened  so  that  perhaps 
six  or  seven  generations  take  the  place  of  five  or  six.  He 
shows  how  the  towns  sterilize  rural  vigor,  and  how  most 
women  of  the  better  class  in  England  usually  at  least  have 

*  The  Possible  Improvement  of  the  Human  Breed  under  the  Existing  Condi- 
tions of  Law  and  Sentiment.  Nature,  vol.  Ixiv,  p.  659.  Also  Pop.  Sci.  Monthly, 
January,  1902. 


726  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

one  additional  child.  Again,  if  wealthy  people  would  aid 
gifted  young  men  in  an  honorable  way,  augmented  social  effi- 
ciency would  result.  Noble  families  might  avow  it  a  point 
of  honor  to  collect  fine  specimens  of  humanity  about  them. 
No  doubt  there  is  here  a  great  power  "  capable  of  being  di- 
rected with  vast  benefit  as  soon  as  we  shall  have  learned  to 
understand  and  to  apply  it "  in  improving  the  breed  of  the 
human  race. 

The  customs,  institutions,  and  beliefs  of  primitive  peoples 
are  related  to  ours  somewhat  as  instinct  is  related  to  reason. 
Our  civilization  is  a  novelty,  full  of  artificialities  and  there- 
fore more  or  less  superficial.  It  rings  hollow  when  subjected 
to  strain  and  test.  Its  conventionalities  are  insincere  and 
many  of  them  a  lie.  The  field  for  hypocrisy  is  large  and  the 
tendencies  to  it  incessant  and  insidious.  The  religion  we  pre- 
tend to  follow  is  often  a  form  and  routine,  and  its  profession 
the  rankest  cant.  It  came  from  the  Orient,  and  from  antiquity 
and  from  an  alien  race.  A  revival  song  of  the  colored  people 
runs,  "  Give  me  Jesus  and  you  take  all  the  rest."  The  Jews 
long  since  did  the  first  and  now  seem  destined  to  do  the  second 
for  Christendom,  and  are  inheriting  the  earth  because  they  are 
the  most  mundane  and  most  devoted  of  all  races  in  history  to 
making  the  most  of  this  life  regardless  of  another.  The  In- 
dian is  constitutionally  at  the  other  extreme,  and  so  over- 
mindful  of  higher  and  supernatural  powers  that  he  can  not 
attain  worldly  prudence.  There  is  little  acculture,  but  all  is 
naive  and  too  automatic  to  be  called  even  second  nature.  That 
is  his  perennial  charm  for  a  sophisticated  age.  He  is  almost 
a  magnified  stage  of  boyhood  which  would  be  incomplete 
without  it,  and  here  again  each  helps  to  explain  the  other.  If 
primitive  races  become  extinct,  they  will  take  out  of  the  world 
with  them  so  much  power  of  sympathetic  appreciation  of 
youth  in  its  yearly  stages  that  we  may  well  be  appalled  for  the 
future  of  the  young. 

With  all  this  vast  body  of  culture  material  of  the  very 
highest  educational  value  it  is  strange  that  anthropology  has 
still  so  feeble  and  inadequate  representation  in  academic  facul- 
ties. It  is  a  wholesome  check  to  excessive  specialization.  As 
F.  Russel  has  shown,  it  gives  a  precious  kind  of  self- 
knowledge,    corrects    undue    self-complacency,    broadens    re- 


ADOLESCENT   RACES   AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       7^7 

ligious  prejudice,  and  deepens  the  sense  of  universal  brother- 
hood. As  Bastian  has  urged,  for  many  years  it  deepens  our 
ideas  of  God,  soul,  fate,  duty,  death  and  mortuary  custom,  re- 
birth, prophecy,  sacraments,  rewards  and  punishments,  and 
scores  of  other  concepts  basal  for  both  religion  and  psy- 
chology. This  is  the  broad  comparative  spirit  in  which 
Pfleiderer  has  treated  the  golden  age;  W.  F.  Warren,  para- 
dise ;  Tylor,  animism ;  J.  Curtin,  creation ;  Lefevre,  the  Holy 
Grail,  the  roots  of  which  conception  he  finds  everywhere 
"  consecrated  by  liturgy  and  divinitized  by  long  memory  " ; 
Robinson,  totemism ;  Chamberlain  explains  the  tendency  of 
brain-workers  to  toil  intensively  for  days  and  weeks  and  then 
relax  to  the  primitive  rhythm  of  activity  and  idleness ;  Mc- 
Ritchie  finds  in  the  lore  of  fairies,  trolls,  goblins,  and  monsters 
racial  memories  of  the  missing  links  in  man's  pedigree  and 
of  extinct  dragons  and  mammals.  If  we  find  fetishism  per- 
vading the  popular  conception  of  religion,  as  O.  Colson  ^  has 
shown ;  that  we  have  inherited  many,  if  not  most,  of  our  ideas 
of  the  soul  from  savages,  as  Bastian  ^  thinks ;  that  many,  if  not 
most,  races  have  ideas  of  a  post-mortem  journey  of  the  soul, 
as  V.  Negelein  ^  shows ;  that  the  dead  have  great  and  definite 
powers ;  •*  that,  as  Andree,  Userer,  and  others  have  seen,  ideas 
of  a  deluge  as  a  punishment  for  sin  abound  in  many  if  not 
most  races ;  that  prophetic  dreams  are  believed  by  many  tribes, 
which  some  think  ancestral  much  in  the  sense  of  Letourneau,'' 
as  are  sacred  waters  and  lustrations;  if  we  find,  with  v.  Jaekel,® 
that  primitive  priests  incline  to  feminine  things,  flowing  robes, 
long  hair,  ornaments,  female  cast  of  countenance,  to  dwell 
indoors,  and  sometimes  wear  veils  and  gloves,  use  fans,  ape 
woman's  walk,  ride  mares  only;  if  we  realize,  as  Hirn '^  and 
Westermarck  have  shown,  that  "  at  a  stage  of  development 
where  nudity  is  the  normal  state,  veiling  must  necessarily  sug- 

*  Wallonia.      Li^ge,  1901,  ix. 

«  Seelenbegriffe  in  der  Ethnologic.     Ethnolog.  Notizblatt,  Berlin,  1901. 
'  Reise  der  Seele  in  den  Jenseits.     Zeitsch.  f.  Vergl.  Volkerkunde,  1901,  p.  149. 
^Biirlitz:  Was  Konnen  die  Todten.     Zeitsch.  f.  Vergl.  Volkerkunde,  1900,  p. 
149. 

'Vashide  u.   Pieron  :   Bull,   et  Mem.   See.   Anthropol.     Paris,    1901,  pp.  194- 

293- 

«Studien  zur  Vergleich.  Volkerkunde.     Berlin,  1901,  p.  144. 

'  Origin  of  Art,  p.  205. 


728  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

gest  the  same  emotion  as  unveiling  in  civilized  society  " ;  un- 
derstand all  the  parallels  and  see  how  almost  even  the  quintes- 
sence of  virtue  is  to  be  found  in  savages  as  low  as  the  Veddahs, 
as  described  in  the  splendid  study  of  the  brothers  Sarrasin 
between  childhood  and  savagery ;  ^  conceive  the  great  power 
of  the  mind  over  the  body  as  shown  in  savage  medicine  more 
fully  than  in  modern  mind  and  faith  cures;  realize  what  a 
potent  and  precious  apperception  organ  for  understanding  the 
vital  relations  of  church  membership  are  the  consanguinity 
and  relations  of  tribal  society,  and  how  totemism  explains  to 
the  savage  that  of  the  believer  to  Christ ;  all  these  things  and 
scores  more  not  only  augment  our  respect  for  savagery  but 
increase  our  confidence  in  and  our  wonder  and  admiration  of 
our  own  religion,  which  has  so  effectively  edited  and  organ- 
ized these  primitive  conceptions,  and  should  incite  us  to 
attempt  in  some  humble  degree  to  prepare  the  way  for,  if  not 
to  participate  in  and  contribute  to,  this  supreme  work  of  the 
very  highest  type  of  genius,  viz.,  so  conduiting  these  primi- 
tive religious  instincts  that  they  shall  irrigate  life  and  incite 
to  virtue. 

VII.  Missionaries,  or  those  sent  forth  with  new  glad  tid- 
ings from  heaven,  have  constituted  a  very  prominent  function 
of  Christianity  since  the  appointment  of  the  apostles  and  the 
commission  to  the  seventy.  Paul  represents  the  ideal  about 
whose  methods  those  of  all  Christian  progaganda  since  have 
centered.  The  methods  have  been  very  diverse  in  different 
periods  and  among  different  races.  In  many  of  the  wholesale 
conversions  of  early  times  the  people  were  construed  to  have 
gone  over  to  the  new  faith  with  the  ruler.  The  method  of  the 
sword  has  been  widely  used,  and  the  persecuted  faith  has 
sometimes  become  in  turn  a  persecutor.  Religions,  deeply 
rooted  and  persistent  as  they  are  in  the  human  nature,  wax 
strong  and  die  like  races.  Jupiter,  Diana,  whose  great  image 
fell  from  heaven,  Baal,  and  even  Thor,  have  perhaps  not 
a  single  worshiper  on  the  earth  to-day,  and  yet  it  is  only 
sixteen  centuries  since  the  Emperor  Julian  defended  the 
religions  of  antiquity  and  thought  that  if  they  perished  class- 
ical literature,  if  not  philosophy,  would  go  with  them.  In  four 
centuries  Christianity  had  converted  the  Roman  Empire,  and 

1  Muthesius  :   Kindheit  u.  Volksthum.     Gotha,  1899,  p.  54. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND   THEIR   TREATMENT       729 

its  diffusion  north,  south,  east,  and  west  was  pressed  with  great 
vigor.  We  know  as  Httle  of  the  methods  of  Saint  Patrick, 
Columba,  Ulfilas,  and  Boniface  as  w'e  do  of  those  of  Lully, 
who  was  the  first  to  devise  a  philosophico-pedagogic  system 
for  persuading  non-Christians.  Having  finished  his  ars  major 
and  summary,  he  invited  the  Mohammedan  doctors  and 
teachers  of  the  Koran  at  Tunis  to  a  disputation  and  over- 
whelmed them  with  both  his  logic  and  his  fervor.  Anselm 
wrote  an  interesting  dialogue  between  a  Jew  and  a  Christian ; 
Aquinas  prepared  his  summary  against  the  Gentiles ;  Erasmus 
wrote  his  missionary  treatise  with  wise  counsels  concerning 
methods;  Walaeus  was  the  first,  in  1612,  to  establish  in  Leyden 
a  college  for  the  training  of  missionaries,  protesting  that  it 
was  not  sufficient  to  prepare  students  for  home  parishes.  The 
early  Protestants,  and  especially  the  Moravians,  inspired  by 
their  passionate  leader  Zinzendorf,  were  most  effective  in  this 
work  before  the  dawn  of  modern  missions.  From  Lully  down 
Mohammedans  have  been  the  hardest  to  convert.  Heresy  and 
apostasy  from  koranolatry  is  here  treason,  but  Islam  can  not 
be  regarded  as  the  mental  and  moral  cul-de-sac;  it  is  often 
thought  to  be,  for  there  is  progress  in  it  or  beyond  it. 

The  Catholic  Church  was  stimulated  by  the  Protestant 
movement  to  renewed  activity,  and  Xavier  roused  new  zeal 
and  enthusiasm  and  sacrificed  himself  with  passionate  fervor 
and  love,  but  never  mastered  any  of  the  Eastern  languages 
among  which  his  chief  work  was  done  and  was  often  without 
an  interpreter.  Protestants  have  still  much  to  learn  from  the 
elaborate  and  well-developed  methods  of  the  Roman  propa- 
ganda founded  in  1622,  which  sought  to  diffuse  Catholicism 
in  all  parts  of  the  world  and  has  from  the  first  had  the  great 
advantage  of  unity.  Most  Christian  countries  in  Europe  and 
most  large  denominations  in  America  have  missions  among 
Gentile  peoples,  and  the  names  of  many  pioneers  in  new  lands 
are  now  household  words.  In  this  country  an  Indian  college 
was  early  erected  at  Harvard,  and  provision  was  later  made 
at  Dartmouth  for  the  Christian  nurture  of  the  native  races. 
It  is  a  pathetic  fact  that  the  first  Bible  printed  in  America, 
in  1663,  was  Eliot's  translation  into  the  Natic,  a  dialect  of 
the  Mohican — a  tongue  which  became  extinct  by  the  death 
of  the  last  of  the  tribe,  whose  story  Cooper  has  told  in  his 


730  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

famous  novel,  and  which  probably  no  man  now  living  can 
read. 

Droysen  declares  that  the  highest  achievement  which  antiquity  in 
its  own  strength  has  been  able  to  attain  is  the  fall  of  heathenism. 
Even  when  infidels  were  closing  in  upon  Christendom  in  the  days 
of  Charles  Martel,  monks  were  leavening,  if  not  their  Saracen  ene- 
mies on  the  south,  nevertheless  the  wild  northern  tribes.  When 
Clovis  and  Valdemir  were  converted,  "  Russian  peasants  were  driven 
into  the  Dnieper  by  Cossack  whips  and  baptized  by  force."  When 
the  revival  of  classical  learning  brought  the  Church  into  closer  contact 
with  the  original  Scriptures,  it  also  gave  it  a  taste  for  acquiring 
Oriental  languages  and  understanding  the  spirit  of  other  races.  Mis- 
sion work  has,  of  course,  been  closely  connected  with  politics,  trades, 
and  explorations  in  ways  that  have,  despite  some  great  exceptions, 
made  each  on  the  whole  helpful  to  the  other.  Now  missionary  ideals 
are  cosmic,  and  include  all  mankind.  Steam  and  electricity  have 
made  the  world  one,  and  the  ideal  is  to  interlace  all  lands  into  a 
divine  confederacy.^ 

The  study  of  missions  has  almost  attained  the  rank  of  a  theological 
discipline.  The  vast  literature,  with  lectureships  and  chairs  and  its 
study  in  colleges,  seems  developing  a  type  of  manhood  that  is  admira- 
ble for  its  heroism,  zeal,  and  fervor.  The  grand  summary,  according 
to  a  recent  authority,'  shows  that  there  are  now  558  missionary  so- 
cieties in  the  world  with  an  income  of  $19,500,000;  6,027  ordained 
missionaries,  and,  including  women,  physicians,  and  laymen,  a  total 
of  18,164;  78,350  native  helpers;  with  a  total  number  of  communi- 
cant and  non-communicant  native  Christians  of  all  ages  of  4,514,592. 
Mission  work  includes  94  universities  and  colleges,  with  35,537  pupils ; 
375  theological  and  training  schools,  with  11,965  pupils;  879  boarding 
and  high  schools  and  seminaries,  with  85,091  pupils;  18,742  elementary 
or  village  day  schools,  with  904,442  pupils.  The  Bible  has  been  trans- 
lated, in  whole  or  in  part,  into  516  languages,  and  the  entire  Bible 
into  99  languages.  Mission  publishing  houses  issue  an  annual  total 
of  381,000,000  papers,  and  10,800,000  copies  of  various  tracts  and 
publications  of  all  kinds.  The  total  number  of  missionary  magazines 
and  papers  is  397,  with  a  circulation  of  250,000.  There  are  now  379 
hospitals  and  783  dispensaries,  treating  a  total  of  2,347,780  patients. 

*  For  ampler  statement  of  this  and  the  next  few  paragraphs,  see  Modern 
Missions  in  the  East :  Their  Methods,  Successes,  and  Limitations,  by  E.  A.  Law- 
rence, D.D.  New  York,  1895.  This  ardent  and  able  writer  resigned  a  pastorate, 
and  at  his  own  expense  and  independently  of  any  organization,  spent  two  years  in 
actively  studying  this  subject  in  all  Oriental  lands,  coming  home  to  devote  himself 
with  new  insight  and  ardor  to  the  work  of  city  missions  and  poor  relief  at  home, 
only  to  die  in  1893. 

'  Centennial  Survey  of  Foreign  Missions,  by  James  S.  Dennis,  D.  D.  New 
York,  1902.  See  also  his  Christian  Missions  and  Social  Progress,  2  vols.,  New 
York,  1897. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES   AND   THEIR   TREATMENT       73 ^ 

There  are  247  orphanages,  foundhng  asylums,  and  homes  for  infants 
in  missionary  lands,  with  16,916  inmates ;  100  hospitals  and  asylums 
for  lepers  and  homes  for  their  untainted  children ;  30  schools  for 
blind  and  deaf-mutes;  156  opium  refuges,  homes  for  widows,  converts, 
insane  asylums,  and  institutions  for  rescue  work;  and  118  miscella- 
neous guilds  and  societies.  There  are  between  30  and  40  missionary 
ships  and  steamers;  about  100  training  institutions  in  Christian  lands, 
not  including  theological  schools  and  seminaries.  There  are  now 
51  American  missionary  organizations — 14  in  Germany,  14  in  Hol- 
land, 2  or  3  each  in  France,  Denmark,  Norway  and  Sweden,  besides 
many  isolated  missions,  with  over  600,000  native  communicants,  in 
non-Christian  lands.  Five  hundred  million,  or  about  one-third  of  the 
human  race,  are  at  least  nominally  Christian.  Among  these  are  the 
Scandinavians  and  English,  who  have  multiplied  fivefold  in  the  cen- 
tury; the  Russians,  who  have  grown  threefold;  the  Germans,  two 
and  one-half.  The  wealth  of  Christian  races  has  fully  kept  pace  with 
their  numerical  growth.  Christians  have  about  doubled  within  the 
past  century,  and  these  are  the  colonizing,  spreading  races,  so  that 
the  future  is  in  the  hands  of  Christian  peoples.^ 

J.  S.  Dennis  (in  his  Centennial  Survey  of  Foreign  Missions,  New 
York,  1902)  compiles  the  following  table  for  the  United  States: 


Name. 


Income. 


Date  of  first 
organization. 


Number  of 
societies. 


1.  Denominational : 

Baptist: 

Union 

Conference 

Other  societies  (7)    

Brethren 

Christian 

Church  of  God 

Church  of  the  Disciples 

Church  of  the  New  Jerusalem 

Congregational 

Episcopal 

Evangelical 

Friends 

German  Evangelical 

Lutheran 

Methodist  (14)    

Moravian , 

Presbyterian 

Reformed 

Seventh-Day  Adventist  (i).. . . 

Unitarian 

Universalist 

Total  (93) 

2.  Interdenominational  (11)  . .    .. 

3.  Miscellaneous  and  special  (23). . 


$1, 


259.504 

44.965 

248,559 

95.744 

17,822 

1,000 

254.070 

5,708 

999,202 

932,637 

215,828 

41,498 

33,906 

227,500 

!, 213.626 
12,251 

[,731.495 

245,000 

37,681 

78,962 

62,439 


'8,761,397 

1,062,582 

483,702 


I814 
1833 

1853 
1886 
1890 
1875 

18IO 

1835 
1876 
1873 
1867 
184I 
I819 
1787 
1836 
1832 
1887 
1825 
1800 


i8i6 
1863 


5 
3 
9 
4 
I 
I 
2 
I 
4 
5 
4 
I 
I 
13 
15 
I 

17 

4 
2 

I 

3 


97 
13 
28 


*  See  Short  History  of  Christian  of  Missions,  by  George  Smith,  Edinburgh. 


732  THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

ENGLAND. 


Name. 


Income. 


Date  of  first 
organization. 


Number  of 
societies. 


1.  Denominational : 

Baptist 

Church  of  England 

Congregational 

Methodist 

Moravian 

Presbyterian 

Unitarian 

Total 

2.  Interdenominational  (34) 

3.  Miscellaneous  and  special  (48) 


1493,720 

4.404.735 

131.485 

1,093,645 

102,940 

156,910 

24,295 


^6,407,730 
3,407,690 
1,957,700 


1792 
1649 
1836 
1813 
1 741 
1847 
1825 


1795 
1733 


5 
37 
3 
8 
2 

3 

I 


59 
37 

53 


From  the  map  of  distribution  of  mission  societies,  according  to 
fields,  we  find  that  India  leads,  with  114  societies;  Africa  has  104; 
China,  yy ;  Central  and  South  America,  39 ;  West  Indies,  33 ;  Malay- 
sia, 24;  Turkey  and  Australasia,  18  each;  Mexico  and  Syria,  14  each; 
Oceanica  and  Ceylon,  1 1  each ;  Burma  and  Canada,  9  each ;  Mada- 
gascar, 7;  and  Persia,  4.  Territorially,  the  portions  of  the  habitable 
globe  totally  unreached  are  Tibet,  Afghanistan,  portions  of  Central 
Africa  and  Central  South  America,  and  many  Pacific  islands.  If  we 
consider  population  instead  of  territory,  we  find  there  are  very  many 
unoccupied  sections  in  all  the  denser  lands. 

The  Student  Volunteer  Movement  for  Foreign  Missions  was 
planned  in  1886,  but  organized  in  1888  at  Mount  Hermon.  It  aims: 
(i)  To  awaken  among  all  students  of  the  United  States  and  Canada 
interest  in  foreign  missions;  (2)  to  enroll  enough  to  meet  demands; 
(3)  to  help  those  intending  to  go  to  foreign  fields  to  prepare  for  their 
life  work,  and  secure  their  aid  in  awakening  interest  in  the  home 
churches;  (4)  to  arouse  a  sense  of  responsibility  in  ministers  and  lay 
workers  at  home.  It  has  done  valuable  service  in  promoting  a  sys- 
tematic study  of  missions  among  students.  A  special  secretary.  Rev. 
H.  P.  Beach,  now  supervises  309  classes,  with  an  average  attendance 
of  4,212,  for  whom  text-books  have  been  prepared  and  libraries 
begun  in  many  colleges.  A  kindred  British  movement  has  been  be- 
gun, and  others  have  followed  in  the  chief  countries  of  Europe.  The 
World's  Student  Christian  Federation  was  formed  in  Sweden  in  1895, 
and  federates  all  national  evangelical  student  movements.  It  aims 
to  unite  students,  collect  data  of  all  kinds,  and  to  deepen  interest. 

Concerning  the  attitude  of  missionaries  toward  ethnic  religions, 
the  sanest  and  most  advanced  statement  I  can  find  is  that  of  Dr. 
J.  L.  Barton,  secretary  of  the  American  Board,  who  believes  that 
every  missionary  is  "  eager  to  find  and  emphasize  the  excellences 
that  he  found  in  the  religions  of  the  people  to  whom  he  was  sent." 
Many,  he  declares,  search  the  sacred  writings  of  the  races  with  whom 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND   THEIR   TREATMENT       733 

they  labor,  to  prove  to  them  that  they  are  not  living  up  to  the  best 
they  have,  sometimes  taking  texts  and  teaching  the  heart  of  the  pagan 
audiences  by  showing  to  them  their  own  unworthiness  as  measured 
by  their  own  standard.  But  he  goes  on  to  say  that  they  do,  and 
should  hasten  to  add  that  Christianity  is  better.  There  is,  however, 
abundant  reason  to  fear  that  this  spirit  of  sympathetic  appreciation 
is  still  too  rare.  But  yet  rarer  is  the  reserve  that  withholds  the  higher 
truth  until  sufficient  preparation  has  been  made  for  its  reception  in 
the  native  soil. 

Hopkins '  says  the  missionaries  "  presented  Christianity  as  a  se- 
vere legal  Jewish  religion."  "  In  their  rigorous  Sabbatarian  view  of 
the  Lord's  Day,  in  their  desire  to  enforce  a  Maine  liquor  law,  and  in 
some  other  matters,  they  have  attempted  to  infringe  upon  the  natural 
rights  of  men  and  have  reproduced  in  native  eyes  the  detested  taboo 
system,  the  nightmare  from  which  the  nation  escaped  in  1820.  They 
have  been  wrong  in  their  hothouse  plan  of  forcing  Christianity  upon 
an  unprepared  people;  endeavoring  to  make  them  run  before  they 
could  walk  or  even  stand  alone;  pouring  water  out  of  buckets  on 
small-mouthed  vials,  and  by  using  the  methods  of  secular  punishments 
and  espionage,  converting  the  nation  into  hypocrites  instead  of  Chris- 
tians." The  legislation  they  have  used  has  been  repressive;  they  long 
set  their  face  against  the  teaching  of  the  English  language,  and  in 
many  cases,  although  with  striking  exceptions,  their  missionaries  had 
personal  disqualifications.  They  have  been  mostly  Puritan  Yankees, 
and  their  churches  are  plain  naked  buildings,  the  congregation  sit- 
ting through  the  whole  service,  taking  no  part  in  prayer  or  hymn. 
The  Catholic  Church,  which  came  in  later,  enlisted  very  many  of 
the  native  faculties  which  Protestantism  did  not  touch.  The  former 
encourages  the  natives  to  come  in  whatever  dress  they  have ;  urges 
all  to  kneel,  stand,  read;  and  has  sent  a  class  of  missionaries  of 
whom  all  speak  with  respect.  Protestant  missionaries  taught  fiercely 
and  insisted  on  a  severe  blue  law  code  of  morals,  which  the  native 
temperament  did  not  resist  but  evaded,  and  which  has  neither  devel- 
oped the  crude  but  strong  ideas  of  right  and  wrong  and  other  native 
virtues  and  industries  in  the  men,  nor  maintained  fecundity  in  the 
women.  Men  must  learn  to  listen  to  conscience  and  treat  the  disease 
and  not  its  symptoms.  They  must  teach  life  and  not  the  subtleties 
of  theology;  convert  individuals  and  not  masses;  and  not  be  too 
impatient  of  showing  rapid  and  immediate  results. 

Lieut.-Colonel  Maekler-Ferryman  gives  a  sickening  account  of 
the  long  competition  of  Protestant,  Catholic,  and  Mohammedan  mis- 
sionaries to  win  the  court  of  the  Uganda  chiefs.  Mutesa  and  his  suc- 
cessor Mwanga.  In  1876  Stanley  had  suggested  this  as  a  great  mis- 
sion-field, and  Mackay's  work  here  is  well  known.  Like  the  Japanese, 
they  desired  to  renounce  their  old  beliefs  and  to  select  a  religion  that 

'Hawaii:  Its  Past,  Present,  and  Future,  by  Manley  Hopkins.  New  York, 
1869. 


734  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

would  suit  them  best.  Had  the  two  sections  of  the  Christian  world 
not  quarreled  one  of  the  most  marvelous  conversions  of  an  entire 
population  the  world  ever  saw  would  have  occurred  here.  The  Cath- 
olic and  Protestant  faction  warred  on  each  other,  and  many  were 
slaughtered,  till  the  latter  prince  denounced  all  alien  faiths  and  threat- 
ened both  Mohammedan  and  Christian  with  extermination.  In  1889 
the  Arabs  wers  masters.  Later  the  king  became  a  Catholic  and 
sought  to  divide  the  land  and  offices  between  the  three  rehgions. 
Then  a  plot  was  laid  to  exterminate  the  Protestants.  At  last,  in  1900, 
Lugard,  a  Protestant,  backed  by  the  British  arms  and  a  Christian 
company,  pacified  the  factions.  With  the  triumph  of  English  influ- 
ence, the  Protestant  missionaries  made  very  rapid  progress.  In  1902 
there  were  two  hundred  churches,  with  congregations  estimated  at 
20,000,  and  2,408  native  teachers.  Catholic  missions  have  also  pros- 
pered. Now  the  country  is  Christian,  although,  but  for  the  tact  of  a 
Lugard,  "  in  all  probability  the  Christians  in  Uganda  would  have 
exterminated  themselves."  The  writer  asks  in  conclusion,  "  Is  it  the 
role  of  the  teacher  of  religion  to  prepare  the  way  for  annexation 
following  after  bloodshed  ?  Why  should  not  missionaries  restrict  their 
work  in  Africa  to  the  enormous  tracts  of  pagan  countries  that  have 
been  brought  under  the  direct  jurisdiction  of  the  several  European 
powers  instead  of  endeavoring  to  rush  ahead  in  search  of  fresh 
ground?  Yet  Great  Britain  has  hitherto  considered  it  her  duty  to 
get  missionaries  out  of  difficulties,  and  will  doubtless  continue  to 
consider  it  her  duty  to  do  so.  For  that  reason  missionaries  should 
be  chary  of  involving  their  country."  ^ 

If  there  is  ever  a  science  of  missions,  it  must  be  based  on 
the  same  kind  of  study  but  yet  more  detailed  and  psychologic, 
as  that  of  which  the  work  of  Lawrence  is  such  a  stimulating 
and  suggestive  beginning.  Mission  work  must  not  be  all  proc- 
lamation, but  must  carry  on  the  work  to  results  and  have 
the  ideal  of  independence.  It  must  teach  men  to  count  three 
before  talking  to  them  of  the  trinity;  it  must  grapple  with 
the  Chinese  language,  "  which  has  four  thousand  words  for 
vices  and  passions  and  none  for  spiritual  graces  " ;  the  gospel 
must  first  be  presented  to  the  understanding  because  that  is 
the  only  way  to  the  heart;  it  must  be  disinterested,  and  not 
always  study  what  we  get  for  what  we  give;  it  must  not  be 
sustained  because  it  creates  a  native  demand  for  foreign  goods 
sometimes  computed  as  averaging  so  much  a  year  for  each 
missionary.  There  should  be  for  each  candidate  for  the  field, 
first  a  physical  examination  and  certificate  of  health  as  for  an 

*  Christianity  in  Uganda.     Jour,  of  the  African  Soc,  April,  1903. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES   AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       735 

arctic  expedition;  robust  common  sense;  a  good  deal  of 
power  in  learning  foreign  and  uncouth  languages  to  the  point 
of  mastery;  an  enthusiasm  that  often  greatly  quickens  talent, 
and  a  far  greater  degree  of  freedom  in  the  field  for  all  such 
men  than  they  now  enjoy.  Special  seminaries  for  missionary 
instruction  are  needed  as  well  as  far  more  trained  university 
men;  careful  and  sympathetic  study  of  comparative  religions 
and  the  philosophy  and,  perhaps  still  more,  the  psychology  of 
belief;  and  as  much  medical  and  handicraft  knowledge  as 
possible,  so  that  missionary  work  be  given  greater  breadth, 
complexity,  closer  relation  with  home  and  personal  life. 

Every  novice  ought  to  have  a  manual  of  condensed  mis- 
sionary experiences  as  his  vade  mecum.  No  history  of  mis- 
sions gives  this,  but  most  are  taken  up  with  statistics  of  the 
number  of  converts  and  sentimental  panegyrics  of  the  saving 
power  of  the  gospel.  The  whole  burden  of  heathendom  should 
press  upon  the  newcomer  in  a  strange  land,  so  that  friends 
seem  far.  He  should  serve  a  prolonged  apprenticeship  under 
experienced  masters,  who  should  at  least  prevent  him  from 
learning  three  hundred  Chinese  characters  upside  down,  as  did 
one.  During  the  probationary  period  the  language  must  be 
well  learned,  so  that  natives  may  not  pray,  as  one  did,  for 
mercy  upon  their  linguistic  blunders.  Soul  and  body  must 
be  laboriously  acclimated.  The  educational  work  should 
generally  be  increased  relatively  to  evangelization  as  a  dis- 
cipline for  the  missionaries  alone ;  were  there  no  results,  these 
stations  would  be  worth  while. 

The  proper  attitude  toward  heathen  customs  and  religions  is  one 
of  the  gravest  questions,  and  the  heart  of  the  educator  sinks  to  see 
how  small  consideration  these  seem  entitled  to  receive  even  at  the 
hands  of  the  most  liberal  and  enlightened  writers.  A  few  recommend 
the  reading  of  a  very  limited  number  of  the  standard  Indian  and  even 
Chinese  works,  but  for  most  the  conception  of  a  rushing  and  ag- 
gressive emotional  campaign  is  thought  better.  Dr.  J.  Thomson ' 
says:  "In  west  South  Africa  the  missionaries  pursue  with  astonish- 
ing blunders  the  most  impracticable  and  visionary  methods  and  ex- 
pect a  Pentecostal  awakening  from  the  inherent  virtue  of  the  great 
truths  they  preach  instead  of  preaching  what  can  be  comprehended." 
In  general,  this  criticism  might  be  passed  upon  the  missions  in  all 

1  Jour.  Anthrop.  Inst.,  1886. 


73^  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

lands.  Many  conceive  it  their  first  duty  to  upset  native  faith.  "  What 
is  your  attitude,"  I  asked  of  a  missionary  returned  from  twenty-five 
years  in  China,  "  toward  native  Confucianism  and  Buddhism?"  "  Our 
first  duty,"  he  replied,  "  is  to  exterminate  them  root  and  branch, 
make  a  tabula  rasa,  because  only  then  can  we  begin  to  lay  the  true 
foundations."  This  is  psycho-pedagogic  barbarism  and  brutality.  Only 
the  most  ignorant  and  bigoted  do  not  now  recognize  the  sympathy 
of  religions  or  realize  that  there  are  many  psychic  and  ethical  roots, 
trunks,  and  even  branches  that  should  be  preserved  and  grafted  on  to. 
To  upset  any  religion  is  not  only  psychological  wastefulness,  but 
generally  involves  the  gravest  moral  dangers.  The  whole  soul  of 
the  religious  propagandist  must  first  of  all  be  thoroughly  vernacular- 
ized,  although  without  loss  to  the  positive  matter. 

The  variety  of  work  in  the  mission  field  is  amazing.  Every  prac- 
tical and  manual  facility  is  helpful ;  preaching,  organizing  power, 
tact,  scholarship,  knowledge  of  human  nature,  and  all  this  differs 
vastly  according  to  the  race  and  degree  of  civilization  of  the  people. 
Adaptiveness  or  the  power  to  be  all  things  to  all  men,  love  of  rough- 
ing it,  the  necessity  of  first  civilizing  and  then  Christianizing  or  basing 
evangelism  on  the  alphabet  and  education,  is  the  pedagogic  way,  and 
the  reverse  method  has  only  a  logical  sanction.  Disease  and  religious 
thought  are  so  closely  combined  in  primitive  minds  that  every  mission- 
ary should  have  a  medical  education,  although  he  should  not  shrink 
into  a  mere  doctor.  The  apex  of  the  entering  wedge  of  the  Catholic 
mission  by  which  it  breaks  its  first  way  is  its  ritual,  confession,  and 
catechism ;  the  Protestant's  is  practical  life  and  the  need  of  a  divine 
suffering  Saviour.  Some  missionaries  have  worked  a  lifetime  and 
won  hardly  a  single  real  convert,  but  this  is  what  gives  inspiration 
and  encouragement.  I  have  no  disposition  to  either  deify  or  abuse 
missionaries,  but  am  saddened  that,  although  all  reforms  involving 
practical  applications  of  psychology  are  slow,  the  last  few  centuries 
have  seen  so  little  advance  in  these  respects.  It  is  of  the  utmost  con- 
sequence that  natives  should  not  be  denationalized  or  their  usefulness 
among  their  own  people  impaired ;  that  none  should  be  unfitted  for 
home  life ;  that  churches  should  become  self-supporting  as  soon  as 
possible;  and  that  it  should  be  borne  in  mind  with  great  races  that 
forests  and  not  annual  plants  are  being  cultivated.  Mission  work  is 
far  more  comprehensive  than  home  work. 

Many  have  insisted  on  teaching  the  English  language,  but  the 
problem  how  far  is  a  grave  one ;  others  have  insisted  on  Hebrew  or 
the  classical  languages ;  some  on  teaching  indigenous  religious  and 
secular  literature ;  some  encourage  the  best  students  to  finish  their 
training  in  America  or  Europe.  Problems  like  these  require  the 
largest,  most  statesmanly  thought.  Another  class  of  questions  is 
what  words  shall  be  used  for  sin,  heaven,  soul,  God,  baptism,  church, 
and  scores  more ;  shall  translations  be  literal,  or  free ;  what  is  the 
relation  between  theology  and  the  plain  Bible  without  note  or  com- 
ment— these  are  problems  that  require  a  rare  combination  of  philolog- 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       737 

ical  knowledge  and  common  sense.  There  certainly  ought  to  be  a 
chair  on  missions  in  every  important  theological  school  in  Christen- 
dom. There  should  be  a  high-toned  missionary  journal  far  above  the 
cheap  mixture  of  alleged  facts  and  statistics  with  cheaper  sentimental- 
ity. There  should  be  plenty  of  opportunity  for  studying  comparative 
religions  and  each  of  the  great  religions  sympathetically.  In  the  great 
religious  school  centering  in  the  Hbrary  and  collections  of  the  Musce 
Guimet  in  Paris,  there  are  elaborate  presentations  of  non-Christian  re- 
ligious ceremonials  by  native  priests  in  costume,  and  students  and 
visitors  try  to  feel  the  sentiments  and  think  the  thoughts  of  native 
worshipers.  This  noble  institution  supplies  in  an  ideal  form  one  of 
the  ingredients  of  missionary,  and  even  theological,  education  indi- 
cated here.  There  should  also  be  some  historical  and  philosophical 
teaching  concerning  pantheism,  agnosticism,  the  various  forms  of 
skepticism. 

No  race,  says  Emile  Barbe,'  has  manifested  any  such  aversion  to 
what  the  Occident  terms  civilization  as  the  Chinese,  and  yet  centuries 
ago  Catholicism  gained  very  many  believers  among  them.  Instead 
of  being  a  "  negligible  quantity,"  the  Chinese,  if  Europeanized,  would 
create  an  economic  and  perhaps  a  culture  crisis  that  would  be  beyond 
all  precedent.  It  is  a  calamity  that  in  France  colonial  questions  are 
the  exclusive  appanage  of  politicians  and  dominated  by  parliamentary 
combinations.  Who  knows  but  that,  if  progress  be  truly  ethnographic, 
the  yellow  race  may  not  outstrip  the  white?  W.  F.  Lord  has  lately 
urged  that  our  civilization  must  eventually  be  replaced  by  that  of  a 
race  less  overrefined  but  more  vigorous.  It  is  certainly  rash  to  say 
that  there  is  no  salvation  outside  the  white  race.  To  reduce  necessi- 
ties is  practically  equivalent  to  the  increase  in  the  sources  of  their 
supply,  and  certainly  superiority  of  evolution  is  not  measured  by  the 
increase  of  wants  and  needs.  The  politics  of  the  future  must  not  aim 
at  suppressing  Asiatic  competition.  It  is  idle  to  separate,  by  a  Chinese 
wall,  this  race  from  our  own,  for  that  would  be  not  only  to  reestablish 
the  ancient  class  distinctions,  but  to  make  them  more  obnoxious  on 
the  industrial  as  well  as  the  social  plane. 

There  is  every  indication  that  the  mission  problem  has  not  been 
solved  in  China,  that  land  where  "  silks  were  worn  while  the  Britons 
still  wore  skins,"  and  even  that  missionary  ignorance  and  blunders 
are  largely  responsible  for  present  disturbances  in  that  country. 
Japan,  which  never  permitted  an  invading  army  and  was  long  under 
the  influence  of  China,  is  now  psychologically  the  open  door  of  en- 
trance. China  is  not  only  the  home  of  one  of  the  largest  races,  but  one 
of  the  greatest  colonizers,  of  whom  General  Grant  said  after  his  visit, 
"  that  while  progress  in  the  Mississippi  Valley  might  be  that  of  an  ava- 
lanche, in  the  valley  of  the  Yang-tse  it  could  only  be  that  of  the  gla- 
cier "  ;  and  Napoleon  declared  that  when  China  moved,  it  would  change 

^  Le  Lutte  ethnographique  et  ^conomique  des  Blancs  et  des  Jaunes.     Revue 

Scientifique,  vol.  lii,  1893,  p.  513. 
86 


73 8  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

the  face  of  the  world.  A  prominent  Californian  lately  said  that  "  we 
must  drive  them  out  or  they  will  drive  us  out,  for  they  have  all  of  our 
virtues  and  none  of  our  vices."  In  all  psychic  respects  they  are  our 
antipodes;  their  speech,  religion,  temper,  and  customs  are  still  essen- 
tially unknown.  Their  self-righteousness  destroys  the  sense  of  sin 
and  quenches  all  such  religious  longings  as  characterize  India.  Their 
patriotism  and  conservatism  make  them  hate  innovations  as  insulting, 
treasonable,  impious,  and  dangerous. 

Henry  Norman  ^  says  that  the  missionaries  insist  that  foreign  in- 
fluence, especially  of  a  moral  kind,  has  declined  to  nothing  in  China; 
that  heathenism  and  immorality  are  both  increasing;  that  China  is 
learning  evil  far  faster  than  good;  and  that  the  country  never  can 
be  Christianized.  He  asserts  a  growing  epidemic  of  ill-will  of  this 
fourth  of  the  world  toward  the  rest  of  it.  "  Foreign  missionary  effort 
in  China  has  been  productive  of  far  more  harm  than  good.  Instead 
of  serving  as  a  link  between  Chinese  and  foreigners,  the  mission- 
aries have  formed  a  growing  obstacle."  The  results  of  missionary 
enterprise  are  summed  up  as  having  produced  "  for  the  Chinese  Gov- 
ernment perpetual  foreign  coercion;  for  the  Chinese  nation,  an  in- 
cessant ferment  of  angry  passions  and  a  continuous  education  in 
ferocity  against  Christianity;  for  the  foreign  missionaries,  pillage 
and  massacre  at  intervals,  followed  by  pecuniary  indemnification — 
an  indefinite  struggle  with  the  hatred  of  a  whole  nation,  compensated 
by  a  certain  number  of  genuine  converts  to  their  faith."  "  The 
Roman  Catholic  missionary  goes  to  China  once  for  all ;  he  adopts 
native  dress,  lives  on  native  food,  inhabits  a  native  house,  supports 
himself  upon  the  most  meager  allowance  from  home,  and  is  an  ex- 
ample of  the  characteristics  which  are  as  essential  to  the  Eastern 
idea  of  priesthood  as  to  the  Western — poverty,  chastity,  and  obedi- 
ence. .  .  .  He  meets  native  superstitions  half-way  by  amalgamating 
the  worship  of  ancestors,  which  is  a  vital  part  of  every  Chinaman's 
belief,  to  the  worship  of  the  saints;  and  by  teaching  his  native  con- 
verts a  prayer  for  the  Emperor  of  China,  which  concludes  with  the 
petition  '  that  he  may  be  preserved  to  a  happy  old  age,  and  the  pros- 
perity of  his  empire  prolonged  to  the  end,  that  they  may  later  enjoy 
with  him  the  eternal  peace.'  "  Norman,  an  ardent  member  of  the  Eng- 
lish Church  and  predisposed  against  everything  Catholic,  conceived 
great  and  growing  respect  for  the  missionaries  of  the  Roman  Church, 
and  less  for  the  Protestant  missionary.  He  found  him  too  fond  of 
comfort,  enjoying  not  only  wife  and  children,  but  servants,  foreign 
food,  with  a  stipend  that  often  increased  with  every  addition  to  his 
family,  jealous  of  Protestant  rivals,  etc.  Protestantism  has  made  the 
great  mistake  of  distributing  the  whole  Bible  in  Chinese,  as  much 
of  it  is  held  up  to  public  ridicule.  In  Shanghai  there  were  seven 
missions,  representing  seven  denominations ;  seven  Sunday  sermons, 
seven   daily  prayer-meetings,   seven   sets   of   schools,   seven   sets   of 


*  The  Peoples  and  Politics  of  the  Far  East.     New  York,  1895. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES   AND    THEIR   TREATMENT       739 

buildings,  seven  sets  of  expenses,  seven  hymn-books,  and  four  or  five 
different  versions  of  the  Bible.  "  The  Chinese  themselves  bracket 
missionaries  and  opium  together  as  the  twin  curses  of  the  country." 
While  there  have  been  a  few^  Protestant  missionaries  of  high  charac- 
ter and  scholarship,  many  are  "  ignorant  declaimers  in  bad  Chinese," 
and  few  have  attained  the  sinological  scholarship  which  is  the  only 
open  door  of  success  in  this  country.  While  some  of  the  converts 
are  genuine  and  sincere,  others  adopt  Christianity  as  a  profession 
which  brings  them  new  activities  and  revenue,  and  still  others  only 
lose  native  virtues  to  acquire  foreign  vices  in  their  place. 

Among  the  most  remarkable  travels  of  modern  times  are  those 
of  Mrs.  J.  F.  Bishop.^  This  lady  organized  an  expedition  of  her 
own  and  penetrated  many  hundred  miles,  where  no  European  has 
ever  traveled,  into  the  heart  of  China.  Most  of  her  trip  was  by  boat, 
but  much  by  sedan  chair.  She  assumed  the  Chinese  costume,  and 
prints  one  hundred  and  sixty  new  photographs  taken  by  herself.  The 
hardships  she  endured  were  almost  unprecedented.  Everywhere  she 
encountered  bitter  prejudice  against  foreigners,  which  often  broke  out 
into  insults  and  sometimes  into  attacks,  one  or  two  of  which  almost 
cost  her  her  life.  Her  volumes  are  extremely  objective  and  are  en- 
tirely devoted  to  her  own  observations,  although  she  is  very  familiar 
with  literature  upon  China.  Perhaps  the  work  will  be  most  of  all  valu- 
able to  those  interested  in  business  and  traffic,  although  the  anthropol- 
ogist will  be  a  close  second.  Her  descriptions  of  foods,  costumes, 
occupations,  and  mode  of  life,  the  shrines,  curious  buildings,  the  modes 
of  navigation  and  bargaining,  the  crops,  etc.,  leave  little  to  be  de- 
sired. 

She  holds  that  the  Roman  Catholic  missionaries,  although  handi- 
capped by  the  exorbitant  indemnity  for  the  damages  of  Sze  Chuan  in 
1895,  the  claim  of  the  hierarchy  to  be  placed  on  a  level  with  the 
mandarins  in  dignity  and  reverence,  the  non-admission  of  heathen  to 
their  church  services,  and  the  last  rites  of  the  Church,  and,  like  the  Prot- 
estant missionaries,  growing  unpopular,  are  nevertheless  more  appre- 
ciated for  their  celibacy,  poverty,  and  asceticism  than  the  Protestants, 
and  declares  that  every  religious  teacher  save  one,  who  has  made  his 
mark  in  the  East,  has  been  an  ascetic,  because  the  Orientals  always 
begin  to  seek  righteousness  by  self-mortification.  Lonely  men  who 
have  left  all  home  ties  and  devoted  themselves  for  life  to  the  people 
among  whom  they  live  and  expect  to  die  are  contrasted  favorably  by 
the  Chinese  with  most  Protestant  ministers,  who  live  in  comfort  in 
what  to  them  seems  luxury  in  treaty  ports  with  their  families, 
going  home  every  five  or  seven  years,  and  who  always  intend  to  pass 
their  old  age  and  to  die  at  their  old  homes.^ 

There  are  2.488  Protestant  workers,  including  wives,  and  80,632 


'The  YanfT-ze  Valley  and  Beyond.      2  vols..  New  York,  1900. 
2  Vol.  i,  p.   152  ft  seq. 


740  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

native  communicants,  but  Christianity  is  generally  felt  to  be  a  de- 
structive and  socially  disintegrating  power.  Since  the  war  with 
Japan,  however,  interest  in  the  "  Jesus  religion  "  has  increased,  and 
there  are  very  many  inquirers.  The  missionary's  knowledge  of  the 
Chinese  language  is  generally  very  imperfect,  but  the  methods  of  all 
the  denominations  are  so  similar  that  the  Chinese  see  little  distinction. 
Their  lives  are  true,  patient,  and  devoted,  and  are  more  eloquent  than 
their  tongues.  The  fame  of  their  pay  from  home  without  trouble  or 
diminution  is  admired.  Baptism  is  generally  regarded  as  a  complete 
confession  of  faith  and  a  break  with  heathenism.  There  are  many 
annual  relapses,  and  those  who  are  employed  by  the  missionaries  as 
servants,  gate-keepers,  etc.,  are  least  likely  to  do  so.  The  native 
Christian  Chinese  are  more  capable  of  self-help,  but  it  is  these  who 
must  Christianize  China.  The  obstacles  are  the  natural  vanity  and 
contempt  of  everything  foreign  as  barbarian,  the  immense  influence 
of  Confucius,  the  difficulty  of  the  alphabet,  and  the  absence  as  yet  of 
a  vocabulary  that  shall  express  Christian  ideas  and  not  be  offensive, 
universal  education  in  indigenous  directions,  and  the  universal  an- 
cestor worship.  From  a  period  of  suspicion,  eight  years  of  African 
travel  have  caused  Mrs.  Bishop  to  believe  in  the  general  efficacy  of 
missions.  She  was  influenced,  however,  more  by  the  great  need  and 
the  hopelessness  of  native  systems  than  by  the  good  missionaries  have 
done,  and  is  convinced  that  there  is  no  resurrection  or  power  in  the 
natives'  faiths,  which,  noble  as  they  were  at  the  start,  have  decayed 
past  all  hope.  In  a  few  esoteric  systems  there  are  seekers  for  better 
things,  those  who  abstain  from  current  evils  and  exhort  chastity, 
good  works,  the  conservation  of  the  mental  energies  by  rest  and  re- 
flection. The  progress  heretofore  made  is  almost  entirely  among  the 
lower  classes,  and  the  literati  who  are  the  leaders  in  China,  where 
reverence  for  letters  is  phenomenal,  have  not  been  reached.  The  many 
missionaries  always  incapacitated  or  home  on  a  furlough,  or  the 
considerable  proportion  of  the  total  number  who  must  spend  a  few 
years  in  learning  the  language,  cripple  the  work.  Almost  none  are 
able  to  converse  with  the  learned  men  upon  their  own  level,  but  many 
are  content  with  a  limited  command  of  the  colloquial  speech  of  the 
coolies.  The  Chinese  language  ought  to  be  begun  at  home  under 
competent  native  teachers,  whether  one  is  going  to  China  to  trade 
or  to  preach.  Any  unmarried  woman  who  does  not  live  under  her 
father's  roof  is  exposed  not  only  to  suspicion,  but  to  assault  upon  the 
street.  A  uniform,  at  least  for  woman  missionaries,  is  recommended 
that  should  indicate  the  class  to  which  she  belongs.  In  no  country 
do  violations  of  etiquette  lead  so  often  to  dangerous  outbreaks  as 
here.  One  of  the  most  popular  dramas  at  Shanghai  a  few  years  ago 
was  a  missionary  preaching  to  natives  and  making  all  kinds  of  jeered 
and  satirized  blunders.  There  are  no  halls,  traditions,  or  opportuni- 
ties for  preaching,  but  work  must  be  personal  and  must  adopt  Chinese 
methods,  conserve  carefully  every  custom  not  contrary  to  its  spirit, 
ally  itself  to  everything  not  evil  in  Chinese  life,  and  uphold  Chinese 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       741 

nationality,  nor  seek  to  perpetuate  the  differences  between  Western 
churches/ 

The   contrast  between   China   and   India   is   also   extreme.     The 
latter  is  the  most  heterogeneous  of  all  lands  with  race  strata  super- 


1  An  interesting  little  book,  purporting  to  be  written  by  a  Chinaman,  has  at- 
tracted  much  attention.^  He  says  his  countrymen  profoundly  mistrust  and  dislike 
our  Western  civilization.  Their  institutions  have  given  a  stability  unknown  in 
Europe,  and  whether  our  religion  is  better  or  not,  it  has  less  influence  on  our  soci- 
ety. There,  moral  relations  come  first,  and  here,  economic  interest  rules  and 
morality  is  grafted  on.  No  Westerner  is  content  or  has  leisure,  and  these  traits 
to  a  Chinaman  are  a  mark  of  barbarism.  Much  as  our  sciences  and  arts  are  supe- 
rior, they  would  not  compensate  China  for  the  loss  in  imitating  our  institutions. 
In  China,  a  man  begins  and  ends  life  a  member  of  his  family  group,  which  has  its 
common  property,  altar,  and  tribunal  for  settling  disputes.  Progress  would  be 
bought  too  dearly  if  it  left  no  leisure  from  the  work  of  acquisition  of  the  means  of 
living  for  life  itself.  They  never  sought  intercourse  with  the  West  either  to  pros- 
elyte or  to  trade.  They  produce  what  they  consume  and  consume  what  they  pro- 
duce, and  are  stable  because  economically  independent.  We  believe  not  only  that 
our  religion  is  the  only  true  one,  but  would  impose  it  on  others.  To  open  a  new 
market  is  the  only  essential  motive  of  the  West  in  its  dealings  with  China.  England 
is  still  blinded  by  the  wealth  it  has  derived  from  India.  But  China  is  homogeneous, 
and  India  is  not.  Our  legislature  is  chiefly  an  effort  to  regulate  the  disorder  of 
our  economic  system.  "Your  poor,  drunk,  incompetent,  sick  and  aged  ride  you 
like  a  nightmare.  You  have  dissolved  all  human  and  personal  ties  and  try  to 
replace  them  by  the  impersonal  activity  of  the  state.  The  salient  characteristic  of 
your  civilization  is  its  irresponsibility.  You  are  liberated  from  your  own  control 
and  are  caught  in  your  own  levers  and  cogs.  In  every  department  you  substitute 
for  the  individual  the  company,  and  for  the  workman  the  tool.  The  competition 
for  market  promises  to  be  a  more  fruitful  cause  of  war  than  was  ever  in  the  past 
the  ambition  of  princes  or  the  intrigue  of  priests.  The  peoples  of  Europe  fling 
themselves  like  hungry  beasts  of  prey  on  every  yet  unexploited  quarter  of  the 
globe,  and  when  nothing  is  left  to  divide  they  will  fall  upon  one  another.  Their 
armaments  have  brought  them  within  sight  of  a  general  war  of  extermination." 
In  China,  thousands  of  communities  live  without  any  law  save  that  of  custom  and 
propriety.  The  first  question  considered  when  change  is  proposed  is  its  effects  on 
morality.  In  England,  all  that  is  not  urban  is  parasitic  or  else  moribund.  We 
are  divorced  from  nature,  but  unreclaimed  by  art ;  instructed,  but  not  educated ; 
assimilative,  but  incapable  of  thought.  Trained  in  the  traits  of  a  religion  not  really 
believed,  Western  morals  are  as  conventional  as  creeds.  There  is  everywhere  means 
and  nowhere  ends.  In  a  riot  China  sent  not  policemen  but  a  delegate  to  learn  the 
rioters'  point  of  view.  They  were  found  right  and  the  required  guarantees  were 
given.  The  Chinese  are  trained  to  perceive  the  finest  relations  of  life,  to  enjoy 
nature  and  work.     This  can  not  be  given,  but  it  can  easily  be  taken  away. 

In  China  government  is  almost  dispensed  with,  and  if  it  ceased  to  exist  the  life 
of  the  people  would  go  on,  and  many  would  hardly  miss  it.     It  can  impose  nothing 


*  Letters  from  John  Chinaman.     London,  1902,  p.  63. 


742^  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

posed  and  erupting,  where  ethnology  has  many  analogies  with  geol- 
ogy. Caste  makes  life  of  naturally  repellent  social  units  dominant 
with  one  great  idea,  stamps  everything  with  irrevocable  heavenly 
sanction,  and  has  elaborated  tribes,  clans,  septs,  castes,  subcastes, 
outcastes,  religious  orders,  devotional  brotherhoods,  occupations  with 
no  end  of  ceremonial  rules  and  prescriptions,  tabooing  many  common 
acts  of  life,  making  it  necessary  for  a  Western  schoolmaster  to  throw 


on  the  people  against  their  will  and  customs.  The  law  obeyed  is  that  of  the  sub- 
jects' own  nature.  Education  fits  to  govern  but  it  often  disqualifies  to  carry  elec- 
tions. Religion  should  be  the  soul  of  the  state,  its  body.  There  are  everywhere 
superstitions  and  beliefs  in  rites,  but  these  are  extraneous  to  true  religion.  Con- 
fucius discouraged  occupation  with  the  supernatural.  All  live  eternally,  so  ances- 
tor worship  is  a  symbol  of  an  immense  social  idea  of  humanity,  past,  present,  and 
future,  like  Comte's  grand  etre.  Humanity  mediates  between  heaven  and  earth. 
Brotherhood  and  the  dignity  of  labor  are  its  corner-stones.  The  Western  idea  of 
life  makes  it  an  episode  whose  centre  is  elsewhere.  In  the  ferment  of  early  Chris- 
tian centuries  the  ideal  was  worsted.  The  West  separates  religion  and  State  and 
abandons  society  to  economy  and  politics.  Those  who  take  Christianity  seriously 
are  driven  to  revolution.  Jesus  was  inexperienced,  untraveled,  young,  unlearned ; 
and  yet  his  noble  ideal  was  more  inspiring  than  any  other,  but  he  was  unfit  to  guide 
a  commonwealth.  So  in  the  West  temporal  and  spiritual  powers  are  arrayed  against 
each  other.  Jesus  condemned  violence  and  would  turn  the  other  cheek,  but  we 
hold  force  essential  to  preserve  society.  Confucianism  has  made  the  nation  one, 
has  taught  horror  of  violence  and  made  right  so  well  supported  that  it  has  no  need 
to  appeal  to  might,  and  by  honoring  father  and  mother  the  days  of  the  race  have 
been  long.  Now,  "In  the  name  of  Christ  you  have  sounded  the  call  to  arms,  in 
the  name  of  Confucius  we  respond."  The  Chinese  think  the  Westerners  little 
better  than  pirates.  The  opium  the  West  introduced  is  a  curse  to  the  land.  When 
smuggling  was  evaded  the  stock  was  destroyed,  and  as  a  result  of  the  opium  war 
thus  caused,  Hongkong  was  taken. 

Suppose  China  had  permanently  occupied  Liverpool,  Bristol,  and  Plymouth, 
had  placed  there  thousands  of  men  independent  of  English  laws,  driven  out  our 
vessels,  admitted  whisky  duty  free,  placed  agents  at  all  points  to  counteract  the 
teachings  of  our  Church  and  undermine  our  society  ;  in  such  conditions  it  would 
not  be  surprising  if  the  Chinese  legation  in  London  were  surrounded  by  a  howling 
mob.  Let  Jesus  himself  judge  between  us.  Religion  is  used  in  the  West  as  a 
weapon  of  war.  The  cross  is  the  pioneer  of  the  sword.  The  proudest  nation  in 
the  world  has  been  humiliated.  Its  people  have  been  treated  not  as  Western 
nations  would  treat  each  other,  but  like  barbarians.  Has  there  ever  been  a  greater 
breach  of  international  comity  ?  With  the  spectacle  of  a  Christian  Kaiser  sending 
his  troops  on  an  errand  of  revenge,  and  conjuring  them,  in  the  name  of  him  who 
bade  us  turn  the  other  cheek,  not  merely  to  attack  and  kill,  but  to  kill  without 
quarter,  how  idle  to  claim  that  the  Western  religion  in  its  essence  is  higher  than 
Eastern  !      It  is  not  Christian. 

On  this  see  the  i6  Reports,  ending  September  30,  1903,  of  the  Society  for  the 
Diffusion  of  Christian  and  General  Knowledge  among  the  Chinese.  Also  J.  I. 
Ball,  Things  Chinese,  1893;  Harlez,  Anthropologic  Chinoise,  1896;  Lemire,  Les 
McBurs  du  Indo-Chinoise,  1902. 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       743 

sods  at  the  low-caste  boys  in  his  room  lest  those  of  high  caste  should 
deem  him  contaminated  by  touch.  The  Brahmans  can  only  walk 
abroad  at  midday,  when  their  reduced  shadows  can  not  be  defiled, 
but  in  the  morning  and  evening,  when  they  lengthen,  they  must  hide 
themselves  with  their  shadows  to  more  isolated  retreats.  Everything 
here  is  tangled,  disordered,  incongruous,  with  a  din  of  discordant 
rites,  with  a  mob  of  gods,  "  who  abhor  a  fly's  death  and  those  who 
still  delight  in  human  sacrifice";  where  religions  are  jumbled  to- 
gether, history  is  disfigured  with  wild  mythology,  poetry  treated  as 
literal  prose  and  plain  fact,  and  science  mystified,  most  of  it  permeated 
by  later  Mohammedan  rule,  but  now  under  the  sway  of  a  few  Eng- 
lishmen who  are  hated  but  revered  for  the  seeming  quality  of  justice, 
and  whose  psychic  conquest  is  represented  by  the  prohibition  of 
burning  widows,  killing  daughters,  or  burying  lepers  alive.  Here, 
as  in  the  later  Roman  period,  many  faiths  have  taught  toleration  and 
even  hunger  for  novelties  in  religion,  where  each  has  somewhere  dug 
a  well  and  made  an  oasis.  India  is  not  only  as  heterogeneous  as 
China  is  homogeneous,  but  it  is  mainly  composed  of  villages  and  rural 
people,  while  China  is  essentially  municipal.  Several  millions  of  the 
brightest  minds  of  India  are  already  infected  with  Occidental  science, 
culture,  and  civilization.  Moreover,  they  are  of  our  own  Aryan  blood. 
Oldfield,  who  went  to  India  full  of  mission  faith  and  zeal,  saw  the 
other  side,  and  pronounces  mission  work  in  India  a  real  failure,  yet 
holds  that  if  Jesus  and  Paul  appeared  there  they  would  find  a  waiting 
world  and  would  win  over  the  heart  and  mind  of  the  whole  race. 
The  missionary  assumes  that  his  type  of  Christianity  is  the  only  true 
religion  and  that  all  other  modes  of  seeking  God  are  heathen  idolatry. 
He  knows  far  less  of  the  Shastras  and  the  Vedas  than  the  Hindus 
do  of  the  Bible.  The  latter  read  the  reports  of  the  missioners  and 
consider  them  dishonest  in  claiming  to  have  accomplished  too  much 
and  painting  native  life  in  too  dark  colors.  Their  course  is  compared 
with  that  of  a  Hindu  missionary  who  should  begin  his  work  in  Eng- 
land by  gloating  over  the  faults  of  Moses  or  Abraham,  ridiculing  the 
miracles  of  Jonah,  and  finding  lewdness  in  the  doctrine  of  the  Im- 
maculate Conception.  They  kill  animals  and  eat  flesh.  Some  suc- 
ceed among  outcasts  while  nearly  all  fail  with  the  higher  and  edu- 
cated classes.  The  saintly  lives  and  ascetic  practise  of  the  early 
Christian  fathers  would  win  their  way,  for  they  would  appear  to 
represent  a  higher  and  not  a  lower  religion.  As  Jesus  praised  the 
beautiful  teeth  of  the  carcass  of  a  dead  dog,  so  we  must  begin  by 
learning  the  good  in  other  faiths.  Our  pagan  ancestors  were  won 
by  having  their  heathen  practises  sanctified  and  not  ridiculed.  Of 
their  own  teachers  they  expect  a  life  of  devotion  to  spiritual  study, 
to  fathom  divine  mysteries,  but  a  group  of  natives  won  a  wager  from 
Oldfield  by  finding  the  Christian  missionary  at  a  club  in  flannels  with 
a  tennis  racket.  Paul  would  not  eat  flesh  or  drink  wine  if  it  made 
his  brother  to  offend,  but  missionaries  do  not  bathe  or  re-dress  before 
eating,    and   associate   largely   with    their    own   countrymen.      Early 


744  THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 

Christendom  won  its  way  by  martyrdom  and  pure  and  simple  lives/ 
Agnosticism  was  overcome  because  most  of  what  was  best  in  it  was 
assimilated.  Religious  propaganda  must  find  in  contemporary  life 
elements  that  can  be  employed  as  media  for  expressing  its  inner  self. 
"  Born  of  the  spirit,"  says  Harnack/  "  the  Church  learned  to  conse- 
crate the  earthly  "  and  mold  the  environment.  Indeed,  of  old  it  went 
so  far  in  this  work  as  to  incorporate  as  essential  what  was  only  the 
product  of  accommodation.  By  this  course,  as  always,  the  Church 
at  first  gained,  but  later  had  to  pay  the  penalty.  Again,  in  a  yet 
larger  sense,  our  age  is  cosmopolitan,  and  we  have  to  know  the  early 
Christianity  for  a  new  lesson  of  variety  of  appeal  and  the  power  to 
select  the  many  and  varied  coefficients  from  a  very  complex  environ- 
ment. Otherwise  Christianity  can  never  become  a  universal  religion. 
At  the  same  time  everything  must  be  simplified,  for  the  history  of 
religion  shows  that  its  really  vital  core  is  narrow.  Thus  only  uni- 
versalism  that  finds  nothing  entirely  alien  to  it  can  be  also  intensive 
and  its  subsequent  systematization  abiding.  Is  it  possible  that  all  the 
lessons  of  anthropology  count  for  nothing  here?  Have  there  been  no 
improvements  in  methods  since  John  Williams,  Judson,  Carey,  and 
Moffat,  or  are  they  still  ideals?  Has  not  the  work  of  Neesima  in 
Japan  and  Crowthers  in  Africa  taught  us  the  immense  advantage  of 
natives  trained  in  Europe  in  reaching  their  fellow  countrymen  ? 

^  Mission  work  should  be  regarded  as  a  part  of  pedagogy 
and  be  included  in  the  work  of  this  department  in  every  uni- 
versity and  college  just  as  the  psychology  of  lower  races 
should  be  included  in  every  course  in  psychogenesis.  The 
human  soul  is  indefinitely  vaster  and  more  complex  than  it 
ever  entered  into  the  heart  of  any  psychologist  to  conceive  it. 
The  germs  of  every  faith  are  in  every  soul  to  a  degree  un- 
known in  religious  Philistia  or  philosophic  Bohemia.  Lives 
of  missionaries  have  for  me  always  had  a  peculiar  charm.  It 
would  be  easy  to  collect  appalling  and  disastrous  blunders  of 
those  who  have  as  it  were  gone  to  Mohammedanism  with  a 
gospel  bound  in  pigskin,  to  Buddhism  with  one  bound  in  calf- 
skin, who  have  ofif ended  every  prejudice  and  admitted  no 
explanation  but  the  worst.  To  one,  India  is  a  wounded  cobra 
that  would  strike  back,  a  perfect  type  of  the  old  serpent  with 
the  sting  of  sin.  Another  sees  nothing  but  "  pure  abomination 
worship  "  in  Mohammedanism.     Another  finds  "  only  folly, 

*The  Failure  of  Christian  Missions  in  India.      Hibbert  Journal,  April,  1903. 
*  See  Harnack's  Die  Mission  u.  Ausbreitung  des  Christentum  in  den  ersten  drei 
Jahrhunderten.     Berlin,  1902. 


ADOLESCENT  RACES  AND  THEIR  TREATMENT       745 

blindness,  and  superstition  "  in  Burma,  and  one  tells  us  that 
among  the  followers  of  Confucius  "  every  vice  is  tolerated  if 
not  sanctioned."  Brahmanism  is  "a  tangle  of  absurd  and 
meaningless  mythologies."  It  is  grueling  to  feel  the  havoc 
such  stodgy  religious  buccaneers  must  have  wrought  on  the 
souls  of  those  they  so  desired  to  save.  But  work  like  that 
of  A.  Mackay  in  Uganda,  of  G.  L.  Mackay  in  Formosa,  J.  E. 
Paton  in  the  New  Hebrides,  and  a  score  more  of  the  best 
modern  heroes  of  the  mission  field,  and  all  the  new  awaken- 
ing, marks  the  present  as  a  time  of  epoch-making  progress. 
But  far  better  things  yet  must  impend. 

As  with  the  other  topics  of  this  chapter,  space  has  for- 
bidden here  more  than  to  take  a  very  hasty  and  utterly  in- 
adequate glance  at  a  vast  field  full  of  complex  and  now  very 
rapidly  growing  interests.  It  suffices,  however,  for  my 
present  purpose  simply  and  in  fine  to  urge  that  the  psychology 
of  religious  growth  is  now  teaching  us  the  desirability  of 
laying  long  and  chief,  though  not  exclusive,  stress  upon  the 
Old  Testament  in  dealing  with  pre-adolescent  children,  and 
reserving  the  most  intensive  teaching  of  the  New  Testament 
for  the  teens.  Savages  are  children  and  youth,  and  the  races 
that  live  under  the  influence  of  the  higher  non-Christian 
ethnic  faiths  also  especially  need  to  be  kept  in  the  pupillary 
state  toward  their  own  faith  long  enough  to  make  it  a  kind 
of  Old  Testament  propsedeutic  to  the  New.  For  a  long 
period  in  the  Christian  Church  the  Old  Testament  was  com- 
paratively neglected,  but  is  now  coming  to  abundant  honor, 
both  among  scholars  and  as  subject-matter  of  religious  teach- 
ing. We  realize  anew  how  every  intelligent  conception  of 
Christianity  rests  upon  it,  and  how  the  wondrous  pedagogic 
genius  of  Jesus  used  it  as  a  basis  for  his  sublime  evangel  of 
love  to  God  and  man.  His  standpoint  may  be  indefinitely  de- 
veloped along  the  lines  of  impulsion  he  gave,  but  we  can  not 
conceive  how  it  can  ever  be  transcended,  because  it  rests  on 
the  strongest  and  most  essential  elements  of  the  human  soul. 
In  making  the  Hebrew  rites  and  writings  the  propaedeutic 
to  his  new  religion,  he  should  be  regarded  not  only  as  the 
founder  of  a  new  faith  but  as  having  given  the  world  an 
object-lesson  of  how  to  relate  the  gospel  to  other  indigenous 
faiths.  If  Christianity  is  ultimate  and  is  fit  to  be  a  universal 
religion,  it  must  be  shown  to  be  related  to  Buddhism,  Brah- 


746  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 

manism,  Confucianism,  and  other  and  perhaps  all  indigenous 
religions  somewhat  as  it  is  to  Judaism.  It  must  be  shown  to 
be  prefigured,  anticipated  in  each,  and  each  must  be  shown 
to  be  fulfilled  in  it  in  analogous  ways.  Those  who  proclaim 
it  must  be  as  sympathetic  and  as  instructed  in  the  letter  and 
spirit  of  the  native  faith  as  Jesus  was  in  that  of  Hebraism, 
and  have  served  an  apprenticeship  like  his  to  it.  This  postu- 
lates a  long  and  hard  work  yet  to  be  done.  There  will  be 
many  new  emphases  and  exegeses.  Much  that  we  have  tried 
to  destroy  will  have  to  be  fulfilled,  and  our  own  religion 
will  be  inconceivably  enlarged  and  glorified  by  new  insights 
and  reveal  new  power.  We  shall  exalt  Mohammed,  Kung-tsi, 
Buddha,  and  scores  of  great  ancient  seekers  after  God  in 
many  lands,  ways,  tongues,  and  centuries,  as  antetypes,  law- 
givers, prophets,  or  forerunners  of  Jesus,  who  will  be  all  the 
more  exalted  because  all  ethnic  lines  and  not  one  alone  will 
converge  in  him.  Sympathy  with  the  good,  and  not  criticism 
of  the  bad,  should  be  as  much  the  rule  as  in  both  the  new  and 
old  studies  of  the  Jewish  Scripture.  Perhaps  canonical  will 
have  to  be  distinguished  from  low  level  production  now 
revered  as  the  Jews  set  apart  Talmudic  and  Massoretic  texts 
from  the  Pentateuch,  Psalms,  and  Prophets,  or  as  early 
Christians  distinguished  apocryphal  literature  from  the  sacred 
books.  Here  is  an  opportunity  to  emulate  the  best  that  the 
heroes  of  Christendom  have  accomplished  from  the  times  of 
the  fathers  to  our  own,  and  more  and  better  yet  to  vie  with 
the  methods  of  Paul  himself,  who  made  Greek  culture  a  pro- 
paedeutic of  the  new  faith  somewhat  as  Jesus  did  that  of  the 
Hebrews,  only  in  less  degree.  His  missionary  triumphs 
among  the  Gentiles  were  because  he  could  reach  the  intelligent 
classes  and  did  not  confine  his  activity  to  the  ignorant,  de- 
graded, and  outcast.  Perhaps  Jesus  was  wiser  than  his 
mundane  self-consciousness  realized,  and  perhaps  his  light 
shone  forth  far  brighter  than  it  would  have  done  had  the  Jews 
not  rejected  him  and  thus  laid  on  him  the  necessity  of  unfold- 
ing the  latent  potentiality  of  their  faith  into  universality.  But 
if  he  had  been  born  into  any  other  of  the  great  religions  of 
the  world  and  been  so  treated,  it  is  impossible  to  conceive  that 
he  would  not  have  made  it  blossom  into  the  same  gospel  he 
taught  and  have  shown  it,  whatever  it  was,  to  be  just  as  open 
and  natural  a  preparation  for  his  teaching  as  he  showed  Juda- 


ADOLESCENT   RACES  AND   THEIR  TREATMENT       747 

ism  to  be.  Some  of  them  perhaps  to  his  transcendent  genius 
would  have  revealed  even  more  prelusions  and  have  opened 
up  yet  broader  as  they  certainly  could  have  done  more  popu- 
lous highways  of  approach.     (See  Chapter  XIV.) 

Finally,  not  only  has  progress  been  most  glacierly  slow, 
but  it  is  not  yet  adequately  defined.  If  too  rapid,  it  is  sure 
to  be  bad  for  virtue,  health,  and  the  most  valuable  knowl- 
edge. Reclus  thinks  civilization  on  the  whole  no  whit  in 
advance  of  savagery,  so  much  lower  than  it  are  slum  denizens ; 
and  Ranke  doubts  all  real  progress  in  history,  believing  it  to 
involve  extreme  differentiation  of  classes  which  is  itself  mor- 
bific. It  is  not  pessimistic  to  realize  that  our  civilization  is 
not  only  a  doom  and  disease  when  forced  precociously  upon 
lower  races,  but  that  it  has  created  scores  of  diseases,  made 
cities  biological  furnaces  where  life  is  consumed,  and  in  gen- 
eral has  a  dark  as  w'ell  as  a  bright  side.  What  if  Pobye- 
donostseff's  impeachment  of  Western  civilization  has  even  a 
grain  of  truth?  What  if  civilization  is  at  root  morbific  and 
sure  to  end  in  reaction  and  decay,  as  a  clever  writer  urges  ?  ^ 
There  are  those  who  hold  that  any  type  of  civilization  is  only 
a  dim  candle  in  one  corner  of  the  vast  museum  of  "  Man-soul," 
leaving  most  of  it  obscure  and  some  of  it  pitchy  dark.  Per- 
haps he  has  a  mean  idea  of  our  race  who  does  not  believe  in 
the  possibility  of  very  different  types  of  culture  and  civiliza- 
tion than  ours,  but  just  as  good;  and  may  not  he  be  the  real 
barbarian  who  deems  his  own  age,  race,  or  faith  the  best  and 
last,  to  which  all  must  be  brought,  and  insists,  with  a  fanati- 
cism worthy  of  the  Mahdi,  on  holiness  after  our  type,  or  else 
death  ?  Perhaps  our  very  religion  must  be  more  or  less  re- 
orientalized  to  fit  the  East.  Does  might  so  make  right  that  the 
worst  in  the  victor  is  better  than  the  best  in  the  victim?  Is 
there  anything  whatever  of  great  value  in  the  world  that  has 
not  a  deep  and  ancient  ethnic  root,  and  is  not  everything  alien, 
artificial,  and  is  it  not  a  better  ideal  to  make  a  good  red  man, 
negro,  Lapp,  or  Kafiir,  than  an  indifferent  European,  and  per- 

'  Civilization  :  Its  Cause  and  Cure.  London,  1891.  See,  too,  Prince  Kropot- 
kin,  Mutual  Aid.  London,  1902,  p.  34^5.  Also  Crozier,  Civilization  and  Prog- 
ress. London,  1894,  p.  464.  Perhaps  no  one  has  seen  more  clearly  how  child- 
hood and  youth  both  resemble  and  need  more  knowledge  of  primitive  people  or 
made  a  more  praiseworthy  effort  to  meet  the  need  than  L.  Frobenius  in  his  .-Vus 
den  Flegeljahre  der  Menschheit.     Hanover,  1901,  p.  416,  400  cuts. 


748  THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 

haps  even  a  good  heathen  than  a  bad  Christian  ?  Is  there  any 
barbarism  that  equals  that  caused  by  premature  and  forced 
civiHzation,  or  any  fallacy  greater  than  that  those  are  not 
cultured  who  can  not  do  or  do  not  know  or  revere  what  we 
do?  The  uniformitarians  not  only  have  a  very  dull,  monoto- 
nous world,  but  their  policy  lacks  prudence,  and  especially 
forgets  the  law  of  future  or  projected  efficiency  on  which  Kidd 
has  just  laid  due  stress.  Galton,  Grant  Allen,  and  others  urge 
that  the  best  primitive  stirps  be  preserved  as  relays  where,  if 
our  culture  becomes  effete,  it  can  recuperate  its  energies,  if 
need  be,  "  by  a  new  rape  of  the  Sabines."  Statistics  show 
that  college  men  in  our  own  communities  do  not  even  repro- 
duce their  own  numbers,  so  antagonistic  is  over-individuation 
to  genesis. 

Thus,  before,  back  of  and  independent  of  all  current  ques- 
tions, may  we  not  urge  that  the  time  has  now  come  for  us  to 
consider  occasionally  problems  of  statesmanship  and  religion 
and  history  from  the  broad  standpoint  of  the  education  of 
races  with  whom  a  thousand  years  are  hardly  as  a  day  ?  Our 
democracy  needs  a  type  of  historical  study  that  glimpses 
these  larger  questions,  and,  while  hopeful,  does  not  assume 
that  we  are  the  heati  possidentes,  or  our  age  the  culminating 
period  of  history,  but  rather  that  its  brightest  pages  are  yet  to 
be  written  because  the  best  and  greatest  things  have  not  hap- 
pened yet.  Nor  does  this  necessarily  imply  that  even  our  own 
blood  or  our  own  institutions  will  dominate  the  far  future.  In 
many  lands  the  victims  have  been  the  real  conquerors.  In 
later  ages  other  stocks  now  obscure,  and  perhaps  other  tongues 
now  unstudied,  will  occupy  the  center  of  the  historic  stage, 
appropriating  the  best  we  achieve,  as  we  learn  from  Semites, 
Greeks,  and  Romans.  If  this  be  true,  every  vigorous  race, 
however  rude  and  undeveloped,  is,  like  childhood,  worthy  of 
the  maximum  of  reverence  and  care  and  study,  and  may  be- 
come the  chosen  organ  of  a  new  dispensation  of  culture  and 
civilization.  Some  of  them  now  obscure  may  be  the  heirs  of 
all  we  possess,  and  wield  the  ever-increasing  resources  of  the 
world  for  good  or  evil  somewhat  perhaps  according  as  we  now 
influence  their  early  plastic  stages,  for  they  are  the  world's 
children  and  adolescents. 


INDEX    OF    SUBJECTS 


Abnormalities  of  growth,  i,  126. 
Aborigines  vanishing,  ii,  650. 
Abstract  words,  need  of,  ii,  462. 
Acceleration  of  growth,  i,  16,  24,  42. 
Accessory  and   fundamental  move- 
ments, i,    154. 
Accuracy  of  movement,  i,  144. 
Acquired    characters     and     adoles- 
cence, i,  50. 
Acromegalia,  i,  81. 
Activity  of  children,  motor,  i,  158. 

of  giants  and  monsters,  i,  41. 
Adolescence,     acquired     characters 
and,    i,  50. 

biography  and,  i,  513. 

coordination   loosened    at,    i,    127 
et  seq. 

exhaustion  at,  i,   276. 

friendships  of,  i,  318. 

idiocy  at,  i,  281. 

in  intellect,  ii,  453. 

literature  and,  i,   513. 

nonsense  in,  i,  317. 

time  and  space  in,  i,  154. 

variations  in,  i,  46. 
Adolescent  insanity,  i,  293. 
Adolescents,  psychic  changes  in,  ii, 
70. 

savages  as,  ii,  649. 
Africa,  puberty  rites  in,  ii,  245. 
African,  traits  of,  ii,  666. 
Age  and  death-rate,   i,  249,  251. 

of   fertility,  i,  508. 

liability   to   diseases  of,   i,   239. 

lung  growth  and,  i,  97. 

of  memory,  ii,  492. 

of  menstruation,  i,  474. 

of  pulse,  frequency  and,  i,  91. 

of  reason,  i,  in. 

of  responsibility,  i,  396. 

of  sickness,  i,  243  ct  seq. 
Agoraphobia,  ii,  216. 
Agriculture,  i,  172  ct  seq. 
Allnnnen  in  urine,  i,   115. 
Alcoholism,    i,  367. 
Alternations  of  p.sychic  states,  ii,  75 

et  seq. 
Altruism,  ii,  81. 
Amalgamation,  ii,  721. 


Ambidexterity,  i,  125. 

Amenorrhea,  i,  496. 

American  aborigines,  puberty  with, 

ii,  232. 
Amphimixis,  ii,    124. 
Anagenic  processes,  i,  48. 
Anger,  i,  220  et  seq.,  354;  ii,  367. 
Animal  noises,  ii,  25. 

psychology,   ii,   52. 
Animals  and  children,  ii,  220. 

and  man,    missing   link   between, 

ii,  91-93- 

masturbation  in,  i,  435. 

menstruation  in,  i,  472. 

migrations  of,  ii,  378. 

noises  of,  ii,   25. 

pubescent  growth  in,  i,  18. 
Anthropoid   and  human,  ii,  91. 
Anthropometry,  ideal  of  gymnastics 

and,  i,  193. 
Anxiety,  a  neurosis,  i,  284-285. 
Ape-like  qualities,  i,  57. 
Ape  traits  in  savages,  i,  57. 
Appetite,  i,  252;  ii,  10. 
Aquatic  organs  in  man,  ii,  192. 
Arbor  Day,  ii,  219. 
Arboreal   life,   ii,    214. 

life  and  the  hand,  i,  I55- 
Archeology  of  mind,  ii,  61. 
Archeopsychisms,  ii,  65. 
Arctic  spring,  i,   118. 
Arms,  growth  of,  i,  65. 
Art  study,  i,  179  et  seq.,  186. 
Arterial  tension  and  tone,  i,  94. 
Arteries,  growth  of,  i,  93. 
Arts  and  crafts  movement,  i,  179. 
Ascending  races,  ii,  720. 
Associations  devised  by   adults,    ii, 

417. 
Astrologv,    pedagogic   place    of,    ii, 

165.  ' 
Astronomy,   ii,   167. 
Asymmetry  in  growth,  ii,  88. 
Asynchronism  of  growth,  i,  55. 
Athletic  festivals  in  Greece,  i.  203. 
Athletics    as    a   conversation   topic, 
i,  229. 
dangers  and  defects  of,   i,  229. 
records  in,  i,  198. 

749 


750 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


Attention,  ii,  66. 

Autobiographies  of  boyhood,  i,  533. 
Autocentric  to  heterocentric,  ii,  301. 
Automatisms,  causes  and  kinds  of, 

i,    159- 
causes  of,  i,  163. 

control  and  seralization  of,  i,  162. 
danger  of  premature   control  of, 

i,  162. 
many  desirable,  i,  161. 
motor,  i,  158. 
nature  of,  i,  160  et  seq. 
new  theory  of,  i,    160. 
Autumn  growth  in  thickness,  i,  21 

et  seq. 
Axiagraph,   i,   145. 
Axial  system,  i,  58. 


Back  lift,  i,  134. 

Balance  of  functions,  i,  126. 

Bathing,  i,  225. 

Bathmism,  ii,  90. 

Beauty,  type  of,  i,  125. 

Belief,  habit  and  muscle,  i,   132. 

Bible  and  love,  ii,  126. 

place  of,  ii,  320,  445. 

as     psychological     text-book,     ii, 
360. 

study,  critical,  ii,  324. 
Bilateral  growth,  i,  125. 

hand  power,  i,  147  et  seq. 
Bile  and  age,  i,   117. 
Biography  and  adolescence,  i,  513. 
Birth,  i,  5. 
Blood,  changes  in,  i,  94. 

corpuscles  and  puberty,  i,  95. 

sex  differences  in  specific  gravity 
of,  i,  96. 

vessels,  growth  of,  i,  88. 
Blushing,  ii.  20. 
Body  training.  Greek,  i,  203. 
Bone  girths,  i.  66. 

growth,   hygiene  of,  i,  82-83. 
Bones,  growth  of,   in  puberty,  i,  58 

ct  seq. 
Botany,  teaching  of,  ii,  210. 
Boxing,  i,  218. 
Boy  life  settled,  i,  48. 
Boyhood,  autobiographies  of,  i,  533. 

older  than  youth,  i,  47. 
Boys,    dangers  of   coeducation    for. 
ii,  619. 

girls,  and  differences  between,  ii, 
569- 

Greek,  i,  513. 

in  Plato,  i.  513. 

unsymmetrical,  i,  242. 
Brachycephaly  and  height,  i,  30. 


Brain,  cell  division  in,  i,  107. 
cells,  growth  of,  i,  106-107. 
cortex  and  sense  centers,  i,   109- 

IIO. 

growth  of,  i,  105. 

growth  of,  in  plasticity  at  puber- 
ty, i,  108. 

increase  of  fibers,  i,   108. 

levels  and  epilepsy,  i,  no. 

medullation,  order  of,  i,   109. 

psychic  functions  of,  i,  no. 

in  starvation,  i,   119. 

tangential    fibers   and   puberty,   i, 
108. 
Brains  of  idiots,  i,  109. 
Breadths,  growth  in,  i,  52. 
Buddhism,  puberty  in,  ii,  245. 
Bullying,   i,  358. 
Burschenschaften,  ii,  406. 
Bushido',  i,  219. 

Cake  walk,  i,  223. 

Camorra,  i,  363. 

Canary  and  child,  ii,  227. 

Capillaries,  variability  of,  i,  89. 

Caprice,  ii,  89. 

Carbonic  acid  and  puberty,  i,   104. 

Caressing,  i,  120. 

Castration,  i,  424. 

effects  of,  i,  430. 

functional,  i,  428. 

of  idiots,  i,  427. 
Cat  and  child,  ii,  224. 
Catagenic  processes,  i,  48. 
Categories,  ii,  551. 
Catholic   Church   and  confirmation, 
ii,  265. 

mission  methods,  ii,  729. 
Cell  division,  i,  2. 

generations,  i,'  2. 

theory,  limitations  of,  i,  2. 
Character,  muscles  and,  i,  131. 
Chest  circumference,  i,   100  et  seq. 

girth,   i,  69  et  seq. 
Child-bearing,   dangers  of  post-ma- 
turity in,  ii.  607. 
Child,   canary  and,   ii,  227. 

cat  and,  ii,  224. 

cry  of  new-born,  i,  5. 

dog  and.  ii,  222. 

rabbits  and,  ii,  226. 
Childlessness  of  women,  ii,  601. 
Children,  animals  and,  ii,  220. 

faults  of.  i.  344  et  seq. 

logical  mentation  of,  ii,  451. 

love  of.  ii.  134. 

motor  activity  of.  i.   158. 

motor  defects  of,  i,   164. 

selfishness  of,  ii,  452. 


INDEX   OF   SUBJECTS 


751 


China,  mission  work  in,  ii,  "jyj. 

Chivalry,  ii,  443. 

Chlorosis,  i,  260. 

Chorea,   i,    157. 

Christian    Endeavor,    criticisms   of, 

ii,  422. 
Christianity,  muscular,  i,  i8g. 
Chums  and  cronies,  ii,  395. 
Church,  femininity  in  the,   i,  225. 
Circulation,  time  of,  i,  95. 

variability  of,  i,  89. 
Circumcision,  i,  467. 
City  life  and  stature,  i,  30. 
Civilization,  dangers  of,  ii,  718. 
Civilized    men,    savages    physically 

superior  to,  i,   169. 
Classic  training  of  epheboi,   ii,  249. 
Climate,  growth  and,  i,  Zi- 
Climbing,  hill,  i.  227. 

power  and  puberty,  i,  138. 
Clitoris,  changes  of,  i,  422. 
Closeness,  fear  of,  i,  104. 
Clouds,  ii.  179. 

Coeducation,   dangers   for   boys,   ii, 
619. 

dangers  for  girls,   ii,  621. 
Coitus      and      masturbation      com- 
pared, i,  440. 

and  size  of  thymus,  i,  122. 
Cold  and  heat,  ii,  186. 
Collections,   ii,  484. 
College  dominance  and  its  evils,  ii, 
515,  520. 

English  requirements  of,  ii,  479. 

needed  reconstruction,  ii,  529. 

philosophy,   ii,  531. 

present  dangers  of,  ii,  528. 

societies,  ii,  404. 
Colonial   methods,  ii,  713. 
Color  changes,  ii,  35. 
Combat  among  students,   ii,  410. 
Compensation   in   growth,   i,   24-25, 

44- 
Competition  of  parts  and  organs,  i, 
241. 

among  tissues  and  organs,  i,  309. 
Concentration,  i,  234. 
Conduct,    bad,    and   reactions   from 
it.  ii.  82. 

good  and  bad.  i,  345. 

and  weather,  i.  347. 
Confession  in  therapeutics,  i.  279. 
Confessionalism    of  young    women, 

i.  555-560. 
Confirmation,  Catholic  Church  and. 
ii.  265. 

Episcopal  Church,  ii.  274. 

Greek  Church,  ii,  272. 


Confirmation,      among      Jews,      ii, 
262. 

Lutheran,  ii,   277. 
Contiict,  i,  216. 
Conscience  and  guilt,  ii,  313. 
Consciousness    a    poor    witness    of 
soul  life,  ii,  341. 

unorganized,  ii,  67  et  seq. 
Consent,  age  of,  i,  374. 
Conservation  and   radical  instincts, 

ii,  87. 
Consumption,  age  of,  i,  257. 
Contagion,  psychic,   i,  265. 
Contrectation,  i,  450. 
Control  of  movements,  i,  145. 
Conversion,  ii,  281. 

age  of,  ii,  288. 

instantaneous,  ii,  342. 

of  intellect,  ii,  315. 

too  intense,  ii,  343. 

too  normalized,   ii,  344. 

natural,  ii,  301. 

precocious,  ii,  345. 

psychology  of,  ii,  349. 

wider  analogies  of,  ii,  331. 
Coordination    loosened    at    adoles- 
cence, i,   127  et  seq. 
Corporal  punishment,  i,  399,  402. 
Corps,  ii,  406. 
Cosmic  uniformity,  ii,  716. 
Courtship,  ii,  120. 

love  and,  ii,   139. 
Cranial  capacity,  i,  72,  105. 
Crime,  age  of  responsibilty,  i,  396, 

causes  of.  in  youth,  i.  386,  406. 

degeneration  and,  i,  343. 

and  education,  i,  407. 

flogging  for,  i,  399,  402. 

juvenile,  causes  of.  i,  3^  ct  seq. 

juvenile  forms  of,  i,  ^2. 

juvenile  statistics  of,  i.  325  ct  seq. 

juvenile  types  of,   i,  389. 

menstruation  and,  i,  498. 

and  reading,  i,  408. 

and  sex,  i,  339,  431. 

sex  anomalies  and.  i,  415. 

treatment  of.  i,  341  ct  seq. 
Criminal,      the      juvenile,      psychic 

traits  of,  i,  339  ct  seq. 
Criminality,  juvenile,   i,  45. 
Criminals,  diseases  of,  i,  343. 

juvenile,  traits  of,  i.  335. 
Critical  Bible  study,  ii,  324. 
Cross,   story  of,   ii,  2>2)7- 
Cruelty,  ii.  85. 

Cry   of  new-born  child,   i,  5. 
Culture  heroes,  ii.  355. 
Curiosity,  ii.  85.  450. 
Curvature  of  spine,   i,  256. 


752 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


Dancing,  i,  213  et  seq. 
Dares,  ii,  366. 
Darkness,  ii,   173. 
Day-dreaming,  i,  311. 
Deadly  sins,  ii,  305. 
Death,  growth  and,  i,  4. 

and  love,  ii,   128. 

love  of,  ii,  336. 

rate,  age  and,  i,  249,  251. 
Debate  and  pugnacity,   ii,  433. 
Defectives,  killing  of,   i,  394. 
Degenerates,  killing  of,  i,  394. 
Degeneration  and  crime,  i,  343. 

juvenile,  i,  336  et  seq. 
Delinquents,  types  of,  i,  389. 
Dementia  prsecox,  i,  300  et  seq. 

criticism    of    current    theories,    i, 
303  et  seq. 

preventive  causes  of,  i,  306. 
Dendropsychoses,  ii,  217. 
Dentition,  i,  77. 
Dependencies,  ii,  711. 
Depilation,  ii,  6. 
Depression,    ii,   80. 
Dermal  habits,  ii,   7. 

hairs,  ii,  8. 

troubles,  i,  261. 
Descending  races,  ii,  720. 
Detumescence,  i,  450;  ii,  124. 
Diet,  growth  and,  i,  21. 
Dip,   power  of,  i,   135. 
Disciples    of   Jesus,    adolescents,    i, 

523. 
Disease         and        disproportionate 

growth  of  parts,  i,  240. 
Diseases,  of  adolescence  neglected, 
i'  238..  . 

age  liability  to,  i,  239. 

of  body  and  mind,  i,  237. 

of  girls,  ii,  569. 

and  loss  of  weight,  i,  240. 

of  the   school   grades,   per  cents, 
i,  243  et  seq. 
Dismenorrhea,  i,  499, 
Disphoria,  ii,  77. 
Dissociation,  i,  322. 
Dog  and  child,  ii,  222. 

training,   age  of,   ii,  228. 
Dogma,  dangers  of,  ii,  320. 
Doing  and  knowing,  ii,  86. 
Dolichocephaly  and  height,  i,  30. 
Doll  curve,  i,  208. 
Domestication,  ii,  222. 
Doubt,  extreme,  ii,  48. 
Doubting  insanity,   i,   291. 
Drama,  educational  value  of,  ii,  439. 
Dramatic  instinct  of  puberty,  i,  317. 
Drawing,  ii,  483. 

curve  of  stages  of,  i,  184-185. 


Dreams,    monthly    periods    and,    i, 
502. 

and  puberty,  i,  262. 

spontaneous  emissions  and,  i,  454. 
Duel,  ii,  409. 
Dueling,   i,  218. 

Eastern  islanders,  traits  of,  ii,  655. 
Eating  habits  controlled,  ii,  14. 
Education,  crime  and,  i,  407. 

of  girls,  ii,  561,  612,  636. 

Greek,  ii,  249. 

Indian,  ii,  694. 

industrial,  i,  170  et  seq. 

of  races,  ii,  721. 

universality  of,  ii,  494. 
Educational  value  of  the  theatre,  ii, 

441. 
Ego,  nature  of,  ii,  69. 
Eighteen,  age  of,  i,    10. 
Elbow,  growth  in  girth  of,  i,  66. 
Embryo,  growth  rate  of,  i,  3. 
Emotion,  ii,  40  et  seq. 
Endurance  and   size,  i,  38. 
Energy  and  laziness,  ii,  75. 
English,  causes  of  pedagogic  degen- 
eration, ii,  457. 

language    and    literature,     peda- 
gogy of,  ii,  454. 

requirements  of  college,  ii,  479. 

sense    language,    dangers    of,    ii, 
462. 
Envy,  i,  357. 

Eozoic  bases  of  heredity,    i,  58. 
Ephebeitis,  i,  308. 
Ephebic  rites  in  Greece,  ii,  249. 
Epics,  educational  value  of,  ii,  442. 
Epilepsy,  i,  no,   273. 
Episcopal    Church  confirmation,   ii, 

274. 
Epistemology,  ii,  46. 
Equilibrium  upset,  i,  47,  49. 
Erect  position  and  tree  life,  i,   155. 
Erethism,  i,  151. 
Ergograph  curves,  i,  150. 
Eskimo,  ii,  677. 
Ether    a   philosophical    assumption, 

."'  541. 
Ethical  judgments,  ii,  394. 
Ethics  and  love,  ii,  132. 
Ethnic  stocks  declining,  ii,  654. 
Eunuchs,  i,  424. 
Euphoria,  ii,  76. 

and  exercise,   i,   196,  205. 
Evening,   ii,    173. 
Evolution  and  optimism,  ii,  546. 
Exactness  of  movement,  i,  144. 
Exercise,  health  and,  i,  169. 

measurements  and,  i.  193. 


INDEX  OF   SUBJECTS 


753 


Exercise,  music  and,  i,  190. 

rhythm  and,  i,    190. 
Exhaustion  at  adolescence,  i,  276. 

and  youthful   insanity,  i,  299. 
Exhibitionists,  ii,  97. 
Expectoration,  i,   118. 
Extermination    of    primitive    races, 

ii,  650. 
Exterminator,  man  the  great,  ii,  93. 
Eye  troubles,  i,  259. 


Face,  growth  of,  i,  ^2. 

Families,  size  of,  ii,  600. 

Farm  work,  i,  172. 

Fastidiousness,  ii,  80. 

Fat,  i,  123. 

Fatigue,  power  to  resist,  i,  149. 

variability  of,  ?,  151. 
Faults  of  children,  i,  344  et  seq. 
Favorite  sounds  and  words,  ii,  305, 

465- 
Fear,  ii,  370. 

Fears,  forms  of  sex,  i,  451. 
Fecundity  of  college  women,  ii,  594. 
Feeling  and  instincts,  ii,  61. 

and  theology,  ii,  326. 
Feelings,  ii,  40  ct  seq. 

psychology  of,  ii,  58. 
Female  coyness,  ii,  116. 

differences,  male  and,  ii,   562. 
Femininity  in  the  church,  i,  225. 
Feminists,  ii,  624. 
Femur,  growth  of,  i,  66. 
Fertility,  age  of,  i,  508. 
Fetishes,  love,  ii,  113. 
Fighting,  i,  216  et  seq.,  356. 
Fire-gazing,  ii,  188. 
First-born,  size  of,  i,  6. 
Flogging  for  crime,  i,  399,  402. 
Flowers,  human  traits  of,  ii,  206. 
language  of,  ii,  205. 
psychology  of,  ii,  202. 
Folly  and  wisdom,  ii,  88. 
changes  in,  ii,   11. 
growth  and,  i,  32. 
Food  and  puberty,  i,  252  ct  seq. 
Foot,  changes  in  growth  of.  i,  68. 
Force  as  a  philosophic  postulate,  ii, 

543- 
Foreign  languages,   dangers  of,    ii, 

457-    _ 
Forests,  ii,  214. 
France,    secondary  education  in.  ii, 

513. 
Freedom,  ii,  89. 

Friction    points    between    races,    ii, 
723- 

87 


Friendship,  antique,  ii,  411. 

love  and,  ii,  133. 
Friendships  of  adolescence,  i,  318. 
Frogs'  legs,  study  of,  i,  129. 
Frost,    ii,    186. 
Fundamental   and   accessory,    i,  88 

III,  .154-. 
Future  life,  ii,  44. 


Games,  i,  202. 

group,  i,  221. 

Panhellenic,  i,  200,  203. 
Gangs,   i,  360;  ii,  396. 
General    paralysis    and    puberty,    1, 

292. 
Genetic  psychology,  obstacles  to,  ii, 
41  et  seq. 

theory  of  public  growth,  i,  44. 
Genius,  i,  309. 

early  development  of,  i,  537. 

and  insanity,  i,  320. 
Geography,   ii,    151. 
Giants,  i,  38,  41. 

and  activity,  i,  41. 
Giggling,  ii,  78. 
Gill-slits,  ii,  192. 

Girl    graduates,    aversion    to    mar- 
riage, causes  of,  ii,  592. 

fecundity  of,  ii,  594. 

sterility  of,   ii,   596. 
Girls  and  boys,  differences  between, 

ii,  569. 
dangers    of    coeducation    for,    11, 

621. 
diseases  of,  ii,   569. 
education  of,  ii,  561,  612,  636. 
education  of,   more  difficult  than 

boys,  ii,  616. 
education     most     humanistic,     ii, 

645. 
education,  manners  in,  ii,  638. 
education,  nature  in,  ii,  641. 
education,  religion  in,  ii.  640. 
first  largest,  why,  i,  42  ct  seq. 
health  of,  ii.   569. 
health    statistics    of    students,    ii, 

583. 
in  high  schools,  predominance  of, 

ii,  506. 
menstruation  of,   ii,  571- 
natural  selection  and  pre-pubertic 

growth  in,  i,  43. 
overdraw  their   energy,   ii,  573- 
and  questionnaires,  ii,  589. 
regularity  in«education  of,  ii,  639. 
Glabella,   i,   78. 

Gland  growth  in  puberty,   i,   II4- 
Glands,  lachrymal,  i,   121. 


754 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


Good   conduct  and   reactions   from 

it,  ii,  82. 
Good-will    as  a   philosophic   postu- 
late, ii,  546. 
Grammar,  place  of,  ii,  456. 
Gravity  center  in  the  human  body, 

i,  61. 
Greece,  athletics  festivals  in,  i,  203. 

ephebic  rites  in,  ii,  249. 

initiation  in,  ii,  249. 

puberty   in,   ii,   249. 
Greek  body  training,  i,  203. 

boys,  i,  513. 

Church  confirmation,  ii,  272. 

education,  ii,  249. 
Grip,  power  of,  i,  139. 
Group  games,   i,  221. 
Growing-pains,  i,  80  et  seq.,  88. 
Growth,  abnormalities  of,  i,  126. 

acceleration  of,  i,    16,  24,  42. 

affected  by  food,  work,  diseases- 
etc,  i,  32-34- 

age  of  maximal,  i,  14,  24,  42. 

of  arms,  i,  65. 

of  arteries,  i,  93. 

asymmetry  in,  ii,  88. 

asynchronism  of,  i,  55. 

in    autumn,    in    thickness,    i,    21 
et  seq. 

bilateral,  i,   125. 

of  blood-vessels,  i,  88. 

bone,  hygiene  of,  i,  82-83. 

of  bones  in  puberty,  i,  58  et  seq. 

of  brain,  i,    105. 

of  brain-cells,   i,    106-107. 

of  brain  in  plasticity  at  puberty, 
i,  108. 

in  breadths,  i,  52. 

cessation  of,  i,  25-28,  55. 

in  chest  girth,  i,  8. 

and  climate,  i,  ii- 

and  comfort,  i,  31  et  seq. 

complexity  of,  i,  28  et  seq. 

control  of,  i,  34. 

criticisms  on  statistics,  i,  13. 

and  death,  i,  4. 

determinants  of,  i,  29  ct  seq. 

and  diet,  i,  21. 

disproportionate,  as  cause  of  dis- 
ease, i,  240. 

equilibrium  of,   i,  2,6. 

of  face,  i,  72. 

of  femur,  i,  66. 

of  first  two  years,  i,  5. 

fluctuations  in,  i,  33-35,  42,  53. 

and  food.   i.  32. 

of  foot,  changes  in,  i,  68. 

in  girth  of  elbow,  i,  66. 


Growth,    gymnastics   and   its   effect 

on,  i,  196  et  seq. 
harmonious,  i,  124. 
of  head,  i,  71. 
of  heart,  i,  88. 
and    height   mass  measurements, 

i,  7,  8. 
in  height,  spring,  i,  21  et  seq. 
last  stages  of,  i,  25  et  seq. 
later  stages  most  human,  i,  39. 
in  lengths,   i,  52. 
limited  knowledge  of,  i,  29. 
literature  on,  i,  6. 
of  liver,  i,  117. 
of  lower  jaw,  i,  yy. 
made  up  if  retarded,  i,  24. 
malnutrition  and,   i,   20. 
is   maximal   size  desirable?  i,  36. 
and  mental  ability,  i,  2y. 
of  mental  powers,  general,  i,  138 

et  seq.,  141. 
of  muscles,  i,  83. 
and  natural  selection,  i,  45,  46. 
of  naval  cadets,  i,  26. 
of  neck,  i,  79. 
of  nose,  i,  78. 
of  ovaries,  i,  121. 
of  pelvis,  i,  69,  71. 
periods,  i,  23. 
plasticity  of,  i,  33. 
prenatal,  i,  3-4. 
prepubertal   decrease   in   rate  of,' 

i,  23. 
prepubertal,    and    retardation,    i, 

42-44,  45,  47,  59-60. 
pubescent  increment,  causes  of,  i, 

42  ^^  seq. 
is  the  race  increasing?  i,  34. 
races  and,  i,  34-35. 
is  rapidity  advantageous,  i,  35. 
rate  of  embryo,  i,  3. 
rate  of  parts,  i,  51. 
and  retardation  age,  i,  41. 
rhythms,  i,  24. 
seasonal  changes  in,  i,  22. 
seasons  and,  i,  21-22,  33. 
sex  differences  in,  i,  16-19,  42. 
of  skin  at  puberty,  i,  112. 
of  skull,  i,  72  et  seq. 
of  skull,  sex  differences  in,  i,  45. 
of  soldiers,  i,  35. 
of  span,  i,  66. 
statistics,    methods    of,    i,    12    et 

seq. 
of  Swedish  boys,  i,  16  et  seq. 
of  symmetry,  i,   125. 
of  tallest  and  shortest  races,  i,  30. 
of  testes,  i,  122. 


INDEX  OF  SUBJECTS 


755 


Growth,   theories  of  prepubertal,   i, 
42-44,  47. 
of  thoracic  girdle,  i,  69. 
in  weight,  i,  7  ct  scq. 
Griibelsucht,  i,  314. 
Guilt,  conscience  and,  ii,  313. 
Gymnastics,   i,    iii. 

and  its  efifects  on  growth,  i,  196 

et  seq. 
and  its  four  unharmonized  ideals, 

i,  195- 
ideal    of,    and   anthropometry,    i, 

193- 
military  ideals  and,  i,  189. 
patriotism  and,  i,   189. 
for  proportion  and  measurement 

criticized,  i,  194,  200. 
Swedish,  i,  187  ct  seq.,   192. 
Gynecology  and  its  needs,  i,  504. 

Habits,  dermal,  ii,  7. 

and  muscle,  i,  132. 
Hairs,  dermal,  ii,  8. 
Hand  and  arboreal  life,  i,  155. 

power  of,  i,   139. 

power,   right  and  left,    i,    147   ^t 
seq. 
Hanging  power  and  puberty,  i,  138. 
Haramatophobia,  ii,  310. 
Hard  and  soft  water,  i,  83. 
Harmonious  growth,  i,  124. 
Hauser,  Kasper,  i,  282-284. 
Head,  growth  of,  i,  71. 
Headache,  i,  246  et  seq. 
Health  and  exercise,  i,  169. 

of  girls,  ii,  569. 

statistics  of  girl  students,  ii,  583. 
Hearing,  ii,  21. 
Heart  and  arteries,  relations  of,  i, 

93- 

beats,   strength  of,  i,  91. 

growth  of,  i,  88. 

masturbator's,  i,  443. 

troubles  in  puberty,  i,  254. 
Heat  and  cold,  ii,   186. 
Hebephrenia,   i,   268. 
Height,   brachycephaly  and,   i,  30. 

decrease  during  day,  i,  8. 

dolichocephaly  and,   i,  30. 

measurements,    limitations    of,    i, 
12. 

measurements,  value  of,  i,  19. 

related  to  long  and  broad  heads, 
i,  30. 

sitting  and   standing,  i,  61. 

and   social  class,  i,  8. 

and  vital  capacity,  i,  103.  _ 
Heredity,  eozoic  bases  of,  i,  58- 

puberty  and,  i,  27,  308. 


Heterogeny,   i,   156. 
High    school,    Committee    of    Ten, 
three   great    fallacies,   ii,  510. 
standardization  of  knowledge,  ii, 
508. 
High  schools,  ii,  503. 

college  dominance   and   its  evils, 

ii,  515,  520. 
Committee   of   Ten   criticized,    ii, 

508. 
curves  of  leaving,   i,  507. 
need   of  emancipation   from   col- 
lege, ii,  526. 
predominance  of  girls  in,  ii,  506. 
statistics  and  curricula  of,  ii,  505. 
Hill-climbing,  i,  227. 
Hindoos,  ii,  700. 

Historic  interest,  growth  of,  ii,  480. 
History,  ideal  reconstruction  of,  ii, 
447- 
value  and  method  of,  ii,  446. 
Home,  love  of,  ii,  375. 
Homesickness,  ii,  380. 
Homogeneity  of  races,  eflfects  of,  ii, 

717- 
Honor,  ii,  443. 
Hoodlums,  i,  319. 
Horse,  pedigree  of,  i,  48. 
Humerus,  growth  of.  i,  65. 
Hydropsychoses,  ii,  196. 
Hymen,  changes  in,  i,  423. 
Hysteria,  i,  275. 

sex  and,  ii,  121. 

talking  cure  of,  i,  279. 

Ideal   education  of  women,  ii,   636. 
Idealism,    its    pedagogy    and    dan- 
gers, ii,  535. 

ultra,  ii,  46. 
Ideals  of  adult  life,   ii,  387- 
Idiocy  at  adolescence,  i,  281. 
Idiots,   best   age   for  growth  of,  i, 
260. 

brains  of,  i,  109. 

castration  of,   i,   427. 
Imagination,  i,  313,  350. 

play  and,  i,  234. 
Imitation  at  puberty,  i.  316. 
Immortality,  lust  for,  ii,  41. 
Impregnation,   i,   i. 
India,  ii,  700. 
Indian  education,  ii,  694. 

nature,  ii,  698. 

songs,  ii.  695. 
Indians,   ii,  688. 
Individual   psychology,   ii,    487. 
Individuality  overblown,  i,  3I5._ 
Individuals,  measurements  of,  i,  14 
et  seq. 


756 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 


Industrial  education,  i,  170  et  seq. 
Industry  and  movement,  i,  166. 
Inhibition,  i,  162. 

of  reflex  movements,  i,  145. 
Initiation  in  Greece,  ii,  249. 
Initiations  to  puberty,  ii,  232. 

of  youth,  Jewish,  ii,  260. 
Insanity,  adolescent,  i,  293. 

doubting,  i,  291. 

genius  and,  i,  320. 

and  masturbation,  i,  445. 

and  puberty,  i,  iii. 

pubertal,  i,  270  et  seq. 

youthful,  exhaustion  and,  i,  299. 
Instability,  i,  47. 
Instincts,  ii,  40  et  seq. 
Intellect,  adolescence  in,  ii,  453. 

conversion  of,  ii,  315. 

sense  and,  ii,  87. 
Intemperance,  i,  367. 
Intense  states,  love  of,  ii,  73. 
Interests,  ii,  85. 

Intestinal  changes  in  puberty,  i,  113. 
Invalid,  the  New  England,  i,  286. 
Itching,   i,  120. 

Jaw,  growth  of  lower,  i,  yy. 

upper,  i,  78. 
Jealousy,  i,  357. 
Jesus,    adolescents    disciples    of,    i, 

523- 
youths'  need  of,  ii,  328. 
Jewish  initiations  of  youth,   ii,  260. 
Jews,    confirmation  among,  ii,  262. 
Joints,  rate  of  movement  in,  i,  142 

et  seq. 
Juvenile  penology,  i,  341  et  seq. 
theft,  i,  330  et  seq. 

Katatonia,   i,   268. 
Kennen  and  Konen,  i,  204. 
Kidneys  in  puberty,  i,  114. 
Killing  of  defectives,  i,  394. 
Knee,  height  of,  i,  67. 
Knightly  ideas  of  youth,  i,  532. 
Knowing  and  doing,  ii,  86. 
Knowledge  and  love,  ii,  136. 
Korea,  puberty  in,  ii,  244. 

Lachrymal  glands,  i,  121. 
Language    through    eye    and   hand, 
dangers  of,  ii,  461. 

love  and,  ii,   134. 

precision  curve,  ii,  467, 

versus  literature,  ii,  459. 
Landsmannschaften,  ii,  408, 
Lapsed  movements,  i,  161. 

states  of  mind,  ii,  66. 
Latin,  danger  of,  ii,  458. 


Laughing,  ii,  78,  95. 

cult,  i,  169. 

intensity,  curve  of,  i,  251. 
Laughter,  i,  232. 

Law  vs.  chaos  as  a  credo,  ii,  544. 
Laziness,  energy  and,  ii,  75. 
Leadership,  i,  36,  38,  39,  40. 
Leap,  i,  137. 
Leg  strength,  i,  136. 
Lengths,  growth  in,  i,  52. 
Lies,  i,  351. 

Life  a  philosophic  postulate,  ii,  545. 
Lifting  from  wrist,  i,  136.  -^ 

power,  i,  133.  \ 

Limbs  grow  faster  than  body,  i,  62. 
Lime,  appetite  for,  i,  83. 
Literary  men,  youth  of,  i,  537,  562. 

women,  youth  of,  i,  546. 
Literature  and  adolescence,  i,   513. 

on  growth,  i,  6. 

language  vs.,  ii,  459. 
Liver,  growth  of,  i,  117. 
Lives  of  saints,  i,  524  et  seq. 
Logical    mentation   of    children,    ii, 

45I: 
Longevity,  i,  41. 
Lordosis,  i,  82. 
Love,  ii,  95. 

of  being,   ii,  135. 

Bible  and,  ii,  126. 

of  children,  ii,  134. 

of  community,  ii,  134. 

and  courtship,  ii,  139. 

death  and,  ii,  128. 

of  elders,  ii,  105. 

ethics  and,  ii,  132. 

fetishes,  ii,  113. 

and  friendship,  ii,  133. 

knowledge  and,  ii,  136. 

and  language,  ii,   134. 

medical  definitions  of,  ii,  115. 

of  music,  ii,  23. 

and  nature,    ii,    129,    144. 

nature,  and  pantheism,  ii,  163. 

in  Plato,  ii,  294. 

and  religion,  ii,  127,  295. 

stages  in  development  of,  ii,  102. 

and  war,  i,  221. 
Lung  growth  and  age,  i,  97. 
Lungs  and  sex,  i,  99. 
Lutheran  confirmation,   ii,  277. 
Lying,   ii,  366. 

Machinery  and  movement,  i,  166. 

Mafia,  i,  362. 

Male    and    female,    differences,    ii, 

562. 
Malnutrition  and  growth,  i,  20. 
Mammae,  changes  of,  i,  419. 


INDEX  OF  SUBJECTS 


757 


Man  once  a  pigmy,  i,  49. 
Manners,  i,   165;  ii,  365. 

in   girls'   education,  ii,  638. 
Manual  training,  i,   174  ct  scq. 

defects  and  criticisms  of,  i,   177. 

difficulties  of,  i,  175. 
Marriage,  delay  of,  dangers  of,   ii, 
628. 

of  girl  graduates,  statistics  of,  ii, 
590. 

of  male  graduates,  ii,  604. 
"Mashes,"  ii,  107. 
Massochism,  ii,  112. 
Masturbation,  i,  432  et  seq. 

in  animals,   i,   435. 

causes  of,  i,  436. 

and  coitus  compared,   i,  440, 

and  despair,  i,  457  et  seq. 

effects  of,  i,  436. 

evils  of,  i,  447. 

extent  of,  i,  453. 

insanity  and,   i,  445. 

and   quacks,   i,   460. 

and  religion,  i,  452. 
Masturbator's   heart,  i,  443. 
Maternity  deferred,   dangers  of,  ii, 

607. 
Maturity,  effects  on  offspring,  i,  50. 

of  different  organs,  i,   55. 
Measurements  and  exercise,  i,   193. 

height,  limitations  of,   i,   12. 

height  mass,  growth  and,  i,  7,  8. 

height,  value  of,   i,   19. 

of  individuals,  i,  14  et  seq. 
Medical  definitions  of  love,   ii,  115. 
Medullation,  brain,  order  of,  i,  109. 
Megrim,  i,  261. 
Memory,  age  of,  ii,  492. 

development   of,  ii,   488. 

kinds  of,   ii,  491. 

sex  curve  of  types  of,  ii,  490. 

of  youth  easily  lost,  i,  535. 
Men,  monthly  periods  in,  i,  501. 

and  women,  differences  between, 
ii,  562. 
Menstrual  wave,   i,   486. 
Menstruation,  age  of,  i,  474. 

in  animals,  i,  472. 

and  crime,  i,  498. 

and  equilibrium,  i,  294. 

of  girls,   ii,  571. 

physiology  of,    i,  482. 

premature,  i,   478. 

regimen  of,  ii,  580. 

among  savages,  i,   479. 

and   shame,  i,  511. 

and    specific   gravity  of  blood,   i, 
96. 

theories  of,  i,  485. 


Mensur,  i,  219. 

Mental  ability,  growth  and,  i,  37. 

Metabolism  and  capacity,  i,  98. 

studies  of,  i,  14. 
Metorrhagia,  i,  479. 
Mexicans,   ii,  679. 
Micturitional  obscenities,  i,  116. 
Middles  Ages  and  youth,  i,  532;  ii, 

259- 
Migrations,  i,  45. 

of  animals,  ii,  378. 
Military  drill,   i,   222. 

ideals  and  gymnastics,   i,   189. 

training  of  youth,  ii,  259. 
Milt,  i,  118. 

Mind  and  motility,  i,  131  et  seq. 
Missing  link  between  animals  and 

man,  ii,  91-93. 
Mission  methods,  ii,  361. 

work  in  China,  ii,  y^iT- 

work,  extent  of,  ii,  731. 

work,  pedagogy  of,  ii,  735. 

work,   student  volunteers,  ii,  732. 
Missionaries,  ii,  728. 

mistakes  of,  ii,  72>Z- 
Missions,  Catholic  methods,  ii,  729. 

to  utilize  all  that  is  best  of  ethnic 
faiths  and  customs,  ii,  745. 
Modesty,  ii,  118,  372. 
Money  sense,  ii,  392. 
Monophyletic   theories,   i,  57. 
Mons,  changes  of,  i,  421. 
Monthly  cycle,  abnormal,  i,  492. 

cycle,    normal    psychology    of,    i, 
492. 

period   and   Sabbath,   i,  502. 

periods  and  dreams,  i,  502. 

periods  in  men,  i,  501. 

periods   in   non-sexual   parts   and 
organs,  i,  490. 
Mood  in  puberty,  i,  297. 
Moon,   ii,   175. 

of   myth,    science    and   pedagogy, 

ii.    175- 
Morbidity  curves,  i,  251. 

tables,  i,  246  et  scq. 
Mortal  sins,  ii,  305. 
Motherhood,  training  for,  ii,  636. 
Mothers,   natality  of,  ii,  597. 
Motor  activity,  primitive,  i,  167. 

automatisms,   i,   158. 

defects  of  children,  i,  164. 

defects,  general,  i,  168. 

economies,  i,   192. 

powers,  general  growth  of,  i,  138 
et  scq.,  141. 

precocity,  i.   157. 

psychoses,  muscles  and,  i,  131. 

recapitulation,  i,  205,  228. 


758 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


Motor  regularity,  i,  213. 

vigor,  sex  and,  i,  132. 
Mountains,  ii,  200. 
Movement,   accuracy  of,   i,    144. 

exactness  of,  i,    144. 

industry  and,  i,  166. 

in  joints,  rate  of,  i,  142  et  seq. 

precision  of,  i,   144-148. 
Movements,  control  of,  i,  145. 

lapsed,  i,   161. 

precocity  of,   i,    165. 

reflex,  inhibition  of,  i,  145. 
Muscle  girth  and  breadth,  i,  86. 

related  to  bone  growth,  i,  88. 

tension,  thought  and,  i,  156. 
Muscles  of  arm  and  leg,  i,  85. 

body  per  cent  by  weight,  i,  131. 

and  character,    i,    131. 

growth  of,  i,  83. 

inflexors,    i,   84. 

and  motor  psychoses,  i,  131. 

small,  and  thought,   i,   156. 

tense  and  relaxed,  i,  87. 

variability  of,  i,  84. 

weight  of,  i,  84. 

and  will,  i,  131. 
Muscular  Christianity,  i,  189. 
Music  and  exercise,  i,  190. 

love  of,  ii,  23. 
Mutation,  ii,  24. 

regimen  of,  ii,  30. 
Myopia,  i,  259. 
Myth,  nature  and,  ii,  153. 
Myths  of  Plato,  ii,  254. 

Narration  craze,  ii,  472. 
Nascent  periods,  i,  35,  iii,  128. 
Nasion,  i,  78. 

Natality  of  mothers,  ii,  597. 
National  epics,  ii,  442. 
Nations,  ii,  408. 

Natural    selection,    growth    and,    i, 
45,  46. 

selection  and  prepubertic  growth 
in  girls,  i,  43. 
Nature  in  girls'  education,  ii,  641. 

as  humanism,  ii,  150. 

love  and,  ii,  129. 

love  of,  ii,  144. 

love  and  pantheism,  ii,  163. 

and  myth,  ii,  153. 

philosophy,  ii,   147. 

poetry,  ii,   148. 

study  and  race  history,  ii,  151. 

technical  nomenclature,  ii,   148. 
Naval  cadets,  growth  of,  i,  26. 
Neck,  growth  of,  i,  79. 
Necrosis,  nutrition  and,  i,  4. 
Negativism,  i,  283. 


Negro,  traits  of,  ii,  675. 
Nephelopsychoses,   ii,    181. 
Nerve  signs,  i,  261. 
Nerves  of  sex,  special,  i,  448. 
Nervousness,  i,  247  et  seq. 
Neurasthenia  at  puberty,  causes  of, 

i,  290. 
New  birth,  puberty  a,  i,  127. 
New  England  invalid,  i,  2S6. 
Night  psychoses,  i,  264. 
Nipple,  changes  of,  i,  420. 
Noises  of  animals,  ii,  25. 
Nonsense  in  adolescence,  i,  317. 
Normal  museums,   ii,  501. 

schools,  ii,  495. 

schools,  diseases  of,  ii,  496. 

schools,     history     of     education, 
how  to  teach  it,  ii,  498. 
Nose,  growth  of,  i,  78. 
Nostalgia,  ii,  380. 
Nudity,  ii,  96. 
Nutrition,  nature  of,  i,  252. 

and  necrosis,  i,  4. 
Nutritive    struggle    among    tissues 
and  organs,  i,  4,  36. 

Obedience,  ii,  451. 

Obstacles   to   psychology,   ii,   41    et 

seq. 
Odor,  i,  1 19-120. 
Old  and  new  organs,  i,  55. 
Onanism,  i,  432. 
Onychophagia,  i,  260. 
Optimism,  evolution  and,  ii,  546. 
Oratory,  pedagogic  value,   ii,  433. 
Organs,   law   and   time  of  growth, 
i,  127. 

in  man,  aquatic,  ii,  192. 
Orthodoxy,  dangers  of,  ii,  319. 
Ossification,  i,  80. 
Osteomalacia,  i,  81. 
Ovaries,  changes  in,  i,  423. 

growth  of,  i,   121. 
Ovulation,  i,  424. 
Ovum,  size  and  weight  of,  i,  3. 

Pain  reacting  to  pleasure,  ii,  76. 

sensibility,   ii,  4. 
Paleoatavism  and  infancy,  i,  50. 
Palpitation,  i,  255. 

at  puberty,  i,  92. 
Pancreas,  i,   118. 
Panhellenic  games,  i,  200,  203. 
Parts,  growth  rate  of,  i,  51. 
Passive  movements,  i,  226. 
Patagonians,  ii,  678. 
Pathos,  power  of,  ii,  334. 
Patriotism  and  gymnastics,  i,  189. 
Pauperism,  i,  385. 


INDEX  OF  SUBJFXTS 


759 


Peace,  not  war,  man's  normal  state, 

i,    174- 
Pedagogy  of  mission  work,  ii,  735. 

of  philosophy,  ii,  531. 

of  physics,  ii,   154. 
Pelagic  vestiges,  ii,  192. 
Pelvic  girdle,  i,  69  et  seq. 
Pelvis,  growth  of,  i,  69,  71. 
Penology,  juvenile,  i,  341  et  seq. 

past  and  present,  i,  391. 
Periodicity,   i,   472. 
Personality,  its  elements,  i,  309. 
Peruvians,   ii,  679. 
Phallicism,   ii,  98. 
Philology,  dangers  of,  ii,  459. 
Philosophic  propaedeutic,  ii,  548. 

schools,    ii,   553. 
Philosophies,  types  of,  ii,  551. 
Philosophy,    epistemology,    noxious 
for    youth,    ii,    535. 

pedagogy  of,  ii,  531. 

preys   on    sense   of   unreality,    ii, 
531- 

safe  ultimate  postulates  of,  ii,  539. 

solipsism,  dangers  of,  ii,  535. 

teaching,  history  of,  ii,  532. 
Phobias,  i,  291. 
Phyletic  correlates,  ii,  93. 

influences  in  sex,  ii,  loi. 
Physics,  pedagogy  of,  ii,  154. 
Pigmentation,  i,   121. 
Pigmy,  man  once  a,  i,  49. 
Pithecoid,  ii,  91. 
Pituitary  body,  influence  on  growth, 

i,  81. 
Pity,  ii,  273- 

of  self,  ii,  354. 
Plants,  ii,  202. 
Plasmata,  i,   411. 
Plasticity  of  growth  at  puberty,   i, 

127. 
Plato,  boys  in,  i,  513. 
Play,  i,  202. 

course  of  study,  i,  231. 

and  imagination,  i,  234. 

and    prehistoric    activity,    i,    202 
et  seq. 

problem,  i,  227  et  seq. 

and  sex.  i,  223,  230. 

stages  and  ages,  i,  209  et  seq. 

and  work,  i,  232  et  seq. 
Plays  and  games,  codification  of,  i, 

230. 
Pleasure,  pain  reacting  to,  ii,  76. 
Points  de  repere,  i,  53-54. 
Pole   and   swastika,  ii,   166. 
Polymasty,  i.  421. 
Popular  delusions,  i,  265. 
Popular  science,  ii,  153. 


Post-maturity       in       child-bearing, 

dangers  of,  ii,  607. 
Power    to   press  arms   together,    i, 

136. 
Precision,  dangers  of  premature,  i, 
165. 
of  movement,   i,   144-148. 
Precocity,  i,  26,  31,  36,  37,  48,  59, 
76,  81. 
causes  of,  i,  321. 
motor,  i,  157. 

in  the  motor  sphere,  i,  207  et  seq. 
of  movements,  i,  165. 
in  sex,   ii,   102. 
Predatory  organizations,  i,  360;  ii, 

403- 
Prenatal  growth,  i,   3-4. 
Prepubertal    growth    and    retarda- 
tion, i,  42-44,  45,  47,  59-60. 
Prepubescent      retardation,     causes 

of,   i,  41. 
Pressure  power  of  knees,  i,  137. 
Primitive  motor  activity,  i,  167. 
races,  ii,  648. 

races  exterminated,  ii,  650. 
Probation  system,  i,  400. 
Property,  psychology  of,  ii,  392. 
Proportion,  i,  124,  127. 
Prostitution,  i,   370. 
Psychic    activity,    seasons    and,    ii, 

487- 

changes  in  adolescents,  ii,  70. 

contagion,  i,  265. 

dangers  of  puberty,  i,  271. 

research,  ii,  43. 

research,  errors  of,  ii,  342. 

states,     alternations     of,     ii,     75 
et  seq. 
Psychology,  animal,   ii,  52. 

of  conversion,  ii.  349. 

of  feelings,  ii,  58. 

genetic,  obstacles  to,  ii,  41  et  seq. 

individual,  ii,  487. 

of  property,  ii,  392. 

of  savages,   ii,  51. 

of  sentiments,  ii,  58. 
Pubertal  insanity,  i,  270  et  seq. 
Puberty     with     American     aborigi- 
nes,  ii,   232. 

blood  corpuscles  and,  i,  95. 

in  Buddhism,  ii,  245. 

carbonic  acid  and.  i,  104. 

causes  of  neurasthenia  at,  1,  290, 

climbing  power  and,  i,   138. 

dramatic  instinct  of,  i,  317. 

dreams  and,  i,  262. 

food  and.  i,  252  et  seq. 

general  paralysis  and,  i,  292. 

gland  growth  in,  i.  114. 


760 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


Puberty  in  Greece,  ii,  249. 

growth  of  skin  at,  i,  112. 

hanging  power  and,  i,  138. 

heart  troubles  in,  i,  254. 

and  heredity,  i,  27,  308. 

imitation  at,  i,  316. 

initiations  to,  ii,  232. 

insanity  and,  i,  iii. 

insanity  of,  i,  270  et  seq. 

intestinal  changes  in,  i,  113. 

kidneys  in,  i,  114. 

in  Korea,  ii,  244. 

mood  in,  i,  297. 

a  new  birth,  i,  127. 

palpitation  at,  i,  92. 

plasticity  of  growth  at,  i,  127. 

psychic  dangers  of,  i,  271. 

and  race,  i,  10. 

rites  in  Africa,  ii,  245. 

rites  in  Eastern  islands,  ii,  239. 

in  Rome,  ii,  256. 

sleep  and,  i,  262. 

suggestiveness  of,  i,  310. 

temperature  and,  i,  123  et  seq. 

urea  in,  i,  115. 

urine  in,  i,  115. 

weak-mindedness  at,  i,  291. 
Pubescence,   neoatavistic,  i,  50. 
Pugnacity  and  debate,  ii,  433. 
Pull  up,  power  of,  i,  135. 
Pulse,  frequency  and  age  of,  i,  91. 
Punishment,  corporal,  i,  399,  402. 
Punishments  in  school,  causes  of,  i, 

346. 
Putting  power,  i,  135. 
Puzzles,  ii,  485. 
Pyromania,  i,  366. 


Quacks,  masturbation  and,  i,  460. 
Questionnaires,  girls  and,  ii,  589. 


Rabbits  and  child,  ii,  226. 
Race  education,  ii,  721. 

history,  nature  study  and,  ii,  151. 

puberty  and,  i,  10. 

stature,  sex  selection  and,  i,  45. 

type  and,   i,    13. 
Races,  effects  of  homogeneity  of,  ii, 

friction  points  between,  ii,  723. 

and  growth,  i,  34735- 

primitive,    extermination    of,    ii, 

650. 
tallest   and   shortest,    growth   of, 

i,  30. 
Radical   and  conservative  instincts, 

ii,  87. 


Rapes,  i,  373. 
Rauhe  Haus,  i,  395. 
Reaction  time,  i,  152. 

time  and  sex,  i,  153. 
Reading  age,  ii,  474. 

crime  and,  i,  408. 

curve,  ii,  467. 
Reason,  age  of,  i,  ill. 

development  of,  ii,  482. 
Reassociation,  i,  280. 
Recapitulation,  i,  2-3,  44-45,  48-49, 
50,  55-57,  89. 

and  motor  heredity,  i,  205  et  seq. 
Records  in  athletics,  i,  198. 
Rectifications  of  religious  ideals,  ii, 

315- 
Reformatories  for  youth,  i,  327. 

theories  of,  i,  397  et  seq. 
Regeneration,  ii,  314. 
Regularity  in  education  of  girls,  ii, 

639- 
Rejuvenation,  i,  i. 
Relapses  to  water,  ii,  195. 
Religion,  definitions  of,  ii,  351. 

in  girls'  education,  ii,  640. 

love  and,  ii,  127,  295. 

masturbation  and,  i,  462. 
Religious  genius,  ii,  356. 

ideals,  rectifications  of,  ii,  315. 
Reproductive  age  and  size,  i,  49. 
Respiration,    costal    and   abdominal 
types  of,  i,  104. 

frequency  of,  i,  103. 

sex  differences  in,  i,  104-105. 
Respiratory   surface  and   power,   i, 

102. 
Resurrection,  psychic  results  of,  ii, 

335- 
Retardation,  i,  23-24,  27,  42,  56. 

need  of,  i,  321. 
Reverie,  i,    111-112,  311. 
Reverie,  i,  111-112,  311. 
Reversion,  i,  47,  49. 

increased  liabilities  to,  i,  47. 
Revivals,  ii,  284. 
Rhetoric,  teaching  of,  ii,  433. 
Rhythm  and  exercise,  i,  190. 

in  primitive  activities,  i,  211. 

of  work  and  rest,  i,  213. 
Rhythms,   antithetic,   ii,   75  et  seq. 
Rickets,  i,  80. 
Right-  and  left-hand  power,  i,  147. 

et  seq. 
Rivalry,  i,  357. 
Rocks,  ii,  197. 

Roman  law  and  youth,  i,  395. 
Rome,  puberty  in,  ii,  256. 
Rudiments,  i,  49,  52. 
Running  away,  ii,  376. 


INDEX  OF   SUBJECTS 


761 


Sabbath,  monthly  period  and,  i,  502. 
Saints,  lives  of,  i,  524  et  seq. 
Salivary  glands,  i,   117. 
Savages,  ii,  648. 

as  adolescents,  ii,  649. 

ape  traits  in,  i,  57. 

extinction  of,  ii,  650. 

menstruation  among,  i,  479. 

physically     superior    to    civilized 
men,  i,  169. 

psychology  of,  ii,  51. 

as  relays  of  civilization,  ii,  747. 

the  youth  of  the  race,  ii,  747. 
Scholarship,  size  of  skull  and,  i,  76. 
School,  aversions  to,  ii,  383. 

causes  of  punishments  in,  I,  346. 
Scientific  men,  youth  of,  i,  544. 
Scoliosis,  i,  82,  256. 
Scrotum,  i,  416. 

Seasonal  changes  in  growth,  i,  22. 
Seasons  and  growth,  i,  21-22,  33. 
Seasons  and  psychic  activity,  ii,  487. 
Sebaceous  glands,  i,  119. 
Second  birth,  ii,  304. 

breath,  i,  151. 
Secondary  education  in  France,   ii, 

513.     See  also  High  schools. 
Sedentary  life,  i,  166. 

life  and  leg  muscles,  i,  137. 
Self-abuse.     See    Masturbation. 
Self-assertion  and  size,  i,  38. 
Self-feeling,  ii,  79. 
Selfishness,  ii,  81. 

of  children,  ii,  452. 
Senescence,  i,  23,  26. 
Sensations,  strong,  craved,  ii,  37. 
Sense  and  intellect,  ii,  87. 
Senses,  changes  of,  ii,  i. 
Sensitiveness,  ii,  85. 
Sentence  sense,  its  growth,  ii,  470. 
Sentiments,  psychology  of,  ii,  58. 
Sex  anomalies  and  crime,  i,  415. 

antipathies,  ii,  114. 

associations  and  their  explanatory 
power,  i,  286. 

aversions,  ii,  114. 

competition,  evils  of,  ii,  583. 

conflicts,  ii,  iii. 

crime  and,  i,  339,  431. 

culmination,  ii,  122. 

curve  of  types  of  memory,  ii,  490 

development,  i,  411. 

difference  in  vital  capacity,  i,  98 
99,  loi. 

differences  in  bilateral  symmetry 
i,  126. 

differences  in   carbon   exhaled,  i 
104. 

differences  in  growth,  i,  16-19,  42 


Sex  differences  in  growth  of  skull, 
.i,  45- 

differences  in  respiration,  i,  104- 
.105. 

differences  in  size  of  waist,  i,  loi, 
102. 

differences  in  specific  gravity  of 
blood,  i,  96. 

fears,  forms  of,  i,  451. 

and  hysteria,  ii,  121. 

lungs  and,  i,  99. 

motor  vigor  and,  i,  132. 

nerve  centers  of,  i,  449. 

organs,  abnormality  of,  i,  414. 

organs,  functions  of,  i,  413. 

organs,  variability  of,  i,  414. 

pedagogy,  i,  468  ct  seq. 

phyletic  influences  in,  ii,  loi. 

play  and,  i,  223,  230. 

precocity  in,  ii,  102. 

psya^ses,  i,  278. 

reaction  time  and,  i,  153. 

regimen,  i,  463. 

secondary  qualities,  ii,  no. 

selection  and  race  stature,  i,  45. 

against  sex,  ii,  576. 

and  sin,  ii,  102. 

and  smell,  i,  120. 

special  nerves  of,  i,  448. 

theories  of,  ii,  141. 
Sexual  maturity,   i,  41. 

selection  in  man,  i,  224. 
Shakespeare,  youths  in,  i,  533, 
Shame,  menstruation  and,  i,  51 1. 
Showing  off,  ii,  104,  364. 
Sickly  age,  i,  243  et  seq. 
Sickness  in  school  grades,  per  cents, 

i,  243  et  seq. 
Silliness  in  adolescence,  i,  317. 
Sin  and  insanity,  ii,  310. 

sex  and,  ii,  102. 

universal,  ii,  353. 
Sitting  height,  curve  of,  i,  63  et  seq. 
Size  and  endurance,  i,  38. 

and  fertility,  i,  37. 

and  intelligence,  i,  36-38. 

judgments  of,  ii,  34. 

and  self-assertion,   i,  38. 
Skin,  development  of,  ii,  5. 

at  puberty,  growth  of,  i,  112. 
Skull,  abnormalities  of,  i,  76. 

growth  of,  i,  72  et  seq. 

length  and  breadth  of.  i,  75. 

size  of,  and  scholarship,  i,  76. 
Slang  curve,  ii,  467. 

value  of,  ii,  468. 
Slavery,  ii,  673. 
Sleep,  proper  time  of,  i,  263. 

and  puberty,  i,  262. 


762 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 


Sleeplessness,  i,  246  et  seq. 

Sloyd,  origin,  aims,  criticism  of,  i, 

178. 
Small  and  large  men,  psychological 

differences,  i,  38. 
Smell,  changes  in,  ii,  15. 

sex  and,  i,  120. 
Social  activities,  i,  360. 

instincts  of  youth,   ii,  363. 

organizations  of  youth,   ii,  396. 
Society  and  solitude,  ii,  83. 
Sociology,  schools  of,  ii,  431. 
Solar  heroes,  ii,  172. 
Soldiers,  growth  of,  i,  35. 
Solipsism,  causes,  ii,  45  et  seq. 
Solitude,  ii,  393. 

and  society,  ii,  83. 
Soma,  evolution  of,  i,  2,  40. 
Soul,  interest  in  its  future,  not  its 
past,  ii,  41. 

much  of  it  lost,  ii,  64. 

nature  of,  ii,  63. 
Sounds,  favorite,  and  words,  ii,  305, 
465- 

in  nature,  ii,  22. 
Space  a  psychologic  prius,  ii,  540. 

psychoses,  ii,  159. 
Span,  growth  of,  i,  66. 
Speech  changes,  i,  318. 
Spendthrifts,  i,  319. 
Spermatic  fluid,  i,  419. 
Spermatozoa,  i,  418. 
Spermin,  nature  of,  i,  441. 
Spine,  curvature  of,  i,  256. 
Spirometer  tests,  i,  100. 
Spleen,  i,   119. 

Spontaneous  emissions  and  dreams, 
i,  454- 

emissions,  normal,  i,  456. 

emissions,  rhythm  of,  i,  454. 
Sports,  i,  202. 

codification  of,  i,  230. 
Spring    growth    in    height,    i,     21 
et  seq. 

and  morbidity,  i,  244. 

restlessness,  ii,  378. 
Spurtiness,  i,  150,  157. 
Squeeze,  power  of,  i,  139. 
Stammering,  stuttering  and,  i,  258. 
Stars,  interest  in,  ii,  164. 
Stature,  city  life  and,  i,  30. 
Sterility  of  girl  graduates,  ii,  596. 
Sterility  and  hard  water,  i,  83. 
Stirpiculture,  ii,  725. 
Stones,  ii,  197. 
Storm  and  stress,  illustrations  of,  i, 

555-589- 
Story-spinning,  ii,  473. 


Strength  and  cross-section,  i,  137. 

of  legs,  i,   136. 
Struggle-for-lifeurs,  i,   173. 
Student  life,  disorders  of,  ii,  413. 

volunteers,  mission  work,  ii,  732. 
Students'  associations,  ii,  399. 

religious  life,  ii,  416. 

vices,  ii,  415. 
Stuttering  and   stammering,  i,  258. 
Subjectivism,  evil  of,  ii,  538. 
Suggestiveness  of  puberty,  i,  310. 
Suicide,  ii,  194. 

causes,    forms,   seasons,    etc.,   of, 
i,  374- 
Sun,  the,  ii,  169. 

in   myth,   science,    and  pedagogy, 
ii,  169. 
Suprarenal  capsules,  i,  116. 
Sutures,  close  of,  i,  75. 
Swastika,  pole  and,  ii,  166. 
Sweating,  i,  120. 

Swedish    boys,    growth    of,    i,     16 
et  seq. 

gymnastics,  i,    187  et  seq.,  192. 
Swimming,  i,  225. 
Symmetry,  i,  20,  53,  124-125. 

of  growth,  i,  125. 

Tachygenesis,  i,  3. 

Talent,  early  development  of,  i,  537. 

Tallness,  disadvantages  of,  i,  20. 

Tapping,  i,  142. 

Taste,  ii,  9. 

Teachers,  aversions  to,  ii,  386. 

training  of,  ii,  495. 
Team  spirit,  i,  221  et  seq. 
Teasing,  i,  358. 

Technical  courses,  need  of,  i,  187. 
Teeth,  i,  7y  et  seq. 

wisdom,  i,  254. 
Telegraphic  skill,  curve  of  acquisi- 
tion, i,  181. 
Temibility,  i,  409. 
Temperament,  ii,  89. 
Temperature    and    puberty,    1,    123 

et  seq. 
Testes,  growth  of,  i,  122. 
Theater,   educational   value  of  the, 

ii.  441. 
Theft,  i,  363  et  seq. 

juvenile,  i,  330  et  seq. 
Theology,  feeling  and,  ii,  326. 
Thermal  sense,  ii,  7. 
Therotropic  movements,  i.   160. 
Thoracic  girdle,  growth  of,  i,  69. 
Thought  and  muscle  tension,  i,  156. 
Thyroid  gland,  i.  122. 
Tibia,  curve  of,  i,  67. 
Tickle  sense,  ii,  6. 


INDEX  OF  SUBJECTS 


763 


Tickling,  ii,  95. 

Time    and    place    orientation,    per- 
sistence of,  i,  319. 
Time,  reaction,  i,  152. 

reproduction,  i,  153. 

and  space  in  adolescence,  i,  154. 
Toga  virilis,  ii,  256. 
Torturing,  i,  359. 
Touch,  changes  in,  ii,  2. 

paleopsychic,  ii,  5. 

sense,  i,   120. 
Toxic   agents  in   dementia   praecox, 

i,  306. 
Toys  in  physics,  ii,  157. 
Training  of  teachers,  ii,  495. 
Transitory   nature  of  youthful   ex- 
periences, i,  535. 
Tree  life  and  erect  posture,  i,  155. 

relics  of,  in  man,  ii,  214. 
Trees,  ii,  208. 

in  psychology,  ii,  211. 
Tremograph,  i,  145. 
Troglodyte  life,  ii,  91. 
Trophic  background  of  life,  i,  252. 
Truancy,  i,  348;  ii,  376. 
Trunk,  length  of,  i,  61-65. 
Truth-telling,  i,  352. 
Turner  movement,  i,  187. 
Twins,  size  of,  i,  6. 
Type  and  race,  i,  13. 
Types  of  delinquents,  i,  389. 

Unity  in  the  mind,  i,  323. 

of  mind  lost,  ii,  68. 

of  mind,  place  of,  ii,  90. 
University,  ii,  554. 

publications,  ii.  557. 

research,  ii,  558. 

stipends,  ii,  555. 

students'    relations    to    professor, 
ii,  557- 
Unmarried  women,   dangers   to,  ii, 

628. 
Urea  in  puberty,  i,  115. 
Urinal  fears,  i.  116. 
Urine  in  puberty,  i,  115. 
Uterus,  changes  of,  i,  422. 
Utilities,  study  of,  ii,   153. 
Utility  dominates  thought,  ii,  486. 

Vagabondage,  i,  349. 

Vagina,  changes  of,  i,  422. 

Vagrancy,  i,  349. 

Variability  of  circulation,  i.  89. 

Variation,  ii,  89. 

Variations  in  adolescence,  i,  46. 


Venery,  ii,  125. 
Vertebrae,  changes  in,  i,  82. 
Virility  in  the  Church,  i,  225. 
Vision,  ii,  32. 

Vital  capacity,  sex  difference  in,  i, 
98,  99,   lOI. 

index  and  capacity,  i,  97  et  seq. 
Voice,  change  of,   ii,   i,  24. 

range  of,  ii,  27-30. 

Wandering,   i,  275. 
War,  love  and,  i,  221. 
Water,  hard  and  soft,  i,  83. 

psychoses,  ii,  191. 
Weak-mindedness  at  puberty,  i,  291. 
Weather  and  conduct,  i,  347. 
Weight  decrease  and  disease,  i,  240. 

of  muscles,  i,  84. 
Will  to  live,  i,  252. 

muscles  and,  i,  131. 
Wind,  ii,  184. 
Wisdom  and  folly,  ii,  88. 
Women  bachelors,  ii,  623. 

childlessness  of,  ii,  601. 

college,  fecundity  of,  ii,  594. 

as  ideal,  ii,  646. 

ideal  education  of,  ii,  636. 

long-bodied,    i,  62. 

and  men,  differences  between,  ii, 
562. 

young,  confessionalism  of,  i,  555- 
560. 
Work  at  its  best  is  play,  i,  235. 

play  and,  i,  232  et  seq. 

and  rest,  rhythm  of,  i,  213. 
Wrestling,  i,  220. 
Wrist,  growth  in  girth,  i,  66. 

Yawning,  i,  170. 

Young    Men's    Christian    Associa- 
tion, ii,  421. 
Youth  of  literary  men.  i,  537,  562. 

of  literary  women,  i,  546. 

]\Iiddle  Ages  and,  i,  332 :  ii,  259. 

military  training  of.   ii.  259. 

reformatories  for,  i,  327. 

Roman  law  and,  i,  395. 

of  the  race,  savages  the,  ii,  747. 

of  scientific  men.  i,  544. 

social  instincts  of,   ii,  363. 

social  organizations  of,  ii,  396. 
Youthful      experiences,      transitory 

nature  of.  i.  535. 
Youths  in  Plato,  i,  513. 

in  Shakespeare,  i,  533. 


INDEX    OF    NAMES 


Abbott,  ii,  438. 

Abbott,  Frances  M.,  ii,  591,  592. 

Abbott,  S.  W.,  ii,  596. 

Abel,  ii,  133. 

Abelard,  ii,  533- 

Abercrombie,  E.  E.,  ii,  288. 

Adams,  C.  F.,  ii,  712. 

Adams,  Henry,  ii,  446. 

Adams,  John,  ii,  666. 

Addison,  Joseph,  ii,  459,  472. 

Adolphus,  Gustavus,  i,  540. 

Aeschines,  ii,  434. 

Agassiz,  i,  545;  ii,  418. 

Agathon,   ii,  295. 

Aguinaldo,  ii,  663. 

Ahrens,   ii,  446. 

Ahuitzotzin,   ii,   680. 

Aitken,   ii,  673. 

Akbar,  ii,  705. 

Alaric,  ii,  337. 

Albertoni,  i,  449. 

Alcibiades,  i,  516. 

Alcott,  A.  Bronson,  i,  579;  ii,  451. 

Alcott,  Louisa  M.,  i,  550;  ii,  472. 

Aldrich,  Thomas  B.,  i,  534. 

Alexander  of  Abonuteichos,  i,  265. 

Alexander,  W.  D.,  ii,  660. 

Algeri,  i,  495. 

Allen,  Grant,  ii,  199,  200,  211,  576, 

721,  748. 
Allen,   James   Lane,   i,   581. 
Allen,  Miss  M.  E.,  ii,  631. 
Allen,  M.  W.,  i,  471. 
Allen,  Nathan,  ii,  571,  595. 
AUin,  Arthur,  i,  232;  ii,  78. 
Althaus,  ii,  16. 
Alvarez,  L.  F.,  ii,  661. 
Alzheimer,  i,  292. 
Anacreon,   i,  368. 
Andersen,    Hans    Christian,    i,    580, 

584. 
Anderson,  W.  G.,  i,  34. 
Andree,   ii,   248,    727. 
Andrews,   i,   424. 
Angus,  ii,  96. 
Anilco,  ii,  691. 
Anthony,  i,  387. 
Apathy,  i,  112. 
Appel,'  i,   55. 


765 


Appelius,  i,   398. 

Aquinas,  ii,  271,  548,  729. 

Arago,  ii,   177. 

Aretee,  ii,  312. 

Aristogeiton,   i,  537. 

Aristophanes,   i,   432 ;   ii,   258,   294. 

Aristotle,  i,  iii,  175,  448,  481,  513, 
522;  ii,  31,  41,  63,  149,  174,  251, 
258,  304,  322,  328,  329,  340,  356, 
366,  411,  433,  434,  455,  461,  539, 
551,   597- 

Armstrong,  S.  C,  ii,  657,  659. 

Arnett,  L.  D.,  ii,  450. 

Arnholdt,   ii,  249. 

Arnold,  A.  B.,  i,  467;  ii,  249. 

Arnold,  Matthew,  i,  131 ;  ii,  325. 

Arnold,  Thomas,  i,  217;  ii,  616. 

Ascher,  i,  371. 

Aschrott,  P.  F.,  i,  397. 

Aubry,  i,  337. 

Augagneur,  i,  371. 

Auvard,   A.,    i,   424,    471,  480,   497, 

498.    . 
Avanarius,  ii,  190. 
Aveling,  i,  483. 
Ayres,  S.  G.,  ii,  290. 

Babcock,  ii,  103. 
Babinski,  i,  112. 
Bach,  i,  259,  311. 
Bachin,  G.,  i,  443. 
Bachofen,   ii,    117,   372. 
Bacon,  Francis,  ii,  329,  655. 
Bacon,  L.  W.,  ii,  420. 
Baer,   i,   381,   431. 
von  Baer,  i,  423 ;  ii,  62. 
Bailey,  H.  T.,  i,  176. 
Bailey,    ii,    211. 
Baillarger,  i,  108,  277,  291. 
Baird,   R.,  ii,  282. 
Baker,  ii,   157. 
Baldensperger,   ii,   327. 
Balfour,  ii,  528. 
Ball,   i,  388. 
Ball,   J.    L,   ii,   742. 
Ballod,   ii,   563. 
Bancroft,  C.  P.,  i,  289. 
Banks,  i,  540. 
Barbe,  Emile,  ii,  737. 


766 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


Baring-Gould,  S.,  i,  524;  ii,  327. 

Barker,  i.  112. 

Barnes,    Earl,    i,    184,    185;    ii,    102, 

316,  387,  451,  483,  486. 
Barnes,  Mrs.,  ii,  480,  481. 
Barres,   i,   387. 
Bartel,  i,  388,  502. 
Bartley,  i,  385. 
Barton,   J.    L.,    ii,   732. 
Barus,    i,    4q6. 
Bashkirtseff,     Marie,     i,    554,     562, 

585;  ii,  629. 
Basset,  i,  474,  481. 
Bastian,   ii,  680,  727. 
Bastian,  ii,   190. 
Bateson,   i,  46. 
Baudelaire,  ii,  307. 
Bauer,  i,  344,  471. 
Bauer,  Bruno,  ii,  324. 
Baur,  i,  241,  320. 
Baur,  F.  C,  ii,  324. 
Baxter,  i,  12. 
Bayard,  ii,  261,  443. 
Bazaillas,    ii,    327. 
Beach,  H.  P.,  ii,  678,  732. 
Beard,  ii,   157. 

Beard,  G.  M.,  i,  290,  369;  ii,  570. 
Beattie,  ii,  532. 
Beaunis,  i,   419,   449. 
Beck,   i,    199. 
Becker,  i,  248. 
Becker,  W.  A.,  ii,  250. 
Becquerel,  i,  420. 
Beecher,  Henry  Ward,  i,  538. 
Beer,  ii,  178. 
Behnke,  ii,  30,  31. 
Bell,    Sanford,    i,   405,    471 ;    ii,    13, 

102,  103,  104,  106,  386,  471. 
Bellarmine,   Cardinal,  ii,  266. 
Belt,   ii,  686. 
Bemies,  C.  O.,  i,  230. 
Benecke,  i,  90,  93,  114. 
Benedict,  i,   72. 
Benedict,  A.  L.,  ii,  698. 
Benseman,   i,   434. 
Berger,  i,  434. 
Bergson,  ii,  249. 
Berillon,   i,   159,  260. 
Berkeley,  ii,  46,  532,  534,  535- 
Berkhan,   i,   270. 
Bernard,  i,  388. 
Bernays,   ii,   190. 
Bernheim,  ii,  249. 
Berry,  i,  371. 

Bertillon,  i,  341,  366,  393, 
Bessey,  ii,  211. 
Bethe,  ii,  53. 
Beyer,  H.  G,  i,  26,  37,  38,  40,  97, 

100,    197. 


Beywater,   ii,   190. 

Biart,  Lucien,  ii,  239. 

Bibra,  i,  80. 

Bickerton,  A.  W.,  ii,  230. 

Bierent,  i,  71,   138,  419,  422;  ii,  27. 

Biese,  ii,  147. 

Bigelow,  Poultney,  ii,  666. 

Billings,  ii,  579. 

Billroth,  i,  546;  ii,  23. 

Binet,  ii,  482,  487. 

Binswanger,  i,  285,  290,  308. 

Bischoff,  i,  84,  105,  117. 

Bishop,    i,    19. 

Bishop,  Mrs.  J.  F.,  ii,  739,  740. 

Bismarck,  i,  218;  ii,  409. 

Bizzozero,  i,  34. 

Black  Hawk,  ii,  691. 

Blackman,  ii,   662. 

Blackwell,  Elizabeth,   i,  471,  480. 

Blake,  Clarence,  ii,  22. 

Blanford,  i,  270,  296. 

Blaschko,   i,  433. 

von  Blomberg,  A.  M.,  i,  560, 

Blood,   i,    312. 

Blumentritt,   ii,  663,   664. 

Bluntschli,   i,    131, 

Blyden,  ii,  671. 

Boal,  i,  429. 

Boas,  Franz,  i,  6,  13,  37,  78;  ii,  699. 

Boerhaave,  ii,  312. 

Boettischer,  C,  ii,  136. 

Bohannon,    E.    W.,    i,   36,   345 ;    ii, 

39.S,  610. 
Boismont,  i,  475 ;  ii,  587. 
Bolton,  F.  E.,  ii,  193,  196,  505. 
Bolton,  T.  L.,  i",  125;  ii,  312,  488. 
Bon  jean,  i,  386. 
Bonnet,  i,  411. 
Bonwick,  James,  ii,  653. 
Bordeau,  ii,  327. 
Borelli,  i,   137. 
Bossuet,  ii,  266. 
Bouchet,  i,  481. 
Boulger,  D.  C,  i,  575 ;  ii,  670. 
Bourke,  Captain  J.  G.,  ii,  681. 
Bourne.  H.  R.  Fox.  ii.  668. 
Bourneville,   i,  415. 
Boutroux,   ii,  431. 
Boveri,  i,  34. 
Bowditch,   H.    P.,  i,  6,    12,    16,   18, 

30,  31,  62,  240. 
Boyd,  i,  99. 

Boyesen,   H.   H.,   i,   539;    ii,  85. 
Brace,  C.  L.,  ii,  659. 
Brace,  Julia,  ii,  20. 
Brackett,  i,   145. 
Brackett,  Miss,  ii,  569. 
Bradford,  i,  19. 
Bradford,  A.  H.,  i,  386. 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


767 


Brahe,  Tycho,  i,  544;  ii,  168. 

Brainerd,  ii,  285. 

Brandt,  i,  232. 

Braune,  W.,  i,  61. 

Brehm,  ii,  222,  229. 

Brethean,   i,   240. 

Breuer,  J.,  i,  233,  278,  279;  ii,  121. 

Brewster,  i,  544. 

Brinton,   Daniel   G.,  i,  231 ;   ii,   133, 

328,  699. 
Broca,   ii,  92. 

Brockman.  F.   S.,  i,  434;  ii,  289. 
Bronte,  Charlotte,  ii,  635. 
Brooke,  James,    ii,  701. 
Brooks,  E.   S.,  ii,  690. 
Brooks,  Sidney,  ii,  711. 
Brooks,  W.  K.,  ii,  567. 
Brosius,  i,  271. 
Brouardel,  i,  339. 
Brown,   Elmer  E.,  ii,   503,   504. 
Brown,  H.  W.,  ii,  451. 
Brown,    Lenox,    ii,   30,   31. 
Brown,  Miss,  i,   149. 
Brown,  Robert,  ii,  674,  679. 
Brown,  Thomas,  ii,  5. 
Brown-Sequard,  i,  448. 
Browne,  C.  E.,  ii,   186,  224. 
Browning,  Robert,  ii,  456. 
Browning,   Airs.,   ii,  635. 
Brunetiere,  ii,  462. 
Bruno,  ii,  540. 
Bruns,   i,   275. 
Bryan,  W.  L.,  i,   142,  146,  147,  149, 

165,  182,  183;  ii,  564. 
Bryant,  William  C,  i,  539;  ii,  86. 
Bryant,  W.  M.,  ii,   161. 
BiJcher,  i,   215. 
Buchholtz,    ii,   253. 
Buck,  ii,  417. 

Bucke.  W.  F.,  ii,  222,  223,  224,  227. 
Buckley,   Edmund,   ii,  99. 
Buckley,  J.  M.,  ii,  289. 
Budge,   i,  448,  449. 
Bullard,  i,    145. 
Bullock,  H.  L..  i.  373. 
BuIlock.R.  W.,  ii,  475. 
Bunge,   i,  260;   ii,  631. 
Burgerstein,  i,   11,  244. 
Burk,  Caroline  Frear.  ii,  394,  484. 
Burk,  Frederic,  i,  6,  8,   11,  32,   109, 

155,  185,  207,  216,  358,  359. 
Burke,  i,  116. 
Biirlitz,  ii,  727. 
Burnett,    Frances   Hodgson,   i,   534, 

551. 
Burnham,  William  H.,  i,  536,  543: 

ii,   292. 
Burns,  i,  237. 
Burrows,  Captain  Guy,  ii,  668. 


Burton.  Sir  Richard,  ii,  668. 

Bushnell,    Horace,  i,  579. 

Butler.  Nicholas  Murray,  ii,  531. 

Butschli,  i.  88. 

Buxton,    Thomas,    i,    540. 

du  Buy,  Jean,  ii,  50,  361. 

Byerly,  ii,  515. 

Byford,    ii,    570. 

Byrnes,   i,  366. 

Byron,  Lord,  i,  541 ;  ii,  148. 

Cabot,    i,    430. 

Cabot,   Sebastian,  ii,  652,  689. 

Cagliostro,    i,    350. 

Cajal,  S.  Ramon  y,  i,  107,  112,  208. 

Calderini,    i,    475. 

Caldo,  i,  431. 

Caley,    i,   412. 

Calhoun,  ii,  380. 

Calle  Shasta,   ii,   691. 

Calmeil,  i,  266,  268. 

Camerer,  i.  12,  14,  22;  ii,  12. 

Cameron,  Jane,  i,  368. 

Campbell,  ii,  20. 

de  Candolle,  ii,  92. 

Canisius,   Edgar,   ii,  668. 

Canning,  ii,  703. 

Capes,  W.  W.,  ii,  250. 

Carey,   ii,   744. 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  i,  180,  568. 

Carlyle,    Mrs.,    i,  208. 

Carman,  Ada,  ii,  4. 

Carman,  Kate,  i,  158. 

Carr,  H.  A.,  i,  233. 

Carrara,  i,  365. 

Carroll,  H.  K.,  ii,  288. 

Carroll,   Lewis,    ii,   455. 

Carstadt,   i.    12. 

Cartwright,   i,  540. 

Cams,  i,  450. 

Cassell,  ii,    157. 

Catiline,    ii,    434. 

Catlin,  ii,  699. 

Ceni,  i.    112. 

Cetewayo,   ii,  670,  720. 

Chabas,   ii,  249. 

Chadwick,  i,  475. 

Chaka,  ii,  720. 

Chalmers,  Lillian  H.,  i,  208. 

Chamberlain,    ii.    711. 

Chamberlain.   A.    P.,   i.   79,  474;   ii, 

98,  455,  468,  698.  699. 
Chambers.  W.  G.,  ii,  390,  619. 
Charcot,  i.  248,  275,  276;  ii,  121. 
Charles.   H..  i,  67. 
Charmides,  i.  514. 
Charpy.    i,    421. 
Chatterton.  Thomas,  i,  538. 
'    Chaucer,  Geoffrey,  ii,  442. 


768 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 


Chestnutt,   C.    W.,   i,    580. 
Childe,  R.  L.,  ii,  233. 
Christian,  J.,  i,  237,  303. 
Christopher,  W.   S.,  i,  36,  yj,   148, 

151,  266. 
Cicero,   ii,  411. 
Claparede,  ii,  249. 
Clapp,  i,  199. 
Clapp,    President,   ii,   532. 
Clark,  Sir  Andrew,  ii,  663,  701. 
Clark,    Campbell,    i,    270,    445,    498, 

501. 

Clark,  Francis  E.,  ii,  423. 

Clarke,  ii,  532. 

Clarke,  E.  H.,  ii,  561,  569,  570,  639. 

Cleinias,   i,  514,  515. 

Cleveland,  Duchess  of,  i,  283, 

Clive,   ii,    709. 

Cloquet,   H.,  ii,   15. 

Clouston,  T.  S.,  i,  242,  257,  258,  259, 

261,  269,  270,  271,  275,  338,  446, 

500,  501 ;  ii,  109,  563,  573,  574. 
Clovis,  ii,  730. 
Cobb,   Misses,  ii,  635. 
Cobb,   Sylvanus,  ii,  474. 
Cobbe,  Miss  F.  P.,  i,  491. 
Cobden-Sanderson,  i,  180. 
Cockayne,  ii,  209. 
Codrington,  ii,  656. 
Coe,  George  A.,  i,  314;  ii,  291,  292, 

340,  345.  348,  350,  351. 
Coghlan,  ii,  606. 

Cohn,  Hermann,  i.  23,  433,  434,  437. 
Cole,  R.  E.,  ii.  289. 
Colegrove,  F.  W.,  ii,  492,  493,  494. 
Colenso,  Frances  E.,  ii,  670. 
Colenso,  W.,  ii,  656. 
Coleridge,   Hartley,  i.  350,  565. 
Coleridge,    Samuel   T.,   i,   312,   566, 

567. 
Collet,  Mary,  i,  578. 
Colson,   O.,   ii,   727. 
Columbus,   ii,  679,   689. 
Combe,  i.  11,  12,  18,  33,  246,  262. 
Combe,  George,  i,  542. 
Comstock.  i,  374. 
Comte,  i.  534;  ii,  135,  194,  356,  359, 

577,   742. 
Conant,  W.  H.,  ii,  282. 
Conder,   C.   R.,  ii,   198. 
Conradi,   Edward,  ii,  466,  467,  468, 

471,   472,   478. 
Cook,   i,    118. 

Cook,   Captain,  ii,  657,  658. 
Cooper,  James  Fenimore,  ii,  729. 
Cooper,    Peter,   i,    539. 
Cope,  i,  46,  50,  56,  241. 
Cornell,  ii,  y^^l- 


Corre,  A.,  i,  326,  329,  334,  373,  379, 

386,  391. 
Corson,  ii,  441. 
Cortereal,  ii,  689. 
Cortez,  ii,  679,  681,  686. 
Coues,  Elliott,  ii,  699. 
Cowles,  Edward,  i,  290,  291,  389. 
Cox,  ii,  170. 
Cox,  C.   N.,   ii,   17. 
Cramer,   F.,  ii,  250. 
Creery   (Sisters),  i,  265. 
Cressey,  F.  G,  ii,  420. 
Crichton-Browne,     James,     i,     263, 

312;  ii,  577. 
Crispi,  ii,  705. 
Crook,  i,  199. 

Crook,  General,  ii,  690,  691. 
Croswell,  T.  R.,  i,  210. 
Crowthers,  ii,  744. 
Crozier,  ii,  747. 
Cudworth,  ii,  532. 
Cullack,  i,  259. 
Cullen,  ii,  312. 
Cullerre,  i,  270. 
Currier,  A.  F.,  i,  475. 
Curtin,  J.,  ii,  727. 
Curzon,  Lord,  ii,  702. 
Cushing,  ii,  99,  686,  697,  699,  700. 
Cyprian,  ii,  336. 
Czermak,  ii,  4. 
von  Czobel,  ii,  328. 

Daffner,  i,  12,  64,  TJ. 

D'Alva,  ii,  680. 

D'Alviella,  ii,  327. 

Damm,   i,    79. 

Dana,  ii,  518. 

Daniels,  i,  429. 

Daniels,  Arthur  H.,  ii,  292,  328. 

Dante,  ii,  339,  456. 

Daraskiewicz,  i,  303. 

Darrah,  E.   M.,  ii,  394. 

Darwin,  Charles  R.,  i,  215,  502,  542, 
586;  ii,  25,  55,  62,  no,  138,  210, 
368,  524,  550,  579,  634,  655. 

Darwin,  G   H.,  ii,    178. 

Daudet,  i,    173. 

Davenport,  ii.  285. 

Davenport-Hill,  Florence,  i,  401. 

David,  E.,  ii,  403. 

David,  N.,  i,  326. 

Davidson,   ii,   289. 

Davy,   Sir  Humphry,  i,  312,  541, 

Dawson,  G  E.,  i,  45,  174,  338. 

Dawson,  Sir  John  W.,  ii,  92. 

Day.   Clive,  ii,  668. 

De  Fleury.  i,  405. 

Deharbe,  ii,  267. 

Dejerine,  i,   112. 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


769 


Delauney,  ii,  2"]. 

Delboeuf,  i,  449;  ii,  379. 

Delbriick,  i.  266. 

Deleal,  ii,   150. 

Delitsch,  ii,  395. 

Delitzsch,  ii,  328. 

De  Long,  ii,  479. 

Demetz,  i,  396. 

Deming,  ii,  594. 

Demolins,  ii,  513. 

Demoor,  i,  336,  344- 

Dennis,  James  S.,  ii,  730,  731. 

Denomme,  i,  275. 

Deny,  G.,  i,  303. 

De  Quincey,  Thomas,  i,  563,  565. 

Dercum,  i,   112. 

De  Sanctis,  i,  262,  276,  380. 

Descartes,   ii,   45,   53,  54,   215,   541, 

644. 
Deschamps,  Gaston,  ii,  462. 
Desjardins,  ii,  323,  431. 
De  Soto,  ii,  689. 
Despine,  i,  366,  370,  394,  396. 
Deuschle,  ii,  254. 
Dewar,  A.  R.,  ii,  230. 
Dewey,  John,  ii,  584,  590,  602. 
Dexter,  E.  G.,  i,  347. 
DeYoe,  F.  E.,  ii,  505. 
Diaz,  ii,  705. 

Dickens,  Charles,  i,  577;  ii,  472. 
Diderot,  i,  191. 
Dido,  i,  208. 

Digby,  William,  ii,  701,  702,  703. 
Dilke,  Sir  Charles,  ii,  712. 
Dingyswago,   ii,  667. 
Diotima,   ii,  254. 
Dittenberger,  ii,  250. 
Dobeln,  ii,  480. 
Doggett,  L.  L.,  ii,  421. 
Dohm,  i,  199. 
Dohrn,   ii,    191. 
Dolch,  Oskar,  ii,  403. 
Dollo,  i,  46. 

Donaldson,  H.  H.,  i,   107,  207. 
Donath,  i,  35,  275. 
Dore,  ii,  479. 
Doring,  i,  502;  ii,  122. 
Dorsey,  ii,  699. 
Douglass,  Frederick,  i,  580. 
Down,  J.  Langdon,  i,  274,  281,  283. 
Drahms,  i,  328,  329,  330. 
Drelincourt,  ii,  no. 
Dresslar,  F.  B.,  i,  158;  ii,  34. 
Drew,  Frank,  ii,  113. 
Droysen,   ii,   730. 

Drummond,  Henry,  ii,  328,  2>T2;  666. 
Drysdale,   Lieutenant,  ii,  673. 
Dubarry,  A.,  i,  363. 
Du  Bois,  i,  475. 

88 


Diickelmann,   i,   471. 

Duff,  Grant,  ii,  710. 

Dugas,  ii,  133,  371. 

Dugdale,  i,  342. 

Dumont,   A.,  ii,  250,  724. 

Duncan,  J.  M.,  ii,  596,  597. 

Duncan,  William,   ii,  648,  692,  693, 

694. 
Dupenlin,  i,  440. 
Dupenloup,    Mons.,    ii,   268. 
Duprat,  G.  L.,  ii,  367. 
Duran,  ii,  685. 
Durfee,  ii,   287. 
Dutt,  R.  C,  ii,  703. 
Duval,  i,  413. 
Dyer,  T.  F.  Thiselton,  ii,  209. 


Earle,  ii,  282. 

Earle,  ii,  463. 

Eaton,  S.  W.,  ii,  473. 

Ebbinghaus,  ii,  395. 

Ebers,  Georg,  i,  563,  584,  585. 

Eckhart,   ii,   162,   540. 

Edes,  R.  T.,  i,  286;  ii,  636. 

Edinger,  i,  112. 

Edison,  i,  538. 

Edson,   Cyrus,   ii,  579. 

Edwards,    Jonathan,    ii,    281,    282, 

283,  284,  285,  532,  542. 
Eliot,    ii.    729. 
Eliot,  Charles  W.,  ii,  594. 
Eliot,  George,  i,  536,  538;  ii,  635. 
Elkin,  ii,  661. 
Ellis,  A.  C.  i,  208;  ii,  497. 
Ellis,  G.  Harold,  ii,  201. 
Ellis,  Havelock,  i,  278,  451,  470,  471, 

480,   481,   491,    500,    501 ;    ii,    no, 

n6,   119,   139,   141,   194,  562,  564, 

565,  567. 
Ellis,  John,  ii,  596. 
Emerson,  Ralph  Waldo,  i,   550;  ii, 

167,  468,  472. 
Emminghaus,   i,   269,   276. 
Emreich,   Katherine,  i,  265. 
Endicott,  ii,  689. 
Enebuskc,  i,   196. 
Engedi,  Count,   ii,  323. 
Engelmann,  George  J.,  i,  250,  477, 

478,   487.    509,    511;    ii,   587,   588, 

601,  602,  605. 
Erasmus,  ii,  729. 
Erismann,    Fr.,    i,    \\,    12,   99,    124, 

134,    140,    141. 
Esquirol,   i,  267,  491. 
Eulenberg,  i,  256,  259,  311. 
Evans,  E.  E.,  i,  283. 
Evvald,    i,    336. 
Ewer,  ii,  275. 


770 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  ADOLESCENCE 


Falret,   i,   277. 

Familler,   ii,  327. 

Farr,  ii,  725. 

Farrington,    ii,   651. 

Farwell,  Arthur,  ii,  695. 

Fasbender,   i,  6. 

Fawcett,  Mrs.,  i,  491;  ii,  723. 

Fechner,  Gustav  T.,  ii,  53,  208,  210. 

Fehling,  i,  12. 

Fenelon,  i,  521 ;  ii,  266. 

Fere,   Ch.,   i,    141,  471 ;  ii,   16,    140, 

312. 
Ferran,  i,  578. 
Ferrero,    i,   211,    357,    474. 
Ferri,  i,  329,  388,  389. 
Ferriani,  i,  340,  352,  357,  365,  370, 

371,  393. 
Feuerbach,   ii,  327. 
Fewkes,  J.  Walter,  ii,  237,  696,  699, 

700. 
Fichte,  ii,  51,  82,  147,  400,  408,  409, 

498,  499.  500,  533,  537,  556. 
Fick,  i,  268. 
Fielding,   H.    {See  Fielding  Hall), 

i,  225,  563,  571. 
Fillmore,  J.  C,  ii,  695. 
Finck,  i,  270,  303. 
Finck,    Henry    T.,    i,    471,    586;    ii, 

115.   134,   582,   583. 
Finklestein,  i,  490. 
Finney,   ii,  282. 
Fischer,  Karl,  ii,  328. 
Fischer,  O.,  i,  61. 
Fischer,  Th.  A.,  ii,  197. 
Fish,  ii,  282. 
Fiske,  John,  ii,  315,  323,  327,  679, 

681. 
Fitch,  Sir  Joshua,  ii,  494,  717. 
Flammarion,   ii,   177. 
Flamsteed,   i,   545. 
Flaubert,   ii,    196. 
Flechsig,  i,  107,   109,   no,   in,  112, 

208. 
Fleischer,  C.  ii,  262. 
Fletcher,  Alice  C,  ii,  235,  635,  695, 

699,  700. 
Fletcher,   Robert,  i,   125. 
Flood,   i,  427,  428,  429. 
Flournoy,  ii,  327. 
Fock,  i,  125. 
Folkard,  ii,  209. 
Follen,  Carl,  ii,  409. 
Forbes,  Francis  B.,  ii,  711. 
Forbush,  W.  B.,  i,  407;  ii,  417,  444. 
Forel,  i,  318;  ii,  53,  230,  403. 
Forlong,   i,  470;  ii,  98. 
Fornelli,  i,  319. 
Foster,   Michael,  ii,  521. 
Fournier,  i,  433,  443,  470. 


France,  C.  J.,  ii,  392, 

Franklin,   Benjamin,   i,   539;  ii,  86, 

602. 
Fraser,  Alexander,  ii,  5,  46. 
Frazer,  James  G.,  ii,   in,  245,  253. 
Frear,     Caroline.       {See     Caroline 

Frear  Burk.) 
Fredericq,  i,  419. 
Freeman,  ii,  446. 
Frere,  Sir  Bartle,  ii,  671,  720. 
Freud,  S.,  i,  233,  278,  279,  285;  ii, 

121. 
Freund,   i,   427. 
Friederici,  G,  ii,  690. 
Friedreich,  i,  354. 
Friedrich,  J.,  ii,  390. 
Friend,  Hilderic,  ii,  209. 
Frobenius,  L.,  ii,  747. 
Froebel,  i,  176,  231,  585;  ii,  81,  496, 

497- 
Froschammer,  ii,  47. 
Froschmer,  i,  350. 
Froude,  ii,  278,  440,  713. 
Fuchs,  Arno,  i,  282. 
Fuerbach,  i,  354. 
Fuller,  Margaret,  ii,  635. 
Fulton,  Robert,  i,  539;  ii,  86. 
Fiirbringer,  i,  433. 
Furness,  ii,  670. 

Gale,  Harlow,  i,  208;  ii,  451. 

Galileo,  i,  544;  ii,   i6i8. 

Galippe,  ii,  571. 

Gall,  i,   448,  501. 

Galton,    Francis,    i,    n,    16,   2)7,   40, 

47,  76,  201 ;  ii,  188,  564,  599,  606, 

725,  748. 
Gamble,  Miss  E.  B.,  i,  471,  491;  ii, 

116,  328. 
Gamgee,    i,   250. 
Ganot,  ii,  518. 
Garbini,  ii,  30. 
Garcia,  G  Manuel,  ii,  30. 
Gardiner,   ii,   446. 
Garfield,  James  A.,  i,  539. 
Garland,  Hamlin,  ii,  696,  699. 
Garner,  J.  L.,  ii,  239. 
Garofalo,  i,  409. 
Garraud,  i,  388. 

Garrison,  William  Lloyd,  ii,  681. 
Gattel,  i,  278,  285. 
Gaule,  J.,   ii,   174. 
Gaume,  ii,  267. 
Gautama,    ii,   314. 
Gautier,    i,  442. 
Gautier,  ii,  657. 
Gavarret,  i,  104. 
Gay,  G  E.,  ii,  506. 
Geddes,  i,  278,  418;  ii,  no. 


INDEX  OF   NAMES 


771 


Gegenbaur,  Carl,  i.  546. 

Geigel,    Richard,    i,   414. 

Geissler,  Arthur,  i,  11,  12,  18. 

Gerhard,  Adele,  ii,  603. 

Gerhardt,  i,  22. 

Gerson,  Chancellor,  ii,  266. 

Gibson,   W.   H.,  i,  541. 

Giddings,   ii,  431. 

Gifford,  i,  538;  ii,  85. 

Gilbert.  J.  Allen,  i,  12,  92,  135,  136, 

143,   146;  ii,  4,  33,  34,  z(i,  564. 
Gildersleeve,  Basil  L.,  i,  203,  520. 
Gillies,  ii,  282. 
Gilman,  i,   172. 
Girand,  i,  388,  499. 
Girard,  Paul,  ii,  250. 
Glaevecke.    i.   430. 
Godard,  E.,  i,  417. 
Goddard,  ii,  235. 
Godfernaux,  i,  318. 
Godin,  P.,  i,  8,  53. 
Goethe,    i,    72,    172,    338,    533,    563, 

581,  582,  583,  585;  ii,  35,  78,   174, 

303,  441,  447,  472. 
Goetze,  W.,  i,  177. 
Goldie,  i,  34. 

Goldsmith,  Oliver,  i,  541. 
Gomme,  ii,  98. 
Goodman,  i,  199. 
Goodsell,   D.  A.,  ii,  288. 
Gordon,  General  Charles  G.,  i,  575 ; 

ii,  664,  670. 
Gottheil,  G.,   ii,  262. 
Gotze,  C.,  i,  185. 
Goubert,  i,  239. 
Goudin,   i,   466. 

Gould.  George  M.,  i,  501 ;  ii,  202. 
Cowers,  i,  274.  275,  445. 
Grahame,    i,    534. 
Granger,  ii,  327. 
Grant,    Cecil,    ii,    523. 
Grant,  U.  S.,  i,  542;  ii,  ^yj- 
Grasberger,  L.,  i,  200,  203;  ii,  250, 

252,  257. 
Grasserie,   ii,  327. 
Gratacap,   ii,   327. 
Gray,  ii,  210. 
Greely,  i,  38. 
Green,   ii,   446. 
Greenwood,  i,  262. 
Greenwood,  J.    M.,   ii,  506. 
Grey.   Sir  George,  ii,  701. 
Grey,  J.  Grattan,  ii,  656. 
Griffin.    President,   ii,  288. 
Griffing,  ii,  34. 
Grigorcscu.    i.    140. 
Grimm  (Brothers),  ii,  98. 
Grimm.  Jacob,  i,  218 :  ii.  409. 
Grinnell,   G.   B.,   ii,   698. 


Groeningen,   ii,  370. 

Groos,  i,   129,   160,  202,  235. 

Grote,   i,  201  ;  ii,   321. 

Grotius,  ii.  714. 

Guidi,   i,  255. 

Guimet,   M.,   ii,   325. 

Guinard,  i.  428;  ii.  140. 

Gulick,  Luther  H.,  i,  138,  206,  209, 

225,  407.  471  ;  ii,  99,  290,  396. 
Gunkel,  Hermann,  ii,  327,  336. 
Gurney,   i,  266. 
Gurriesi,  i,  78. 
Gutsmuth,  i,   201. 
Guy,  i.  91,  343. 
Guyau,  n,  133,  303,  651. 

Haddon,  ii,  239,  240. 

Haeckel,  ii,  327. 

Haeker,  i,  475. 

Hagen,    i,    270,    271. 

Hale,   Edward   Everett,   ii,  420. 

Hale,  Horatio,  ii,  699. 

Hale,  Lord,  i,  2>72>- 

Hall.  A.  C,  i,  405. 

Hall,  C.  M.,  ii,  289. 

Hall,  Fielding,  ii,  245,  349,  648,  670, 

709.     {Sec    H.    Fielding.) 
Hall,   G.    Stanley,   i,    125,    149,   208, 

264;  ii,  78,  176,  417. 
Hall,  Marshall,  ii,  53. 
Hall,   W.    S.,   i,    19,  25,   59,  61,  66, 

67,  68.    125. 
Haller.  i,  120,  425. 
Hamilton,    ii,    390. 
Hamilton.   A.   M.,  i,   274. 
Hamm,  i,  418. 
Hammond,  i,  269,  433,  501. 
Hammond,  E.   P.,  ii,  288,  290,  291. 
Hancock.   John  A.,  i,    145,   164;   ii, 

470,   482. 
Happel.  Julius,  ii.  425. 
Hardwicke,   ii,   433. 
Harlez,   ii,   742. 
Harmodius,  i.  537. 
Harnack.  ii.  229.  327.  744. 
Harper.  Miss  L  H.,  ii,  583. 
Harper,    William    R.,    ii,    505,    531, 

631. 
Harris,  i.  427. 
Harris,  W.  T.,  i,  320,  579. 
Harrison,  i,  491. 
Harrison,  General,  ii.  199. 
Hartenberg,  P.,  ii,  371. 
Hartcr.  i.  182. 
Hartmann,  i,  305,  375,  398,  409,  440; 

ii.  7^'2.7,  359. 
Hartwell.    E.    W.,   i,    125.    149,   248, 

250.   259. 
Harvard,   i,  470. 


772 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


Harvey,  P.  T.,  ii,  652,  666. 
Haslett,    S.    B.,   ii,   361. 
Hastings,  Warren,  ii,  707. 
Hastings,  W.  W.,  i,  53,  103,  135. 
Hatch,  ii,  325,  328. 
Hatfield,  i,  511. 
Hatton,  ii,  652. 
Hauptmann,  i,  587;  ii,  633. 
Hauser,  Kasper,  i,  282,  283. 
Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  i,  539;  ii,  85. 
Hayes,  Alice,  ii,  585,  586. 
Hayes,  S.   P.,  ii,  282,  698. 
Heape,  i,  473. 
Hecker,   i,    12,   265,   266,   267,    303; 

ii,  598. 
Heeler,   ii,  328. 
Hegar,  ii,  563,  580,  721. 
Hegel,   i,  305,  542;   ii,   51,  55,    102, 

147,  326,  328,  339,  359,  446,  542, 

551- 
Heidi,  i,  534. 
Heine,  i,   542;  ii,  583. 
Heinroth,  i,  353;   ii,  310. 
Heiser,  i,  257. 
Helfericht,    ii,    250. 
Helmholtz,  i,  152;  ii,  544. 
Helwald,  ii.  380. 
Hemmeter,  i,  546. 
Henderson,    i,    282. 
Henderson,  H.   C,  ii,  476. 
Heneoch,  i,  237. 
Henle,   i,   75. 
Henry,  Joseph,  i,  539. 
Henry,  Patrick,  i,  538 ;  ii,  85. 
Henry,  W.  O.,  i,  429. 
Henter,  i,  67. 

Heraclitus,  ii,  64,  124,  190,  191,  197. 
Herbart,  i,  162,  242,  309;  ii,  58,  496. 
Herbert,  George,  i,  578. 
Hering,  i,  94. 
Hermann,    ii,  250. 
Herrick,    Miss,    ii,   483. 
Herschel,  William,  i,  545 ;  ii,  174. 
Hertel,  Axel,  i,   II,   12,   17,   18,  243, 

244.  245,  250. 
Hertwig,  i,  57. 
Hervey,  ii,  282. 
Herzen,    i,    152. 
Hesiod,  ii,  340. 
Heubner,    i,   255. 
Hill,   Frank  A.,   ii,  507. 
Hille,   H.,  ii,   136. 
Hinsdale,  i.   145. 
Hippias,    i,    191. 
Hippocrates,   i,  227,   265,  432,   503; 

ii,  541- 
Him,  ii,  698,  727. 
Hirsch,  i,  320. 
Hirt,    i,   241. 


Hitchcock,  Edward,  i,  7,  26,  62,  86, 

97,  133,  134;  ii,  287. 
Hobbes,  i,  578 ;  ii,  46,  329,  359. 
Hobson,  J.  A.,  ii,  667,  668. 
Hoch,  i,  292. 
Hodder,  E.,  ii,  656. 
Hodge,  C.  F.,  i,  18;  ii,  53,  211. 
Hoffmann,  ii,  353. 
Hoffmann,  H.,  ii,  483. 
Hoffmann,  Louis,  ii,  158. 
Holder,  C.  R,  i,  545. 
Holl,   Karl,   ii,  327. 
Holmes,  J.  L.,  ii,  244. 
Holmes,  Oliver  Wendell,  i,  539;  ii, 

574. 
Holmes,  W.  H.,  ii,  699. 
Holtzendorff,  i,  397,  408. 
Homer,  ii,  369,  434,  649. 
Hood,  ii,  636. 
Hopf,  ii,  480. 

Hopkins,  E.  Washburn,  ii,  245. 
Hopkins,   Manley,   ii,  733. 
Hopkins,  Mark,  ii,  287. 
Hopkins,   N.    M.,   ii,    158. 
Hoppe,  J.  J.,  ii,  364. 
Horace,    i,    432. 
Horn,  ii,  12. 
Hornemann,    i,   244. 
Horsley,  ii,  650. 
Horsley,  J.  W.,  i,  369. 
Horwicz,  i,  394;  ii,  137, 
Hosslin,  i,  433. 
Hough,    ii,   699. 
Howard,  ii,  5^. 
Howard,  F.  E.,  ii,  32. 
Howe,  i,  471. 
Howe,  i,  478. 

Howells,  William  Dean,  i,  534. 
Howerth,  L  W.,  ii,  447. 
Howes,  Annie  G.    (Mrs.  Annie  H. 

Barus),  ii,  583,  590,  602. 
Hoyt,  M.   A.,  ii,   147. 
Hrdlicka,  i,  63,  69,  126;  ii,  238. 
Hiickstadt,  E.,  i,  431. 
Hughes,  i,  217. 
Hughes,  James  L.,  i,  577. 
Hugo,  ii,  472. 

Humboldt,  i,  542;  ii,  150,  687. 
Hume,  i,  375 ;  ii,  46,  47,  533,  535. 
Hunt,  Helen,  ii,  691. 
Hunt,  Holman,  i,  576. 
Hunter,  John,  i,  538,  542. 
Hurlbut,   J.   L.,   ii,  289. 
Hutchinson,   ii,   532. 
Huxley,  Leonard,  i,  545. 
Huxley,  Thomas  H.,  i,  62,  142,  541. 

545;    ii,   214,    304,    329,   455,   524, 

527,   548,   550,  578,  691. 
Huyghens,  ii,  542. 


INDEX   OF  NAMES 


773 


Hyatt,  i,  56;   ii,   418,   568. 
Hyde,   C.   M.,   ii,  662. 
Hylan,  John  P.,  ii,  327. 
Hypatia,  ii,  635. 

laffe,  ii,  249. 

Ibsen,   i,  447;  ii,  353,  401,  441,   442. 

Icard,  D.  G.,  i,  480,  498. 

Idler,  ii,  310. 

IgnatiefF,  i,  383. 

Ilberg,  G.,  i,  237,  303. 

Infeld,  i,  292. 

Inge,    ii,    2,^- 

Inglesant,  John,  i,  577,  578. 

Inman,   ii,  98. 

Ion,   i,   515. 

Ireland,  i,  260,  282,  360. 

Ireland,   Alleyne,    ii,    713. 

Irons,  I.  W.,  i,  478. 

Irving,   Washington,   i,   541. 

Itard,  i,  284. 

Jackson,  Hughlings,  i,  108,  no,  in, 

112,   207,   304. 
Jacobi,  i,  483,  486,  504;  ii,  53- 
Jacobi,  Mary  P.,  ii,  586. 
Jacoby,  A.,  ii,  657. 
Jaeger,    ii,    16,    19. 
Jaeger,  Gustav,  i,  68,  82,   120,  203 
Jaeger,  O.  H.,  ii,  250. 
von  Jaekel,  ii,  727. 
Jagemann,   i,   397. 
Jahn,    i,    129,    187,    188,    196,    540; 

ii.  499. 
James,  Alexander,  i,  257. 
James,  G.  W.,  ii,  665,  694,  699. 
James,  William,   i,  457;   ii,  44,  292, 

327,  328,  340. 
Janet,   Pierre,  i,  276,  277,  278,  280, 

394- 
Jankau,   ii,   579. 
Jastrow,    M.,    ii,    327. 
Jayle,  i,  430. 
Jefferson,  Thomas,   i,    539;   ii,   456, 

666. 
Jeffries,    i,    563,    569;    ii,    85,    135, 

150,    162. 
Jegi,  ii,   389. 
Jenks,  A.   E.,  ii,  698. 
Jennings,   i,  470;   ii,  98. 
Jessen,  i,  268. 
Joan  of  Arc,  i,  265,  540. 
Johnson,    G.    E.,    i,    160,    231,    232, 

407;   ii,   488. 
Johnson,  Jr.,  John,  ii,  397. 
Johnston,  C.  A.,  i,  487. 
Johnston,    Sir    Harry,    ii,   670,    673, 

674. 
Johnston,  O.  W.,  i,  485,  486. 


Joly,  i,  320,   328. 

Jones,   Lloyd,   i,  96. 

Jones,  William,  ii,  198. 

Jordan,  David   Starr,  i,  56;  ii,  379, 

527,  612.  613,  614. 
Joubert,  C.   H.,  i,  476. 
Jouin,  ii,  267. 

Jowett,  Benjamin,  i,  513;  ii,  458. 
Juarez,    President,  ii,  687. 
Judd,  Charles  H.,  ii,  49. 
Judson,  ii,   744. 
Jukes,   i,  2>y7,  342,  343. 
Julian,  Emperor,  ii,  728. 
Julliard,  i,  379. 
Just,   Karl,  ii,   76. 


Kaan,  i,  290,  466. 

von  Kaas,  i,  171. 

Kaes,  i,  107,  108,  109,  in,  112. 

Kafemann,  ii,  32. 

Kahlbaum,  i,  267,  269,  301. 

Kaiser,  i,  107. 

Kakuskine,   i,  474. 

Kamehameha  I.,  ii,  658. 

Kandinsky,   i,  350. 

Kant,  Immanuel,  i,  5;  ii,  41,  42,  45, 

51,  82,  147,  293,  400,  533,  535,  541, 

547,  548,  551,  714- 
Kayme,  G.  S.,  ii,  666. 
Keane,  ii,  655. 
Keate,  ii,  657. 

Keats,  John,  i,  538;  ii,  85,  149. 
Kees,  M.  S.,  ii,  289. 
Keibel,  i,  55. 
Keill,  i,  501. 
Keim,  Theodor,  i,  523. 
Keith,  i,  474. 

Keller,  Gottfried,  i,  563,  585. 
Keller,   Helen,   i,   554. 
Kemsies,  ii,   489. 

Kennedy,  Helen   P.,  i,  475;   ii,   587. 
Kent,  ii,  640. 
Kepler,  ii,   168. 
Kern,  i,  502. 
Kctterer,  i,  472. 
Key,  Axel,  i,  n,  12,  16,  17,  18,  23, 

24,  25,  31,  244,  245,  246,  248,  250, 

259,  260,  511. 
Khayyam.  Omar,  i,  368. 
Kidd,   ii.   513.    748. 
Kierkcngaard,  ii,  312,  327. 
Kicrnan.   i,   500. 
Kinast.  ii,  327. 
Kind,  i,  260. 
King,   i,  483. 
King,  G.  F.,  ii,  198. 
Kinkead.  T.  L..  ii,  268. 
Kinnaman,  A.  J.,  ii,  502. 


774 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


Kipling,  Rudyard,  ii,  456,  459,  498, 

705- 
Kirkpatrick,  E.  A.,  ii,  476. 
Kirn,   Ludwig,  i,  388;  ii,  312. 
Kisch,  E.,  i,  255. 
Klein,  i,  276. 
Kleinpaul,  i,  450. 
Kline,   L.   W.,   i,   33,  45,    141,   348; 

ii,    194,    375,    377,   380,    381,    389, 

392,  450. 
Klive,  Stella,  ii,  629. 
Knapp,  P.,  ii,  233. 
Kneipp,  Father,  i,  255,  466. 
Knight,  ii,  99. 
Koch,  i,  239. 
Koch,   E.,   ii,  327. 
Koch,  M.,  ii,  136. 
Kolk,  H.  E.,  i,  171. 
Kolliker,   i,   112. 
Korosi,  ii,  598,  599. 
Kosinzoff,  i,  383. 
Koster,  i,  502;  ii,  312. 
Kotelmann,  L.,  i,  11,  12,  59,  69,  85, 

87,  99,  123,  136,  137,  138,  140. 
Kotzebue,  ii,  409. 
Kovalevski,   P.  L,  i,  291,  388,  491, 

495,   499- 
Kozle,  1,  345;   ",  305- 
Kraenzlein,  i,   199. 
Kraepelin,    Emil,    i,    237,    301,    302, 

303,  304,  306,  310,  323,  344;  ii,  312. 
Krafft-Ebing,  i,  286,  295,  303,   318, 

388,  426,  433,  449,  470,  495,  499. 
Kratz,  H.  E.,  ii,  385,  486. 
Krause,   ii,   250. 
Kraussold,  ii,  310,  311. 
Krieger,  i,  475,  476. 
von  Kries,  J.,  i,  280. 
Kroemer,  i,  426. 
Krohne,   i,  398. 

Kropotkin,  Prince,  ii,  396,  747. 
Krug,  i,  256. 
Kuczynski,  R.  R.,  ii,  601. 
Kiihne,  i,  232. 
Kulpe,  ii,  37. 
Kurnig,   i,   440. 
Kurufa,  i,    171. 

Laas,    ii,   41. 

Laborde,   i,  481. 

Lacassagne,  i,  388. 

Lacenaire.   i,   387. 

Laden,  L'Abbe,  ii,  268. 

Lafayette,   i.   540. 

Lallemand,  i.  432. 

Lamb,  Charles,  i,  312;  ii,  440. 

Lancaster,  E.  G.,  i.  99.  253,  337,  426, 
459,  475,  535,  537,  543.  544 ;  ii,  23, 
77,  292,  328,  384,  477,  484. 


Landois,  i,  93,  105. 

Landsberger,  i,  12,  14,  61,  66,  67,  71, 

72,  75,    lOI. 
Lange,  C,  i,  457. 
von  Lange,  Emil,  i,   11,  18,  23,  26, 

42. 
Lange,  F.  A.,  11,  551. 
Lange,  K.,  i,    184,   185. 
Lanny,  William,  ii,  655. 
Laponge,  ii,  431. 
Larsen,  Viola,  i,  501. 
Lasalle,  ii,  190. 
Las  Casas,  ii,  653,  681. 
Lavelle,  M.  J.,  ii,  268. 
Law,  F.  H.,  ii,  505. 
Lawrence,  E.  A.,  ii,  730,  734. 
Lawrence,  Henry,  ii,  703,  706. 
Laycock,  i,   121,  501. 
Lear,  E.,  ii,  455. 
Learoyd,  Miss,  ii,  472. 
Le  Bon,  ii,  431,  577. 
Le  Conte,  ii,  518,  549. 
Le  Dantec,  i,  471. 
Lee,  F.  S.,  i,  424,  472,  483. 
Lee,  Joseph,  i,  226,  228. 
Leeuwenhoek,  i,  418. 
Lefevre,  ii,  147,  327,  727. 
Leffingwell,  i,  380. 
Legrande  du  Saulle,  i,  277,  291. 
Leitner,  G.  W.,  ii,  648,  666,  710,  711. 
Lelut,  i,  320. 
Lemire,  ii,  742. 
Lemoine,  i,  394. 
Lemon,  J.  S.,  i,  348. 
Leonard,  A.  G.,  ii,  670. 
Leopold,   ii,  669. 
Lepelletier,  ii,  258. 
Le  Plongeon,  ii,  682. 
Leport,   i,  413. 
Lerber,    ii,    403. 
Leroy-Beaulieu,  ii,  713. 
Lesbonax,    ii,   253. 
Lesgaft,  i,  247. 
Letourneau,  ii,  392,  447,  727. 
Leuba,  James  H.,  ii,  292,  327,  340, 

344- 
Leusbuscher,  R.,  i,  266,  268. 
Levinstein,   i,   270. 
Levy,  i,  496. 

Levy,  Miriam   B.,  ii,   175. 
Lewis,  Ida,  i,  540. 
Lewis,    W.    Bevan,   i,  273,   299;    ii. 

312. 
Libby,  M.  F.,  i,  533. 
Liharzik,   i,    18,    23,   25,   53,  61,   67, 

75- 
Lilienfeld,  ii,  359.  431. 
Lilienthal,  Max,  ii,  263. 
Lincoln,  Abraham,  ii,  681. 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


775 


Linde,  A.  v.  d.,  i,  283. 

Lindley,  E.  H.,  i,  158,  166,  317;  ii, 

192,  485. 
Ling,  i,   102,  192,  201. 
Ling-Roth,  H.,  ii,  653. 
Linnaeus,  ii,  210. 
Lippert,  ii,  245,  328. 
Lipsius,  ii,  350. 
Liveing,  i,  261. 

Livingstone,  David,  ii,  666,  715. 
Lloyd,  H.  D.,  ii,  656. 
Lobsien,   ii,   486,  491. 
Locke,  G.  H.,  ii,  526. 
Locke,  John,  i,  58;  ii,  46,  532. 
Lockyer,  ii.  542. 
Lode,  i,  418. 
Loeb,  i,   112;  ii,  53. 
Loewenthal.  i,  483. 
Loisel,  G.,  ii,    109. 
Lombroso,  i,  320,  321,  334,  335,  357, 

359,  365,  371,  387,  390,  401,  43i> 

433,  474;  ii,  4,  92,  301. 
Long,  i,  199. 
Longkanel,    ii,   222. 
Lord,  W.  F.,  ii,  T},^. 
Lorey,  i,  117. 
Lortet,  i,  425. 
Loti,   Pierre,  i,  588. 
Lotze,  ii.  9,  51,  97,  323,  403,  545. 
Louis  XIV.,  ii,   177. 
Lounsbury,   ii,   468. 
Lourbet,  ii,  565. 
Low,  Leopold,  ii,  265. 
Lowe,  F.  H.,  i,  393. 
Lowell,  A.  L.,  ii,  713. 
Lowell,   James    Russell,   i,    541 ;   ii, 

468,  509.  513,  686. 
Lowenfeld,  i,  285,  433. 
Loyola,  ii,  310. 

Lubbock,  Sir  John,  ii,  198,  213. 
Luckey,  G.  W.  A.,  ii,  35. 
Lucretius,  ii,  354,  460. 
Ludwig,  i,  129;  ii,  97,  609. 
Lugard.  ii,  734. 
Liihrmann.   i,  292. 
Luigi,  i,  99. 

Lukens,  H.  T.,  i,  184,  185 ;  ii,  483. 
Lullies,  i,  475,  476. 
Lully,   ii,    729. 
Lumholtz,    Carl,    ii,   655,    683,    684, 

685. 
Luther,    Martin,   i,   523 ;   ii,   31,  42, 

278,  279,  408,  500. 
Luys,  i,  449. 
Lycurgus,  i,  465. 
Lyell.  i.  542;  ii,  92. 
Lyon,    ii,    357. 
Lysis,  i,  514. 


McBurney,   R.  R.,  ii,  421. 
McConnell.  ii,  327. 
McCosh,  ii,  44,  533. 
McCulloch,  O.   C,  i,  337. 
McCurdy,  J.  H.,  i,   197. 
McDermott,  Louisa,  ii,  484. 
MacDonald,  Arthur,  i,  365 ;  ii,  381. 
Macdonald,  Sir  John,  ii,  693. 
McDonald,  ii,  505. 
McGee,  W.  J.,  ii,  238,  699. 
McGhee,   i,   211,   230. 
McKay,   i,  265. 
McKenzie.   ii,   28.  30. 
McKim,  W.  D.,  i,  394. 
MacLane.   Mary,  i,   559;  ii,  629. 
McMaster,  ii,  286. 
McRitchie,  ii,  92,  727. 
Mabille.  i.  388,  499. 
Macaulay,  ii.  459,  472,  656. 
Macdougal,  ii.  211. 
Mackay,   A.,   ii,   -jzz,   745. 
Mackay,  G.  L.,  ii.  745. 
Mackintosh,  James,  i,  350,  540;  ii. 

532. 
Mackintosh,  William,  ii,  328. 
Macmillan,  Hugh,  ii,  211. 
Madden,  i,  95. 
Maedler,  ii,   178. 
Maekler-Ferryman,    Lieut.-Col.,    ii, 

Mager,  H.,  ii,  656. 

Magnan,   i,  285,   Z2>7,   449,   450 ;   ii, 

312. 
Magnus,  ii,   15. 
Mailander,   i,   375. 
Mailouch,  i,  440. 
Maine,    Sir   Henry,   ii,   398. 
Mairet,  i,  288. 
Maitland,  ii,  98. 
Maitland,  Louise  M.,  ii,  484. 
Malling-Hansen,    i,   21,   22,   32,    34. 
Mallock,  ii.  327. 
Malo,  ii.  661. 
Malthus,  ii,  602. 
Manaceine,  i,  262. 
Manilus,  Senator,  i,  465. 
Mann.    Horace,    i,    236. 
Mannhardt,  ii,  214,  253. 
Mantcgazza,  i,  419,  502;  ii,  16,  134, 

327; 

Marci.  i,  495. 

Marcon.   Paul,   ii,  683. 

Marhojm.    Laura,   ii,   627. 

Marie,    i.   81.   427. 

Marion,  ii.  652. 

Marius.  ii.  307. 

Marks.   M.   A.  M.,  ii,  702. 

Marquardt,  ii.  250. 

Marro,  i,  69,  81,  104.  115,  133,  153, 


776 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 


225,  '^yj'  260,  272,  284,  296,  297, 
298,  299,  304,  330,  331,  333,  345, 
357,  364,  390,  414,  415,  419.  426, 

427,  448,  466,  474,  489;  ii,  3,   II, 

17,  18,  27,  109. 
Marsh,   Mary,  ii,  652. 
Martel,  Charles,  ii,  730. 
Martin,  ii,   563. 

Martineau,  Harriet,  i,  542 ;  ii,  635. 
Marwedel,  i,  471. 
Masetti,  i,  78. 
Masini,  ii,  27. 

Mason,  O.  T.,  ii,  92,  699,  721. 
Massasoit,  ii,  691. 
Masselon,  i,  283. 
Mather,  Cotton,  ii,  288. 
Mathew,  John,  ii,  656. 
Mathews,  R.  H.,  ii,  240,  243. 
Matthews,  i,  477. 
Matthews,  Washington,  ii,  699. 
Matusch,  i,  271. 
Maudsley,  i,  131,  270,  293,  294,  304, 

446. 
Maupas,  i,  i. 
Maurel,  ii,   599. 
Maurice,    ii,    321. 
Max,  Gabriel,  i,  265. 
Maxwell,  i,  540;  ii,  155. 
Mayer,  August,  ii,  395. 
Meeh,  i,  112. 

Mehnert,  E.,  i,  55;  ii,  607. 
Melanchthon,  ii,  31,  647. 
Melinard,  ii,  20. 
Meno,  i,  515. 
Mercier,   i,   157. 
Metchnikoff,  ii,  327,  431. 
Meyer,  i,  82. 

Meyer,  Adolf,  i,  303,  304,  306,  338. 
Meyer,  L.,  i,  474,  496,  511. 
Meyer,  R.  M.,  i,  585. 
Meynert,  i,  108. 
Michelet,    ii,    134. 
Mickle,  W.  J.,  i,  292. 
Mies,  i,   105. 
Mill,  John  Stuart,  i,  432,  563,  565, 

566;  ii,  86,  346,  451,  546,  702,  712. 
Millais,  i,  576. 
Miller,  i,  185. 
Miller,  G.  R,  ii,  676. 
Miller,   Hugo,   i,   388. 
Miller,  Joaquin,  ii,  691. 
Mills,  B.  Fay,  ii,  289. 
Milton,  John,  ii,  455. 
Mindeleff,  ii,  699. 
Mitchell,  S.  Weir,  ii,  575. 
Mitter,  i,  534. 
Moberly,  ii,  328. 
Mobius,  i,  237.  278,  429 ;  ii,  564. 
Moffat,  ii,  744. 


Mojon,  i,  427. 

Moliere,  i,  214. 

Moll,  i,  278,  286,  433,  434,  450,  481, 

500;  ii,  117,  140,  141. 
Monin,  ii,   19. 

Monroe,  W.  S.,  ii,  393,  395.  489. 
Montaigne,  ii,  140. 
Montcalm,   i,  540. 
Montesino,  ii,  681. 
Moody,  D.  L.,  ii,  288. 
Moon,  i,  19,  59,  62,  66,  67,  68,  85, 

97,   100,    loi,    134,    135,    136,    137, 

138. 
Mooney,  James,  ii,  237,  430,  699. 
Moore,  ii,  282. 
More,  ii,  140. 
Moreau,  i,  239,  276. 
Morel,    i,   254,   267,   300,   324,   491; 

ii,  310. 
Moreles,  General,  ii,  687. 
Morgan,  i,  i. 
Morgan,  L.  H.,  ii,  694. 
Morgan,  Pierpont,  i,  543. 
Morley,  i,  471. 
Morris,  H.  C,  ii,  712. 
Morris,  William,  i,  180. 
Morrison,  i.  331,  332,  401,  403,  404. 
Morrison,  T.,  ii,  704,  706. 
Morselli,  i,  320,  378. 
Mortimer,  A.  G,  ii,  268. 
Mosca,  i,  476. 
Moser,  J.  H.,  ii,  650. 
Moses,  L  S.,  ii,  262. 
Moses,  Josiah,  ii,  327. 
Mosher,  Celia  D.,  ii,  588. 
Moshesh,  ii,  667. 
Mosler,  i,  115. 
Mosso,  Angelo,  i,  467. 
Mott,  J.  R.,  ii,  422. 
Moulton,  ii,  446. 
Miihlmann,   i,  3,   4,   59,  84,  90,  97, 

106,  113,  117,  118,  121. 
Miiller,  i,  166;  ii,  30. 
Miiller,    Max,   i,   563,  585;   ii,    146, 

170,  322,  327,  361,  455. 
Mumford,    ii,   192. 
Munger,  Theodore  F.,  i,  579. 
Murisier,  ii,  327. 
Murray,  Alexander,  i,  538. 
Mutesa,  ii,  733. 
Muthesius,  ii,  728. 
Mwanga,  ii,  TZZ- 
Myers,  F.  W.  H.,  ii,  43. 

Nacke,  i,  500. 

Nansen,  i,  540;  ii  85,  677. 

Napoleon,  i,  542;  ii,  408,  499,  513. 

653.  674,  7iT. 
Nathanson,  i,  261. 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


777 


Neale,  i,  213  ;  ii,  329. 

Neesima,  ii.  744. 

von  Negelein,  ii.  "/-zj. 

Negri,  Ada,  i,  560. 

Neison,  ii,   178. 

Nelson,   Horatio,   i.   540. 

Nelson,  Julius,  i,  454,  502. 

Neoptolemus,  i,  513,  520,  521. 

Nesteroff,  i,  246.  247. 

Netschajeff,   ii,  489,  491. 

Neuhauss,  ii,  660. 

Newton,  Heber,  ii,  325. 

Newton,  Isaac,  i,  544;  ii,  85,  86,  149. 

329,  542. 
Nicholas,    ii,    706. 
Nietzsche,  ii,  82,  292,  356,  ZTT),  651, 

714. 
Nisbet,  i,  320. 
Nisbet,  ii,  657. 
Nitobe,  Inazo,  i,  219. 
Noel,  M.,  ii,  268. 
Nogues,  ii,  249. 
Nolan,   i.   272. 
Nordau,  i,  353;  ii,  367,  460. 
Norman,  Henry,  ii,  738. 
Novalis,   i,  375. 
Novicow,  ii,  431. 
Nuel,  i,  419. 
Nuttall,  Zelia,  ii,  166. 

Oettingen,  i,  388. 

Oken,   ii,    50. 

Oldenberg.  ii,  245. 

Oldfield,    ii,   743. 

Oliphant,   Alice,    i,   568. 

Oliphant,  Laurence,  i,  563,  568. 

Oliphant,   Margaret  O.   W.,  i,  568. 

Oliver,  i,  484. 

O'Neill,  John,  ii,  166,  198,  200,  213. 

Oppenheim,  ii,  370. 

Oppenheimer,   i,  84. 

O'Rell,  Max,  ii,  582. 

Orschansky,   ii,    598. 

Orton,  i,   199. 

Osceola,  ii,  691. 

Ostwald,  ii,  327,  431. 

Ovid,  i,  432. 

Page,    i,    199. 

Pagliani,  i,  11,  12,  99,  140,  474,  475- 

Paine,    Thomas,    i,    581. 

Paley,  ii,  532. 

Palmer,  Alice  Freeman,  ii,  631. 

Papillon,  ii,  381. 

Paquita,   ii,  691. 

Parent-Duchatelet,  i,  370. 

Parker,  i,  280. 

Parker  Theodore,  ii,  Z^l- 

Parkham,  ii,  688. 


Parmenides,  ii,  542. 

Partridge,   ii,   327. 

Partridge,    George   E.,    i,    145,    151, 

261,    312,    317,   367,    368,    369;    ii, 

20,  238,  371,  450,  468. 
Pascal,   i,   540. 

Pater,  Walter,  i,  563,  575 ;  ii,  444. 
Paton,  ii,  655.  745. 
Patrick,    ii.    190. 
Patrick.  G.  T.  W.,  ii,  562. 
Patterson,  i.  563. 
Patterson,  G.   W.,  ii.  652. 
Patterson,  Miss,  ii,  481. 
Pattison,  Mark,  i,  573;  ii,  527. 
Paulsen,  E.,  ii,  20,  28. 
Paulsen,    Friedrich,    i,   218;    ii,   44, 

163,  409,    542. 
Paulsiek,    ii,   480. 
Pausanias,  ii,  294. 
Payot,  i,  475  ;  ii,  327. 
Pearson,    ii,    567. 
Peckham,  George  W.,  i,  6,   12,  23, 

31,  64. 
Peeples,  D.  L.,  i,  478. 
Peirce,  C.  S.,  i,  412;  ii,  136. 
Pele,  ii,  658. 
Pelham,   i,   341. 
Pellico,   i,  392. 
Pelmann,  i,  388,  499. 
Penalta,  Marquise  of,  ii,  310. 
Penn,   William,  ii,  652,  690. 
Penniman,  ii,  516. 
Pentecost,  G.  F.,  ii,  288. 
Peper,   ii,   157. 
Pepper,  i,  274. 
Perott,  Joseph  de,  i,  8. 
Perry-Coste,  i,  501. 
Pesskoff,  i,  99. 

Pestalozzi,  i,   174,  345;   ii,  451,  498. 
Peters,  ii,  380. 
Pfeifer,  W.,  i,  396. 
Pfister,   i,   105. 
Prteidercr,   ii,   'J27. 
Prtiiger,  i,  482,  483;  ii,  53, 
Phasdrus,  ii,  294. 
Philebus,   i,  516. 
Philip,   ii,  434. 
Philip,   King,   ii,  690,  691. 
Philips,   ii,  282. 
Philipson,  David,  ii.  262,  263. 
Phillips,   D.    E.,  ii,   135,  411. 
Phillips.   P.  C.,  i,  35- 
Philoindicus,  i,  388. 
Philpot,  ii,  214. 
Picard,  ii.  554. 
Pickett,    i.    299. 
Pierquin,  ii,  54. 
Pike,  L.  O.,  i,  341,  366. 
Pilger,  i,  243. 


778 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   ADOLESCENCE 


Pilling,  ii,  699. 

Pindar,  i,  204. 

Pinel,  i,  267. 

Pitt,  i,  254. 

Pizarro,  ii,  681,  683. 

Plato,  i,  26,  34,  204,  238,  313,  320, 
384,414,505,  513,  514,  515,  519,  533; 
n,  31,  41,  51,  74,  85,  106,  132,  174, 
190,  204,  253,  254,  255,  258,  259, 
267,  279,  293,  296,  301,  321,  326, 
329,  332.  340,  401,  461,  496,  498, 
533,  539,  548,  551,  597,  72 1. 

Plaw,  i,  199. 

Playfair,  i,  476;  ii,  580. 

Pliny,  i,  481. 

Ploetz,  ii,  720. 

Ploss,  i,  470,  479;  ii,  8,  98. 

Plotinus,  ii,  162. 

Plumb,  P.  E.,  i,  478. 

Poatain,    i,   91. 

PobyedonostseflF,  ii,  715,  747. 

Poehl,  A.,  i,  442,  448. 

Polimarchus,   i,  517. 

Polus,  i,  516. 

Pomeroy,  Jesse,   i,  358. 

Pontiac,  ii,  690,  691. 

Pope,  L.  A.,  ii,  290,  291. 

Popham,  ii,  689. 

Porter,  Noah,  ii,  282,  533. 

Porter,  William  T.,  i,  6,  12,  20,  36, 
37,  63,  66,  69,  72,  73,  75,  loi,  I35, 
14,0,  141. 

Pouillet,  i,  433. 

Powell,  ii,  699. 

Pratt,  Colonel,  ii,  694. 

Preston,  Miss  G.  A.,  ii,  584,  585. 

Preyer,  i,  158,  443. 

Price,  i,  479. 

Prichard,  i,  239. 

Prichard,  H.  H.,  ii,  678. 

Priestley,  i,  541. 

Pritchard,   ii,   239. 

Pritchett,  Henry  S.,  i,   170. 

Proal,  i,  344,  357,  379,  387. 

Proclus,  ii,  162. 

Pruss,  ii,  543. 

Pryor,  ii,  545. 

Puech,  i,  121,  423,  496. 

Puffendorflf,   ii,   655. 

Purdy,   ii,   698. 

Pyle,  i,  501. 

Pythagoras,  ii,  177,  247. 

Quain,  i,  75,  95. 

Quantz,  J.  O.,  ii,  214. 

Quatrefages,  ii,  246. 

Quetelet,   i,    12,    14,    18,  25,  31,   66, 

67,  72,  75,   132,   137,  139,   147;  ii, 

304. 


Queyrat,  ii,  483. 
Quintilian,  ii,  433,  434,  442. 

Raciborski,  i,  466,  477,  481. 

Radestock,  i,  262,  320. 

Raffles,  T.  Stamford,  ii,  701. 

Ramenaux,  i,  91. 

Ramsay,  Sir  Henry,  ii,  706. 

Ranke,  i,  62;  ii,  720,  747. 

Ransom,   Arthur,   i,  523. 

Ratistinae,  S.  L,  ii,  268. 

Ratzel,  ii,  666,  718. 

Rauber,  A.,  ii,  396. 

Raymond,    F.,    i,    278. 

Reclus,    ii,    98,    666,    687,   720,    722, 

747- 
Reddersen,  i,  397. 
Red  Jacket,  ii,  691. 
Reed,  T.  B.,  i,  540. 
Reeves,  P.  W.,  ii,  656. 
Regis,  i,   270,   271,  295. 
Regnard,   Paul,  i,  266. 
Reid,  Thomas,  ii,  5. 
Reik,  J.  O.,  ii,  22. 
Reinke,  i,  i. 
Reinl,  i,  485. 

Reinsch,  Paul  S.,  ii,  713,  714. 
Reischle,  ii,  338. 
Remak,  i.  485. 
Rembrandt,  i,   131 ;  ii,  146. 
Remondino,  P.  E.,  ii,  248. 
Renan,  i,  588;  ii,  201,  323,  325,  361, 

705- 
Retzius,  i,  67,  112. 
Reuter,  L,  ii,  268. 
Reyer,  ii,  478. 
Reynolds,  i,  274. 
Reynolds,  M.,  ii,  148. 
Rhodes,  Cecil,  ii,  668,  67a 
Ribbing,  i,  433. 
Ribery,  ii,  373. 
Ribot,  ii,  393. 
Richard,  i,  372. 
Richmond,   i,  471. 
Richter,   i,    234. 
Rieger,   i,   72. 
Riemann,  ii,  408. 
Riis,  Jacob,   i,   349,   361,  362,   580; 

ii,  418. 
Rink,  ii,  677. 
Rinne,  F.,  ii,  663. 
Ripley,  i,  30,  73. 
Ritschl,  ii,  328. 
Rittenhouse,    i,   539, 
Ritter,  i,  117. 
Roberts,  i,  373. 
Roberts,   Charles,   i,   11,   12,  25,  31, 

99,  102,  119,  135,  207, 
Roberts,  G.,  i,  427. 


INDEX   OF  NAMES 


779 


Robertson,  i,  477. 

Robertson,  F.  W.,  i,  131. 

Robinson,  ii,  727. 

Robinson,  E.  M.,  ii,  345. 

Robinson,    F.    W.,    i,   368. 

Robinson,  G.  A.,  ii,  654. 

Robinson,  Louis,  i,  142;  ii,  214. 

Rocco,  ii,  98. 

Roemer,  A.,  ii,  327. 

Rohleder,  Hermann,  i,  432,  433,  437. 

Roland,  Madame,  i,  547. 

Rollet,  i,  407. 

Romanes,  ii,  359. 

Romero,   Matias,  ii,  683. 

Romilion,  ii,  266. 

Rosenbach,  i,  433. 

Ross,  i,  157. 

Rossetti,  i,  576. 

Rossi,  i,  326. 

Rothmann,   i,  261. 

Rousseau,  i,  246.  538,  555,  585,  587; 

ii,  320,  374,  718. 
Roussel,    i,    372. 
Routledge,  ii,  157. 
Roux,  J.,   i,  4,   241,   309,  449,  450; 

ii,   16,  141. 
Rowe,  J.,  i,  449,  471. 
Roy,  P.,  i,  303. 
Royce,  Josiah,  ii,  137,  327. 
Riidinger,  ii,  564. 
Runze,  ii,  2>^'j. 
Rusden,  ii,  656. 
Ruskin,   John,   i,    180,   235 ;    ii,    146, 

181,   583. 
Russel,  F.,  ii,  726. 
Rutherford,   Mark,  i,  574. 
Rylands,  L.  G.,  i,  369,  397. 

St.  Agnes,  i,  525. 

St.  Ambrose  of  Sienna,  i,  530. 

St.  Anselm,  i,  527;  ii,  729. 

St.  Antony  i,  525. 

St.  Artemas,  i,  525. 

St.  Augustine,  ii,  266,  281,  307,  337, 

357,  474,  610,  666. 

St.  Basil,  i,  213. 

St.  Benedict,  i,  526;  ii,  119. 

St.  Bernard,   i,  527. 

St.  Boniface,    ii,    729. 

St.  Bruno,  ii,  310. 

St.  Catharine,  i,  530. 

St.  Charles  Borromeo,  ii,  272. 

St.  Christina,  i,  528. 

St.  Clara,  i,  529. 

St.  Colette,  i,  530. 

St.  Columba,  ii,  729. 

St.  Columbanus,  i,  526. 

St.  Cuthbcrt,   i,   327. 

St.  Dominic,   i,  528. 


St.  Dunstan,  i,  527. 

St.  Edmund,  i,  529. 

St.  Elizabeth  of  Hungary,  i,  529. 

St.  Ephraem,  i,  525. 

St.  Euphrasia,  i,  526. 

St.  Euphrosyne,  i,  526. 

St.  Frances  of  Rome,  i,  530. 

St.  Francis  of  Assisi,  i,  529. 

St.  Francis  of  Paula,  i,  531. 

St.  Francis  of  Sales,  i,  532. 

St.  Godrick,  i,  528. 

St.   Gregory,  i,  213. 

St.    Hilaire,   i,   24. 

St.  Hilarion,  i,  525. 

St.  Hildegund,  i,  528. 

St.   Ignatius,  ii,  266. 

St.  Isidore,   i,  526. 

St.  John,  ii.  321. 

St.  John  Chrysostom,  i,  526. 

St.  Julian,  i,  525. 

St.  Juliana,  i,  530. 

St.    Kentigern,  i,  526. 

St.  Louis,  i,  530. 

St.  Martian,  i,  525. 

St.  Martin,  i.  525. 

St.  Notker  Balbulus,  i,  527. 

St.  Oringa,  i,  530. 

St.  Patrick,  ii,  729. 

St.   Peter  Damiani,  i,  527. 

St.  Peter  Nolasco,  i,  530. 

Saint-Pierre,  i,  587 ;  ii,  320,  714. 

St.  Rose  of  Lima,  i,  532. 

St.    Sulpice,   ii,    272. 

St.  Theresa,  i,  531. 

St.   Ven,   i,  528. 

St.  Veronica,  i,  531. 

St.  Vincent  of  Paul,  i,  532;  ii,  272. 

St.  Walaric.  i,  .S26. 

St.  Werburga,  i,  527. 

Sabatier,  ii,  2)2^. 

Sachs,  Hans,  i,   180. 

Sadler,  M.  E.,  ii,  521,  523,  614. 

Samoset,  ii,  691. 

Samuel  son,  i,  367. 

Sanborn,   i,  579. 

Sanctonius,  i,  501. 

Sand,   George,  i,   548,  574;   ii,  472, 

635- 
Sandberg.  Graham,  ii,  708. 
Sandis,  E.  B.,  ii,  244. 
Sandovv,   i,    191,    196. 
Sanford,  E.  C.,  i,  60. 
Santayana,   ii,   136. 
Sappcl,  ii,  683. 
Sargent,  ii,  285. 
Sargent,  D.  A.,  i,  27,  39,  62,  66,  67, 

68,  71.  75,  79.  loi,  102,  195,  229. 
Sargent,  John  S.,  i,  125. 
Sarrasin,  ii,  728. 


78o 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 


Saunders,   ii,  640. 

Saunders,  F.  H.,  ii,  373. 

Saussaye,    ii,   328. 

Savage,  i,  271,  296. 

Saville,  i.  291. 

Savonarola,  i,  537 ;  ii,  85. 

Scanderbeg,   ii,  691. 

Schaeffer,  i,  511. 

Schafer,  ii,  359. 

Schiiffle,  ii,  431. 

Schallenberger,  M.  E.,  ii,  393. 

Scharling,  i,  104. 

Scharnhorst,   ii,  499. 

Schelling,    i,  305;    ii,   51,    147,   546, 

651. 
Scherer.  ii,  358. 
Schiele-Wiegand,   i,   93. 
Schiff,  ii,  16. 
Schiller,  i,  437. 
von  Schiller,  J.  C.  F.,  i,  542 ;  ii,  168, 

319,  400,  441. 
Schimmelmann.    Countess,    i,    549; 

ii,  629. 
Schinz,   ii,   327. 
Schleiermacher,    ii,    no,     127,    136, 

324,  326,  327,  328,  365,  634. 
Schlitz,  i,  72,  78. 
Schmey,  i,  489. 
Schmidt,    ii,    177. 
Schmidt,  Emil,  i,  n. 
Schmidt,   K.,   ii,  250. 
Schmidt-Monnard,  i,  12,  247,  248. 
Schneider,  i,  267. 
Schnepf,  i,  99. 
Schoenichen,  W.,  ii,  230. 
Scholt,   D.  J.,  ii,  268. 
Scholz,  i,  291,  303. 
Schoolcraft,  ii,  699. 
Schopenhauer,  i,  131,  213,  375,  411, 

444;  ii,  63,  117.  200,  292,  547. 
Schouppe,  ii,   267. 
Schrader,  ii,  588. 
Schrempf,  i,  218;  ii,  312,  409. 
Schroder,  i.   12. 
Schroder,  R,  i,  489,  490,  495. 
Schiile,  i,  272,  303. 
Schultz,    i,    328. 
Schultze,   ii,    179. 
Schurman,  J.  G.,  ii,  664,  665. 
Schurtz,  ii,  98. 
Schuster,  ii,  190. 
Schuyten,  ii,  486,  487. 
Schwann,  i,   117. 
Schwarz,  ii,  256. 
Schvvegler,   ii,  518. 
Schweibe,    ii,   26. 
Schwinge,  i,  95. 
Scott,  i.  46. 
Scott,  Charles  P.  G.,  ii,  454. 


Scott,  Colin  A.,  i,  278,  384,  471 ;  ii, 

no,  296,  327,  367. 
Scott,    Walter,    i,    180,   540;    ii,   86, 

442. 
Scripture,  E.  W.,  i,  149;  ii,  489. 
Scukits.    i,    475. 
Sears,  C.  H.,  i,  346;  ii,  24. 
Seashore,  i,  153. 
Seaver,  J.  W.,  i,  27. 
Sedgwick,  Ellery,  i,  581. 
Seeley,  ii.  304,  328. 
Seerley,  F.  N.,  i,  414,  434,  443,  452, 

461 ;  ii,  97. 
Seggel,  i,  259. 
Seglas,  J.,  i,  237,  301. 
Seguin,  i,  282. 
Seiler,  ii,  32. 
Selager,  i,  495. 
Semper,  ii,  14. 
Senator,  i,  489. 
Seppelli,  i,  269. 
Serbski,  V.,  i,  237,  301. 
Sergi,  ii,  92. 
Serieux,  i,  237,  300. 
Seuvre,  i,  479. 
Seward,  W.  H.,  i,  542. 
Shaftesbury,   ii,   532. 
Shakespeare,    i,    533;    ii,    340,    440, 

441,  442,  455,  573. 
Shaler,  N.  S.,  ii,  137. 
Shapcott,  Reuben,  i,  574. 
Shattuck,  i,  199. 
Shaw,  J.  C,  ii,  486,  489! 
Shearer,  W.  J.,  ii,  526. 
Sheldon,  i,  199. 
Sheldon,  Henry  D.,  i,  360,  549;  ii, 

398,  403,  405,  406.  437. 
Shelley,  i,  537 ;  ii,  85,  148. 
Sheridan,  i,  542. 
Sherman,  L.  A.,  ii,  456,  471. 
Shinn,  Miss,  ii,  591. 
Shorthouse,  J.  H.,  i,  577. 
Shute,  D.  K.,  ii,  230. 
Sibillot,  P.,  ii,  198. 
Sidgwick,  Mrs.,  ii,  585,  602,  603. 
Sidis,  Boris,  i,  280,  281. 
Sidney,  ii,   261,  443. 
Siegert,  i,  345. 
Sieveking,  i,  273. 
Sighele,  i,  371,  387;  ii,  327- 
Sigismund,   ii,    18. 
Sigismund,  Emperor,  ii,  456. 
Sikorski,  i,  326. 
Silva,  i,  489,  490. 
Simms,  Th.,  ii,  289. 
Simon,  i,  432. 
Simon,  ii.  328. 
.  Simon.  Helene,  ii,  603. 
Simpson,  ii,  601. 


INDEX  OF  NAMES 


781 


Skeat  W.  W.,  ii,  656. 

Slaughter,  J.  W.,  ii,  176. 

von  Slupecki,  Hans,  i,  395. 

Small,  A.  W.,  ii.  583. 

Small,   A'l.   H.,   i,  409;   ii,   317,   365, 

375.  385,  395,  426. 
Smedley,  i,  25,  36,  98,   126,   148;  ii, 

33- 
Smidt,  i,  276. 
Smith,  ii,  590. 
Smith,  George,  ii,  731. 
Smith,  Goldwin,  ii,  327,  475. 
Smith,   Margaret  K.,  ii,  463. 
Smith,  M.   M.,  ii,  582. 
Smith,  R.,  ii,  328. 
Smith,  R.  H..  i,  511. 
Smith,  Mrs.,  ii,  601. 
Smith,    Theodate    L.,    i,    149,    264 ; 

ii,  174,  364,  450,  593,  594. 
Snedden,  D.  S.,  ii,  394. 
Socrates,  i,  204,  341,  513.  514,  515, 

516,  517,  518,  519;  ii,  41,  174,  178, 

255,   295,  335,   340,  372,   411,   414, 

551,  633. 
Sollier,  i,  282,  283,  415,  449. 
Sorel,  ii,  698. 
Sorensen.  i,  96. 
Soury,  ii,   16. 
Southey,  ii.  282. 
Southworth,  Mrs.,  ii,  472,  474. 
Souza-Leite,  i.  81.  427. 
Spencer,  i,  230,  367. 
Spencer,  Herbert,  i.  540;  ii,  25,  26, 

41,  199,  329,  524,  550,  602,  633. 
Spencer,  Ichabod,  ii,  289. 
Spenser,  ii,  442. 
Sperry,  i,  471. 
Spiess,   i,    187. 

Spinoza,  ii,   128,  301,   326,  356,  542. 
Spitta,  i,  262. 
Spitzka,  i.  105,  445.  446. 
Spitzner,  i,  237,  308. 
Spotted  Tail,  ii,  691. 
Sprague,  W.  B.,  ii,  282. 
Sprengel,  i,  116,  266,  448;  ii,  210. 
Springer,   i,  425. 
Squier,  ii.  683. 
Stableton,   ii,   385. 
de  Stael.  Madame,  ii.  635. 
Stafford,  Col.  J.  G.  B.,  ii,  673. 
Stalker.  James,  ii,  356. 
Stall,  i.  471. 

Stanford,  Senator,  i,  183. 
Stanley,  Henry  M.,  ii,  666,  668,  715, 

??,?,■ 
Starbuck.   E.    D.,   ii,   290,   291,    292, 

328,  340. 
Starr,  ii.  682. 
Stein,    ii,   499. 


Steiner,   K.   v.  d.,  ii,  683. 

Stekel,  W.,  ii,  580. 

Stemham,  i,  484. 

Stendhal,  i,  387;  ii,  134. 

Stenzl,  i,  237. 

Stephen,    Sir    James    Fitzjames,    i, 

576;  ii,  706. 
Stephen,  Leslie,  i,  576;  ii,  632. 
Stephens,    ii,  699. 
Stephenson,   i,  486,  487. 
Sterz,  i,  303. 
Stevenson,    i,   232. 
Stevenson,  Mrs.  M.  C.,  ii,  237. 
Stewart,  Colin  C,  i,  18. 
Stewart,  P.,  i,  292. 
Stillman,  W.  J.,  i,  578. 
Stirner,  Max,  i,  39;  ii,  82,  133. 
Stoddard,  Samuel,  ii,  689. 
Stokes,  ii,  328. 
Stolz,  J.,   ii,   262. 
Storer,  H.  R.,  i,  471 ;  ii,  569. 
Strada,   ii,  328. 
Strafford,   i,   578. 
Strahan,  S.  A.  K.,  i,  381. 
Strandberg,  Hilma,  ii,  629. 
Strange,  Alice  le,  i,  569. 
Strauss,  ii,  324. 
Striimpell,  i,  237.  344,  345- 
Stuart,  Dugald,  ii.  5. 
Stuart,  Ruth  McEnery,  i,  581. 
Stubbs,  ii,  446. 
Sturgis,  i,  447. 
Sturm,  ii,  457.  514. 
Suarez,  ii,  714. 
Sully,  i,  232,  548. 

Sutherland.  A.,  ii,  85,  190,  357,  374. 
Swedenborg,   ii,    127. 
Swettcnham,   ii,  656. 
Swift.  E.  J.,  i,  404.  541,  542. 
Swift.  Jonathan,  i,  542;  ii,  119,  458. 
Sykes.  F.  W.,  ii,  670. 
Synionds,  i.  249. 
Symonds,   John   Addington,    i,   563, 

575  :  ii,  208. 

Taine,  i,   161,  242,  309;  ii,  68,  316, 

487. 
Talbot.  E.   S..  i,  336. 
Taliack,   William,   i,  400,   409. 
Taml)urini,  i.  427. 
Tamerlane,  ii.  705. 
Tanzi.  i.  427. 
Tarchanoff.  i,  449. 
Tarde,  i,  316,  389;  ii,  383. 
Tardieu,  i,  2,7},. 

Tarnowski,  i.  286,  433,  470,  475. 
Tasman.  ii.  652. 
Tassin,  Wirt,  ii,  198. 
Taverni.  i.  339. 


782 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  ADOLESCENCE 


Taxil,  i,  371. 
Taylor,  ii,  390. 
Taylor,  F.  C,  ii,  572,  573. 
Taylor,  J.  Madison,  ii,  581. 
Tecumseh,  ii,  199,  690. 
Teichmiiller,  ii,  190. 
Telemachus,  i,  513,  520,  521,  522. 
Tennyson,    Alfred,    i,    180;    ii,   441, 

442,  479. 
Terquem,  ii,  249. 
Tertullian,  ii,  42,  98,  336,  552. 
Thackeray,  William  M.,  i,  581. 
Thales,  ii,   197. 
Thayer,  Alice,  ii,  203. 
Theastetus,  i,  518. 

Theal,  George  McCall,  ii,  247,  667. 
Theckla,  i,  525. 
Theile,  i,  84. 
Thiele,  ii,  325,  328. 
Thoma,  i,  90. 
Thomas,  Cyrus,  ii,  688. 
Thomas,  M.  Carey,  ii,  591,  603. 
Thompson,  i,  418;  ii,  no. 
Thompson.  Benjamin,  i,  539. 
Thompson,  Francis,  i,  518. 
Thompson,  Miss,  ii,  565. 
Thomson,  Bruce,  i,  343. 
Thomson,  Joseph,  ii,  670,  674,  735. 
Thorburn,  John,  ii,  574. 
Thring,   ii,  616. 
Thurber,  C.  H.,  ii,  387,  505. 
Thurston,  i,  187. 
Thurston,  Father,  ii,  268. 
Thwing,  President,  ii,  289. 
Tilt,  i,  475,  48.1. 
Tissot,  i,  432 ;  ii,  26. 
Toldt,   i,    12. 

Tolstoi,  i,  538;  ii,  401,  498. 
Tomochi-chi,  ii,  691. 
Torok,  i,  72. 

Torrens,  William,  ii,  674. 
Townsend,  Meredith,  ii,  706. 
Tracy,  ii,  282,  283. 
Trales,  ii,  312. 
Traube,  i,  94. 
Treitel,  ii,  32. 
Treitsche,  ii,  409. 
Treitschke,  i,  218. 
Trendelenburg,  ii,  41,  191. 
Trettien,  A.  W.,  i,  155,  22"];  ii,  217. 
Triplett,  Norman,  i,  347. 
Trollope,  Anthony,  i,  563,  573, 
Trommer.  i,  237,  302. 
Trousseau,   i.   270. 
Trowbridge,  i,  274,  296. 
Trowbridge,  J.  T.,  i,  539. 
Truganina,  ii,  655. 
Triiper,  i,  239,  345. 
Truslow,  Walter,  i,  93. 


Tschisch,  i,  303. 

Tshaka,  ii,  667. 

Tucker,  M.  A.,  ii,  481. 

Tucker,  William  J.,  ii,  516. 

Tuckerman,  i,  475. 

Tuckwell,  Gertrude  M.,  i,  399. 

Tuke,   i,  388,  499;   ii,  380. 

Turner,  i,  57. 

Turner,  J.  M.  W.,  ii,  148. 

Twain,  Mark,  ii,  472. 

Twombly,  ii,  660. 

Tyler,  ii,  665. 

Tylor,  E.  B.,  ii,  455,  727. 

Tyndall,  ii,  156,  329,  511,  548. 

Tyo  Soga,  ii,  720. 

Ufer,  i,  345. 

Uhle,  i,  115. 

Uhlitzsch,  Richard,  i,  11,  12,  18. 

Ulfilas,  ii,  729. 

Upward,  Allen,  ii,  673. 

Userer,  ii,  ^2"]. 

Ussing,  J.  L.,  ii,  250. 

Vachon,  ii,  131,  146. 

Valdemir,  ii,  730. 

Van  Gehuchten,  i,  112. 

Van  Rensselaer,  M.  G.,  ii,  578, 

Van  Twiller,  ii,  689. 

de  Varigny,  i,  34;  ii,  191,  379. 

Vasilyew,  i,  102. 

Vassey,  ii,  78. 

de  Vaux,  Beatrice  Clotilda,  ii,  635. 

Venn,  J.,  i,  25,  76,  134,  140. 

Venturi,  i,  286. 

Vespa,  B.,  i,  380. 

Vernois,  i,  420. 

Verres,  ii,  434. 

Viasemsky,  N.  W.,  i,  10. 

Vierordt,  K.,  i,  22,  23,  51,  53,  59,  61, 
T7,  89,  92,  94,  97,  103,  IDS,  106,  114, 
.119.  135,.  137;  ii,  12,  27,  30,  32. 

Villerme,  i,  25. 

Virchow,  i,  46,  57,  483;  ii,  666,  720. 

Vittorino  da  Feltre,  i,  543. 

Voisin,  i,  282. 

Volkmann,  i,  91. 

Volquarsden,  ii,  254. 

Vorbrodt,  ii,  327. 

Voris,  ii,  483. 

Vostrovsky,  Clara,  ii,  476,  486. 

Voth,  ii,  6qo. 

de  Vries,  i,  46. 

Vulpius,  i,  107,  108,  III,  112,  162. 

Wachter,  ii,  136. 
Wadsworth,  General,  ii,  690. 
Wadsworth,  Harry,  ii,  420. 


INDEX   OF   NAMES 


783 


Wagner,  Charles,  i,  471. 

Wagner,   Richard,   i,    180,   203,   541, 

586;   ii,  339,  442. 
Wahl,  i,  22. 
Waitz,  ii,  116. 
Walaeus,  ii,  729. 
Walker,  A.  R.,  ii,  239. 
Walker,  Francis  A.,  ii,  503. 
Wallace,  ii,  380,  657,  720,  722. 
Wallin,  J.  E.  W.,  ii,  180. 
Ward,  Mrs.  Humphry,  i,  581. 
Warneck,  ii,  687. 
Warner,  B.,  ii,  619. 
Warner,  Charles  Dudley,  i,  534;  ii, 

675. 
Warner,  Francis,  i,  76.  126,  160,  261, 

262,  263,  282;  ii,  564,  578. 
Warren,  i,  471. 
Warren,  W.  F.,  ii,  727. 
Washington,  Booker  T.,  i,  543 ;   ii, 

459,  677,  698. 
Washington,  George,  ii,  391,  666. 
Watts,  ii,  480. 
Weber,  i,  475,  476. 
Weber,  E.  H.,  i,  61,  137;  ii,  2,  3. 
Webb,  ii,   177. 
Weete,  ii,  250. 
Wefers,  i,  199. 

Weinel,  Heinrich,  ii,  327,  336. 
Weisbach,  i,  57. 
Weismann,  i,  4,  41,  419;  ii,  25,   26, 

138,  293,  550. 
Welcker,  i,  3,  "^J. 
Wellcome,  Henry  S.,  ii,  234,  692. 
Welldon,  i,  523. 
Welling,   ii,  696. 
Wernicke,  ii,  485. 
Wernle,  ii,  328. 
Wertheim,  i,  87. 
Werther,  i,  387. 
Wesley,  ii,  282. 
West,  ii,  653. 
West,  Gerald  M.,  i,  6,  12,  23,  37,  63, 

12,,  74,  75,  274. 
West,  I.  P.,  i,  433. 
Westcott,  ii,  254. 
Westermarck,  ii,  98,  727. 
Westorp,  ii,  98. 
Westphal,  i,  388.  499. 
Westphalen,  i,  484. 
Wey,  i,  429. 
Weyler,  ii,  696. 
Wheelock,  ii,  285. 
Whipple,  Bishop,  ii,  69X. 
White,   i,   280. 

White,  Andrew  D.,  ii,  406,  531. 
White,  Frances  E.,  ii.  603. 
White.  William  Allen,  i,  534.  535- 
Whitefield,  ii,  282,  284,  416,  532. 


Whitehead,  i,  475. 

Whitman,  Walt,  ii,  149,  456,  468. 

Whitney,  Caspar,  ii,  660. 

Whittier,  John  G.,  i,  539;  ii,  438. 

Whitton,  F.,  ii,  526. 

Whytt,  ii,  53. 

Wichern,  i,  395,  396. 

Widal,  ii,  381. 

Wiedersheim,   G.   R.,  i,   52,  70,  76, 

77,  84;  ii,  215. 
Wiener,  Christian,  i,  14,  18. 
Wigan,  i,  330. 
Wigglesworth,  ii.  285. 
Wilberforce,  William,  ii,  681. 
Wilcox,  i,  471. 
Wilder,  i,  471. 
Wilkinson.  R.  J.,  ii,  709. 
Willard,  H.  M.,  ii,  388. 
Wille,  i,  237,  270,  271,  294,  295,  304, 

331. 
Williams,  John,   ii,  744. 
Williams,  Lillie  A.,  ii,  465,  467. 
Williamson,  i,  576. 
Willis,  ii,  380. 
Wilson,  Sir  Daniel,  ii,  699. 
Wilson,  J.  T.,  ii,  574,  575. 
Wiltshire,  i,  480. 
Windelband,  i,  320. 
Windsor,  i,  199. 
Wines,  F.  H.,  i  299,  328,  339. 
Winkelried,  ii,  691. 
Winslow,  i,  330. 
Wintrich,  i.  99. 
Wise,   I.   M.,  ii,  262,  263, 
Wittenberg,  H.,  i,  431. 
Wolfe,  i,  540. 
Wolfe,  H.  K.,  ii,  34,  35- 
Wood,  ii,  588. 
Wood,  J.  G.,  ii,  244,  247. 
Woods,  Alice,  ii,  614. 
Worcester,  D.  C,  ii,  663. 
Wordsworth,  William,  i,   542,  574; 

ii,  148,  200.^ 
Worms,  Rene,  ii,  431. 
Wretkind,  i.  22. 

Wright,  E.  Blackwood,  ii,  672,  708. 
Wundt,  i,  162,  262;  ii,  ill,  456,  537. 
Wynekcn,  G.  A.,  ii,  136,  I37- 


Xavier,  ii,  266,   729. 
Xenophon,  i,  205;  ii,  257,  259. 


Vate,  ii,  707.  708. 

Yoder,  A.   H.,  i,    18,  404,  407.  534; 

ii.  452._ 
Young,  ii.  378. 
Young,  ii,  390. 


784 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   ADOLESCENCE 


Young,  Lucien,  ii,  660. 
Yung,  i,  34. 

Zadek,  i,  94. 

Zak,  N.  v.,  i,  8,  102,  247. 
Zanardelli,  i,  407. 

Zeissing,  i,  12,  23,  25,  53,  61,  66,  67. 
Zeller,  Edward,  i,  265;  ii,  136,  147, 
324- 


Zeno,  ii,  535. 

Ziegler,  i,  218;  ii,  400,  401,  409. 

Ziehen,  ii,  312. 

Ziemssen,  Otto,  ii,  327. 

von  Ziemssen,  i,  260. 

Zinzendorf,  ii,  729. 

Zitkala-sa,  ii,  695. 

Zola,  i,  337 ;  ii,  595- 

Zwardemaker,  ii,  17. 


(3) 


THE   END 


^6 


3  1205  00840  9987 


^f 


i?,^,f°™ERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A    001393  370 


